After the devastating psychological blow of losing her home in Réanville after it was pillaged by German troops and French locals, followed by the death of her (still estranged) mother in 1948, Cunard returned to London. She spent much of the following years travelling through France and Spain (both dramatically changed since the wars) as well as Chile (invited by her close friend Neruda), the West Indies, and Cuba. There is evidence to suggest that Cunard was involved with the exiled Spanish Maquis and their continuing covert resistance against Franco’s regime by helping soldiers and their families escape, and that she even took lessons in dynamiting.23 Cunard’s poem ‘Relève into Maquis’, published by the small Derby-based Grasshopper Press in 1944, is a criticism of Vichy France’s ‘relève’, or exchange policy, that traded skilled workers with Nazi Germany for French prisoners of war from 1942 onwards. Using the language of French prime minister Pierre Laval’s government propaganda, Cunard undercuts the lies therein and the relève’s implicit collaboration with other forms of enforced deportation. She also glorifies the Maquis and their covert attempts to undermine fascist rule in France, Germany, and Spain. The poem’s anonymous heroic fighter, a veteran of Spain, is ‘Enlisted until war’s end – / Not to see folks or friends again – Don’t count on any pay – / Death if your weapon’s lost – Total secrecy, death if not –’. ‘Relève into Maquis’ is a rousing battle cry that ends with the words ‘signed, FRANCE.’ In 1943 and 1944 Cunard collected and published (through La France Libre and Pierre Seghers) seventy Poems for France, a celebration of the resistance movement that was published both in French and English. One astonishingly didactic poem Cunard wrote in 1944, ‘Man–Ship–Tank–Gun–Plane’ stands out – not just for its title’s Futurist syntax, but for its sweeping head-on depiction of battle, reminiscent of poems by F. T. Marinetti or Blaise Cendrars, only with a great deal more humility and, indeed, humanity.
During the early 1940s, Cunard wrote and planned an unfinished series of seven poems for seven countries called ‘Passport to Freedom’, a bold transnational pamphlet written in Spanish, Italian, French, and English. Her seventh country, the United States, the country of her mother’s birth, remained unwritten; by her own admission she got no further than the line ‘Up from the grassy roots’.24 A partial typescript for this exists in Cunard’s archive, dated spring 1942, and three of the poems were published in newspapers, including The New Statesman. Not quite the cruising ‘Supra-Nation’, this series of poems accounted for boundaries but moved freely across them – a privilege Cunard did not always enjoy when faced with borders enforced by war. Taken together, they make a compelling case for transnational modernism and the internationalism of Cunard’s literary and political allegiances.
Traces of other planned collections can be found in Cunard’s archived manuscripts, including her aforementioned ‘Epic on Spain’ and two unrealised larger projects, ‘The Visions’ (or ‘Cosmo’s Dream’) and a collection of poems now referred to as the Bodleian Manuscript, or Augustan Manuscript, completed in 1944. Cunard focused her energies on several literary works during the 1950s including her book-length ‘memories’ of the writers George Moore and Norman Douglas, two figures who had occupied fatherly roles during her early life. She also produced a book of poems in French about Spain written between 1945–49, Nous Gens d’Espagne (We People of Spain). A combination of a mental breakdown in 1960, respiratory complaints from life-long smoking and drinking, and a series of falls which resulted in a broken hip, meant that Cunard spent much of 1963 bedridden, after periods in both London’s St Clement’s Hospital and Holloway Sanatorium at Virginia Water in 1960. Her copious notebooks and journals – dutifully recording the name of the café or far-flung city in which she is writing – become more and more feverish and difficult to decipher from 1960 onwards. Although her poems written in Holloway Sanatorium are neatly handwritten (often at a window or in the communal TV room, taking stock of hospital rituals and members of staff), they are not reproduced in this volume. However, their titles are enough to gauge their contents: ‘Sonnet for Jock-the-Scot (Jock Duff of the L.C.C.)’; ‘Mistresses Perjury and Collusion on the Magistrate’s Knee (Café Holloway Jail April 6 1960 N–11,582 (ME–NC)’; ‘To Nurse Phillips’ (written in eight minutes); ‘I, Scarlet Broad’; ‘2 sonnets written while Geoffrey Horam made a coloured crayon portrait of me 10–11 AM 1960 June 28’. Perhaps one ought to be mindful of Cunard’s 1963 poem ‘The Artist to Himself’, handwritten in a notebook whilst staying with friends at Villa Pomone in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. In it she warns,
Never show unfinished work!
No one will understand.
‘Spontaneous ravings of the mind’…
Not even best friends at hand.
The way to deal with things of that kind
Is work and work and work
Upon the poem, music, stone
That’s yours, and only yours alone,
Until its very end.
Then show it all, without a word,
To others; that pleasing shout
(if any!) of praise may then be heard
(Not that that will remove thy doubt
As to the valour of the thing;
Yet still, some solace bring…)
Enfevered creation, it is good
But only with patience in the blood
Itself of the very thing.
