CUNARD, (Clara) Nancy 1896-1965

PERSONAL:

Born March 10, 1896, in Leicestershire, England; died March 16, 1965, in Paris, France; daughter of Sir Bache and Maud (Burke) Cunard; married Sydney Fairburn, November, 1916 (divorced 1925).

CAREER:

Author, editor, publisher, and activist. Hours Press, La Chapell-Réanville, France, founder; reporter for Associated Negro Press during the Spanish Civil War.

WRITINGS:

Outlaws, Elkin Mathews (London, England), 1921.

Sublunary, Hodder & Stoughton (New York, NY), 1923.

Parallax, Hogarth (London, England), 1925.

Poems (Two) 1925, Aquila (London, England), 1930.

Black Man and White Ladyship: An Anniversary, privately printed (Toulon, France), 1931.

(Editor) Negro Anthology, Made by Nancy Cunard, 1931-1933, Wishart & Co. (London, England), 1934, Negro Universities Press (New York, NY), 1969.

(Editor, with Pablo Neruda) Les poètes du monde defendant les peuple espagnols, self-published (La Chapell-Réanville, France), 1937.

(Editor) Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, Left Review (London, England), 1937.

(With George Padmore) The White Man's Duty: An Analysis of the Colonial Question in the Light of the Atlantic Charter, W. H. Allen (London, England), 1942.

Men-Ship-Tank-Plane, New Books (London, England), 1944.

Relève into Maquis, Grasshopper (Derby, England), 1944.

(Editor) Poems for France, Written by Poets on France since the War, with Biographical Notes of the Authors, La France Libre (Paris, France), 1944.

Grand Man: Memories of Norman Douglas, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1954.

GM: Memories of George Moore, Hart-Davis (London, England), 1956.

These Were the Hours: Memories of My Hours Press, Réanville and Paris, 1928-1931, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1966.

Thoughts about Ronald Firbank, Albondocani (New York, NY), 1971.

Cunard's papers are housed in various locations: the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; the Library of Congress; and the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

SIDELIGHTS:

Although she was a notorious figure during her lifetime, British poet and publisher Nancy Cunard is relatively unknown to modern readers. Once famous for her bohemian lifestyle and her association with avant-garde literary, artistic, and political circles, Cunard wrote poetry that was influenced by Georgian and emerging modernist traditions.

In addition to her own writing, Cunard, who was white, was a tremendous advocate of African and African-American culture and literature. In fact, in 1934 she compiled and published an eight-hundred-page collection of black writings called Negro Anthology, Made by Nancy Cunard, 1931-1933. Including many photographs, the anthology includes the writings of well-known black writers of the day such as Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, and Langston Hughes. The book contains not only works of poetry but essays and articles that address the topics and issues that were affecting blacks during the early twentieth century. Cunard herself contributed six essays and a poem titled "Southern Sheriff," which criticizes racism in the American South.

In 1916 Cunard's first published poems had appeared in an anthology series titled "Wheels," the title of which was taken from one of her poems. Other contributors to the series, which was published by Edith Sitwell, included Aldous Huxley and Cunard's longtime friend Iris Tree. Some five years later Cunard published Outlaws, her first book of verse, which included thirty-one new poems and five that had appeared in Wheels. The collection caught the attention of reviewers, including Edgell Rickword of New Statesman, who declared: "One can feel the pulse of an original mind beating through a rather uncongenial medium." A number of literary critics and scholars considered Cunard's third volume of verse, Parallax, to be her most impressive work as a poet. The book includes just a single poem that runs more than five hundred lines. The main theme of the poem is alienation and a yearning for some kind of belonging in a world that Cunard thought was unraveling. Rickword, who reviewed the book for the Times Literary Supplement, wrote that "it has a grasp of reality and complexity which is so frequently lacking from women's poetry."

Despite the praise she received from many of her contemporary critics, later readers have largely neglected Cunard's poetry. Some scholars, however, feel that her writings should not be forgotten because they offer a unique perspective on some of the most important issues of her time. "If her verse never quite established a secure and distinctive voice of its own, it is, nevertheless, worth reading for the insights it offers into the aesthetic and political possibilities of poetry in the period 1916 to 1940," critic Chris Hopkins wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

Having lived through World War I, Cunard railed against the rise of fascist political movements in Italy, Germany, and Spain. Between 1928 and 1931 she owned and operated a publishing company in La Chapelle-Réanville, France, called the Hours Press. Cunard used the press to publish high-quality small editions of prose and poetry that the commercial publishers were not interested in. Some of the better-known authors who published works with the press included Ezra Pound and Samuel Beckett. During the Spanish Civil War, Cunard worked as a news correspondent for the Associated Negro Press. She also collaborated with Chilean poet Pablo Neruda on a pamphlet that helped support the Spanish Republicans in their war against the fascist forces. Several of Cunard's books were published in the years following World War II, including three volumes of memoirs. One of these volumes, These Were the Hours: Memories of My Hours Press, Réanville and Paris, 1928-1931, was published posthumously in 1966.

Her bohemian lifestyle not only led Cunard into numerous romantic liaisons, both temporary and long-term, but also encouraged her excessive drinking. At the end of her life she experienced repeated bouts of drunken paranoia that led to run-ins with the police and eventually an ordered stay at a sanatorium. The drinking also took a serious toll on Cunard's health, and she died at the age of sixty-nine on March 16, 1965, in Paris, France. Some modern critics, like Hopkins, feel that Cunard's literary accomplishments will forever be entwined with her publishing activities and public life. "Her reputation is better remembered than her poetry, but her life and work are closely linked: both show a progression from a wish to shock and a rejection of old meanings to a search for new and valuable insights," concluded Hopkins.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 240: Late Nineteeth-and Early-Twentiety-Century British Women Poets, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001.*