FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.
FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side
from ‘Thyrsis’
Selected Poems of Nancy Cunard
Edited by
SANDEEP PARMAR
Contents
Title Page
Introduction
OUTLAWS · 1921
Outlaws
And if the End Be Now?…
Moon
The Sonnet of Happiness
I
II
Praise
The Lovers
Wheels
Zeppelins
The Last of Pierrot
Sonnet
War
Monkery!
1917
Promise
Lament
Mood
The Knave of Spades
Psalm
Prayer
Sirens
Evenings
The River Nene
Voyages North
The Love Story
Transmutation
Love
Poor-Streets
The Wreath
Sonnet
Answer to a Reproof
Sonnet
Western Islands
The Haunted Castle
Thamar
SUBLUNARY · 1923
Sublunary
In a Café
Eusebius Doubts
Iris of Memories
Mary Queen of Scots
Ballad of 5 Rue De L’Etoile
Memory at the Fair
Adolescence
The April Hour
Premature Spring
Sonnet
Mist
In the Valley of Willows
At Martin-Eglise
Bottles, Mirrors and Alchemy
Drought
Shall We Forget?
In the Valley of Arques
The Siege
Twelve Chimes upon the Clock
Horns in the Valley
Here is the Autumn
If We Devise Tonight –
Adventurer
The New Friend
Sonnet
The Spiders Weave
Provence
Southward
Beaucaire
At Les Baux
To Vaucluse Came Petrarch and Laura
At St Rémy
Saintes Maries-De-La-Mer
By the Dordogne
The Night in Avignon
New Coasts
Red Earth, Pale Olive, Fragmentary Vine
The Solitary
Pale Moon, Slip of Malachite
Tempests
Echoes
Toulonnaise
A Vis-à-vis
Spenkler
Allegory
Pays Hanté
From Afar
From Afar
Buddha above the Hearth
The Caravans Return
What If the Bell Is Loud
Time Alone Grapples
I Ask No Questionable Understanding
These Rocked the Cradle
An Exile
You Have Lit the Only Candle
I Think of You
I Have Never Loved One That Was Not Proud at Heart
So May You Nail Your Sorrow to My Name’s Cross
I Shall Depart
At Fuenterrabia in Spain
Cap Du Figuier
To the Eiffel Tower Restaurant
I Am Not One for Expression
To I. T. and T. W. E.
‘Les Jeunes’
Crepuscule Sentimentale
Opium
Les Masques
PARALLAX · 1925
FROM · POEMS TWO 1925 · 1930
Simultaneous
In Provins
FROM · RELÈVE INTO MAQUIS · 1944
Relève into Maquis
MAN SHIP TANK GUN PLANE · 1944
FROM THE BODLEIAN MANUSCRIPT
Love’s Alba Against Time, Time’s Against Love
Love, Death, Time, Weather
Between Time and Etc
Tell It, Glen
And Also Faustus
Yes, It Is Spain
To Eat Today
Pamiatnik – Memorial of Bittersweet
EOS
Sequences from a Long Epic on Spain
The Lands That Were Today
Journey to the New World
The Chilean Sonnets
Psalm for Trinidad
‘How Long?’ Is Not ‘For Ever’
Less Than the Slave
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?’
14 Juillet 1941
Fragment in the Old World
Incarnations
Whose Desert?
Dordogne
PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED OR UNCOLLECTED POEMS
Soldiers Fallen in Battle
Remorse
Uneasiness
Brigit
Victor and Nancy at Pertenhall in Feb, Say, of the Early Fifties
Pain Sonnets
Stripling
To Professor Bernelot Moens
To Douglas Cooper from Nancy Cunard
For Douglas Cooper
Passport to Freedom
The Poet to His Wars
Three Prison Sonnets
By Their Faces Shall Ye Know Them
In the Watches of the Night
Order
To Whom?
Portrait-Sonnet
‘Till Dawn do us Deliver’
8 AM Sonnet
From Afar
Of Liberty
Saintes De La Mer
Aigues Mortes
Trasimene
When We Must Go Our Ways
The Solitary
The White Cat
Wansford Bridge Spring
Looking at a Photograph in the Same Dress 1928 to 1926
For December
1929’s Spring Poem
The Boeuf Blues
Equatorial Way
Southern Sheriff
‘Rape’
Réanville
In the Studio
In San Gimignano
June for Italy – June For Freedom
Kikuyu
Jaime
Late Night Sonnet
Letter
Lincoln
The Love Story
¿Me Oyes, Mijito?
Mosley 1943
Myself
And an Afternoon
April, 1942
Saturday Night in ‘The Golden Lion’
October-November Night in ‘The Coach & Horses’
Of a Glass Stopper Found in the Sea at Collioure S. W. France, in 1951
Pisces Pulled Plough
‘Come, Liberating Wine!’