Cunard dates the start of her long poem ‘The Visions’ to 1964, during her painful convalescence post-hip surgery in Pomone,25 but her biographer dates the composition somewhat earlier. The poem is incomplete in both typescript and notebook drafts. Cunard’s introduction to two sequences from the poem reads as follows.
The theme of it all, roughly, this: Cosmo, the poet, who appears later in this early part which is entirely about the Medieval Halls and the singers there, leaves one night in a rage, finds himself, the next day (one may suppose this is all between the years 1000 and 1200 AD) with some of the visions of that great Castle which he has left on his horse, Mead, and sleeps the night in the hay of their barn, while on his way who knows whither. At first, and at once, surges a long dream, and it is all about Fish, and only about Fish. The dream itself merges into the first of the Visions proper, and this, by chance, is simply Adam. After this comes many and very various visions, culminating in our age of ‘nuclear fission’, when Cosmo may be said to issue from them.
Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, Swinburne and various other figures from history and literature appear central to this dream-vision and the role of the poet as unifier of time and human history. It is an ambitious if bewildering work that, in its breadth and learning (obscure, sometimes archaic references to art and literature) warrants further study.
The only Selection of Cunard’s poems that predates the present one is a reproduction of a 1944 typescript housed in the Edward John Thompson Papers at the Bodleian Library, published by Nottingham Trent Editions as The Poems of Nancy Cunard: From the Bodleian Library in 2005, edited and introduced by John Lucas. Thompson was a writer, historian of India and translator of Rabindranath Tagore whose political sympathies (gradually becoming in favour of Indian self-government) would have chimed with Cunard’s. Thompson’s archive contains several letters and poems which he and Cunard were deliberating over, including some destined for a collection in his ‘Augustan Modern Poets’ series, published by Ernest Benn. Cunard was enthusiastic about the project, mostly because of her respect for Thompson and because the books were cheaply priced (at 9d) and therefore accessible to a wider audience. Her delight at the price, and her own knowledge of the book market, may even be part of the reason that she had shunned mainstream book-length publishing after her second collection in 1923. For whatever reason, Cunard’s Bodleian / Augustan manuscript languished after Thompson’s unexpected illness and death in April 1946 from stomach cancer, and she did not pursue it. Cunard did, however, dedicate her ‘Man– Ship–Tank–Gun–Plane’ to Thompson, a fellow political radical.26 By Cunard’s own admission it is a sc
ant selection, omitting many of her poems from Outlaws and Sublunary. Judging by their correspondence, Cunard realised how different her first two books were from the material she later produced during three major wars. She was keen to disown her earlier work, that which was written before her ‘social consciousness time’ (1926–28).27 In a letter to Thompson on 10 December 1943 she writes:
Here are some more poems. I have had a dreadful three days going through Wheels, Outlaws and Sublunary, copying the entire lot, once and for all, of these O.O.P.s. They are quite terrible, quite terrible these books, and I can’t think how they got printed. There is NOTHING else that I could bear you to look at in those three books. You’ll see however, that I have extracted a very few, and these I think can pass. Parallax too I am greatly dismayed at, most of it, but these two sequences can pass. I think I begin to write a poem with Simultaneous and In Provins; only from then on.
Thompson was clearly keen to offer a balanced and representative view of Cunard’s poetic oeuvre, but she fiercely resisted reprinting more than three poems written before 1925, feeling that they were badly written and immature. She also claims that between roughly 1926 and 1936 she wrote almost no poems at all.28 Finally, Thompson relents when Cunard insists ‘They are downright bad, or at least very inferior, and I will not be represented by them. I will NOT.’29 By 1945, Cunard had returned to Réanville to face the devastation of her once home and what remained of the Hours Press. Thompson appears to have passed the task of editing Cunard’s manuscript to someone else during his illness. Although Cunard mentions that she is planning a large edition of her later poems, to be entitled The Lands That Were Today after her poem for Kay Boyle, neither book appeared and Cunard went back to publishing small pamphlets, often at her own expense.
Notwithstanding Cunard’s disavowal of her early poetry, the value of her modernist poem Parallax as a whole is indisputable, as is, I would argue, the value of her several World War I and European travel poems from Outlaws and Sublunary. Here are the seeds of her political consciousness, her rejection of British nationalism in favour of internationalism, and her early aesthetic forays into modernist avant-garde poetics. Cunard’s near-entire poetic output, viewed as a whole, provides a different sort of picture of the poet, one that charts the hope and despair of her generation and reflects the best of its artistic aims.
A recent reprint of The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People! includes a recollection by Ramón J. Sender of Cunard’s passion for art as a means towards social justice: ‘Nancy Cunard was a bold heroine of the battle against the inexpressible. The inexpressible that, as we say, waits and needs to be expressed.’30 Writing about her in the late 1920s, the poet and artist Mina Loy vividly captures her friend’s spiritual and visual alterity, as well as her fragile form, in her poem ‘Nancy Cunard’. What Loy could not have envisioned here is the tremendous strength and unflinching idealism of Cunard’s literary legacy.
Your eyes diffused with holly lights
of ancient Christmas
helmeted with masks
whose silken nostrils
point the cardinal airs,
The vermilion wall
receding as a sin
beyond your moonstone whiteness,
Your chiffon voice
tears with soft mystery
a lily loaded with a sucrose dew
of vigil carnival,
Your lone fragility
of mythological queens
conjures long-vanished dragons –
– their vast jaws
yawning in disillusion,
Your drifting hands
faint as exotic snow
spread silver silence
as a fondant nun
framed in the facing profiles
of Princess Murat
and George Moore.31
NOTES
1 Mulk Raj Anand, Conversations in Bloomsbury (London: Wildwood House, 1981), pp. 37–39.
2 Nancy Cunard, These Were the Hours: Memoires of My Hours Press, ed. Hugh Ford (Carbondale: Southern Ilinois University Press, 1969), pp. 201–204.
3 Lois Gordon, Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 25.
4 Denis Donoghue, Irish Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 79.
5 Nancy Cunard, letter to John Hayward, 11 January 1965, The Papers of John Davy Hayward, Kings College Archive Centre, Cambridge.
6 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A facsimile and transcript of the original drafts, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), p. 27.
7 Gordon, pp. 62–64.
8 Nancy Cunard, letter to Ezra Pound, 11 June 1946, Nancy Cunard Papers, Harry Ransom Center (Texas), box 10, folder 6.
9 Gordon, pp. 99–106.
10 Cunard, These Were the Hours, p. 8.
11 Gordon, p. 122.
12 Jane Dowson, Women, Modernism and British Poetry, 1910–1939: Resisting Femininity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 117. Dowson’s book also provides an excellent contextualization of women poets involved in the Spanish Civil War, including Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, both friends of Cunard’s.
13 Cunard, These Were the Hours, p. 7.
14 Nancy Cunard Papers, Harry Ransom Center, box 8, folder 6.
15 James Donald, Some of These Days: Black Stars, Jazz Aesthetics, and Modernist Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 18–19.
16 As quoted in Anthony Barnett, Listening for Henry Crowder: A Monograph on His Almost Lost Music (Lewes: Allardyce, Barnett, Publishers, 2007), pp. 20–21. Barnett’s book offers a vivid account of Cunard’s impressions.
17 For more on Crowder’s life and music see As Wonderful as All That? Henry Crowder’s Memoir of His Affair with Nancy Cunard, 1928–1935 (Navarro, California: Wild Trees Press, 1987) and Barnett’s excellent Listening for Henry Crowder.
18 Gordon, p. 180.
19 Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (first published by Left Review, 1937. Reissued by Cecil Woolf Publishers, London, 2001), p. 14.
20 Ibid. p. 32.
21 Nancy Cunard Papers, Harry Ransom Center, box 7, folder 3.
22 Gordon, p. 259.
23 Gordon, p. 311.
24 Nancy Cunard Papers, Harry Ransom Center, box 7, folder 6.
25 Nancy Cunard Papers, Harry Ransom Center, box 8, folder 4.
26 John Lucas, introduction to Poems of Nancy Cunard: From the Bodleian Library (Nottingham, Trent Editions, 2005), p. 18.
27 Letter from Nancy Cunard to Edward Thompson, 29 Feb 1943, Edward John Thompson Papers, University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng c. 5285.
28 Letter from NC to ET, 23 Feb 1944, ibid.
29 Letter from NC to ET, 29 Feb 1943, ibid.
30 Los Poetas del Mundo Defendian al Pueblo Español, ed. Pablo Neruda and Nancy Cunard (Spanish reprint, Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2010), p. 79.
31 Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger Conover (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1997), p. 103.
Outlaws
1921
Outlaws
I
There is a curious legend of two lovers
That thrills within the heart of every man;
Ghostly they are, yet living, and the span
Allotted them by fate no end discovers.
There was a man, adventurous and free,
Evil of soul, grown into league with hell,
Loved by a woman that no fear might quell;
Their lives rose as the waves grow out at sea.
Wild as the glory of a desert lion,
Dark as the sombre magnitude of death,
Heavy with memories as a storm that saith
Aloud its toll of corpses… Cruel iron
Lay as a heart within this man, yet still
She followed him; he held her to his will.
II
Her heart held many musics; many songs
Shone like fair crystals in her tenderness,
An
d all her longing was for happiness;
Yet love was darkened by her lover’s wrongs
And wild unlawful piracies, though he
Worshipped with passion, elemental flame
That burns, consuming self; the soul untame
Burnt in each freely. They shall never see
The shuddering brinks behind them, never know
The perilous moments nor the cruel hour
When death strove for them; but with haunted eyes
Speed to infinity, while all this slow
World’s musing chronicle records the power
That dwelt in their strange love that never dies.
III
And so they wandered through life’s haunted rooms,
Each other’s heart laid bare to each, and hid
In secrecy from all the rest, amid
Their happiness and tragedies and glooms.
Life drew its ghosts around them, and on walls
Lingered strange shadows that were more than life
In their deep artifice. A trenchant knife
Above them hung, the knife that never falls
But trembles in its warning. Voices came
Selected Poems Page 4