Oath – History Repeats
From Prison
You
Notes to the Poems
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Introduction
For feminist literary critics, the resurrecting of marginal women writers calls for deft manoeuvring. An indelicate, exceptionalist gesture in favour o
f forgotten female genius inevitably fails. One has only to witness how ‘neglected’ women writers are set within scholarly histories of existing artistic constellations to see how their lives, influences, works – even their physical bodies – enter into an imagined, evaluative male space. And yet, the indisputable fact is that poet, publisher, journalist and editor Nancy Cunard (1896–1965) occupied a primary role in transatlantic modernism and the European avant-garde. Her myth persists: first glimpsed at the Bloomsbury literary salon of Edith, Sacheverell and Osbert Sitwell in the early decades of the twentieth century; later, as an author published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press; and then in accounts of and by her famous lovers Aldous Huxley, Michael Arlen, and Tristan Tzara, among others. As the visionary founder of the Hours Press, Cunard was the first to publish the twenty-three-year-old Samuel Beckett, as well as works by Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden. Cunard’s reputation as striking artist’s model and muse, and her lithe – probably anorexic – silhouette haunting Left Bank Paris in the 1920s and 30s, is remembered by most who have come across her remarkable likeness. As with so many of her female contemporaries, like Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes, the persistent image of Nancy Cunard is more myth than substance and somewhat self-cultivated. In a photograph taken by Man Ray in 1926, Cunard appears as a sharp, angled woman, up to her elbows in African ivory bracelets. Her pose is somewhere between alluring and defensive, and her side profile directs us towards an unknowable spectator just outside the frame. Worn through much of her life, these bracelets were a kind of personal armour and her astounding collection (much of which was stolen during World War II) testifies to her vulnerability as much as her tireless battles against social and political injustice. One hope of this volume of Cunard’s poetry is to mediate the gaze of readers and modernist scholars between her compelling public image and her wide-ranging and extraordinary literary oeuvre.
Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand recounts meeting Nancy Cunard in London in the 1920s with the biographer Catherine Carswell. Expressing surprise at finding her in a café called Whytelady’s, Cunard retorts that she has already convinced the owner to rename it Black and White, and that she will invite the famous black American actor Paul Robeson to its inauguration. Cunard’s mix of mischief and grandeur in this scene belies her serious life-long dedication to anti-Fascist, anti-racist and anti-imperial causes. According to Anand’s memoir, Conversations in Bloomsbury, Cunard was deeply sympathetic to his views of the British Raj: he was beaten and imprisoned for taking part in Gandhi’s resistance movement just before the Amritsar massacre in 1919. Cunard must have been reflecting on her own life when she replied, bending her head thoughtfully, ‘Nothing like a personal insult to make you into a rebel!’1 Cunard’s public rebellion against the values and ambivalence of her own social class and nationality complicates her legacy, as one whose association with artistic and literary circles was peripheral and selective. From the 1920s to the 1940s, she appears and then unexpectedly vanishes from the frame of transatlantic modernism. During these years, Cunard reincarnated herself from rebellious heiress to writer, social activist, and avant-garde publisher. As the great-granddaughter of the Cunard shipping-line founder Samuel Cunard, Nancy could not avoid her association with one of the most famous families in the world. Her story begins with a privileged childhood and adolescence, gaily photographed at the races alongside the daughters of great men, then moves to a literary career marked by travel and social activism in the Spanish Civil War and for the French resistance. Through three major wars, Cunard championed art as the antidote to world chaos.
Cunard’s Hours Press, which mostly operated between 1928 and 1931 in Paris and La Chapelle-Réanville, was looted and her home destroyed by German troops and pillaged by her French neighbours under the encouragement of the town’s mayor. Books, letters, and artworks were lost – troops put eleven bullet holes through her Tanguy landscape and bayoneted her portrait by Eugene McCown – and many of Cunard’s precious ivory bracelets were carried off.2 Hence much of Cunard’s correspondence with the key writers of her era no longer exists. Her archived notebooks bear traces of her end as an isolated, disinherited idealist, jotting out quick, dark and observant poems standing at a window or in the TV room of London’s Holloway Sanatorium after being declared legally insane in 1960. Tragically, Cunard spent her final erratic days wandering the streets of Paris, where she was found weighing no more than twenty-six kilograms. On 17 March 1965 she died alone in the public ward of the charitable Hôpital Cochin in Paris.
Born in 1896 at Neville Holt, a thirteen-thousand-acre estate in rural Leicestershire, England, Nancy was the only child of Sir Bache Cunard and Maud Burke, a wealthy American who would later restyle herself as the flamboyant socialite Lady Emerald Cunard. Theirs was a marriage of convenience – Bache had forsaken the family business and was living as a country gentleman. Needing a wife to support his bucolic lifestyle, his title (that of a Baronet granted by Queen Victoria to his grandfather) lured in the beautiful and much younger Maud to a role in the British establishment. Becoming Lady Cunard, Maud gained much-craved social legitimacy and secured herself access to British royalty (Maud would later, unwisely, become the close confident of Wallis Simpson). The loveless marriage of Cunard’s parents was wholly apparent to Nancy from a very young age: Maud’s eventual separation from Nancy’s father and her high-profile relationships with the writer George Moore (‘G. M.’) and the composer Thomas Beecham undoubtedly added to what must have been an emotionally deprived childhood. However, Nancy’s access to literature in both French and English, the highly intellectual conversation of adults via her mother’s salons (attended by artists and politicians such as Max Beerbohm, Somerset Maugham, the Balfours, the Asquiths, and Lady Randolph Churchill), and international travel during her childhood, provided strong foundations for an increasingly worldly and itinerant life. She was not only presented at Court in 1914, she was also the favourite dancing partner of none other than Edward the Prince of Wales (who she found boring, unsophisticated and ‘physically slow to mature’).3 Nancy’s early prewar years as a spoiled debutante – part of a ‘Corrupt Coterie’ of young aristocrats, artists and writers including Lady Diana Manners and the poet Iris Tree, among others – ended with her introduction to the avantgarde circles of wartime London, populated by Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Pound was already known to Cunard’s mother, as was T. S. Eliot; both had been guests at her Cavendish Square soirées, including the first performance of W. B. Yeats’s play At the Hawk’s Well in London in 1916.4 That same year, Lady Cunard had also helped Pound secure a Civil List grant for James Joyce. Years later, on hearing of Eliot’s death in January 1965, Nancy wrote a poem titled ‘Letter’ (published here for the first time) in which she recalled first meeting him at one of her mother’s society balls.
We met, you and I, first, that summer night of 1922,
At a ball – You in ‘smoking’, I in a panniered dress
Of Poiret: red, gold with cascading white tulle on the hips.
The P. of W. was there (so polite, lovely face) and we danced together;
The hostess, that small termagent, in all her glitterings,
Brilliant was she, the hostess, at this sort of thing.
Bored by it all was I. After many dances we went down
Alone, by the grand staircase to the supper room.
It was then; Eliot, you came in, alone too, for the first time to my eyes;
Well-advised of you was I, already somewhat versed in you:
I mean Prufrock.
Hindsight softened her impressions of the Prince of Wales (Edward VIII) and her estranged mother – and quite possibly of Eliot himself, whose later-life conservative, religious, pro-royalist nationalism she would have despised. In ‘Letter’ she goes on to describe a gin-fuelled tryst with Eliot in front of a gas fire in a private room above Soho’s Eiffel Tower restaurant. Cunard sent the poem to Eliot’s close friend, the editor John Hayward, on hearing of Eliot’s death
, but did not receive an immediate reply. About a week later, she chivvied a response: ‘You will have had my poem to you on Eliot by now. I wonder, will you be liking it or not? I hope you will be liking it. Oh, how it surged up, written, all the first part, standing up after lunch, with the usual interruptions, written on further, immediately later; corrected as best I might later yet.’5 Hayward’s eventual reply was discouraging: Cunard wrote back that she would keep the poem private, as she had always intended. ‘As for the personal element in my “Letter” to you (called “Letter” on purpose), I meant it that way. So you understood. I wondered, thinking you would. So we agree – this a “Letter” just for you and me.’ ‘Letter’ is an homage to both Eliot’s effect on Cunard’s early poetry and to his great stature in later life. It is also marvellously coy about the night they shared together: ‘Not every life-moment’s recalled, though all of that night certainly is… / Not every moment goes into one’s histories, / Be they written, or even, spoken.’ No doubt Hayward feared the potentially scandalous revelation of a kind of intimacy between Eliot and Cunard, hence his act of suppression. Reading the poem now, in light of their shared responses to World War I and the shared high-modernist aesthetics of The Waste Land and Parallax especially, their diverging styles in later life are even more stark. Cunard’s absorption in French Surrealism in the 1930s, and her fervent activist (at times anarchic) political poetry, contrasts sharply with Eliot’s Anglicisation and the religious themes of his Four Quartets. The two corresponded little during the 1920s and 1930s; mostly Cunard wrote asking Eliot to contribute work to the Hours Press or to one of her many projects. Unbeknownst to Cunard, T. S. Eliot made a cruel and inaccurate caricature of her as the whoreish ‘Fresca’ in drafts of The Waste Land, a seventy-two-line section wisely redacted by Ezra Pound from the final manuscript. Mimicking the style of Jonathan Swift’s ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, Eliot mocks Cunard’s intellect and literary ambition:
When restless nights distract her brain from sleep
She may as well write poetry, as count sheep.
And on those nights when Fresca lies alone,
She scribbles verse of such a gloomy tone
That cautious critics say, her style is quite her own.6