Nancy
Cunard, the only child of Sir Bache Cunard, of the shipping family,
was
born in 1896. Educated at several exclusive schools, Cunard's poetry
first appeared in magazines in 1916. Three volumes of poetry followed:
Outlaws (1921),
Sublunary (1923) and Parallax
(1925), a book published by Virginia
Woolf and her husband,
Leonard Woolf.
In 1928
Cunard founded Hours Press that published writers such as Richard
Aldington, Louis
Aragon, George Moore, Robert
Graves, Ezra
Pound and Samuel Beckett.
Cunard's relationship
with African-American musician, Henry Crowder, caused a major scandal
and led to a break with her family. The couple moved to Austria where
Cunard wrote the pamphlet, Black Man and
White Ladyship(1931). With Crowder she also published Negro
(1934), an anthology of African-American art. Cunard also became involved
in the campaign to free the Scottsboro
Boys , where nine young black men were falsely charged with the
rape of two white women on a train.
On
the outbreak of the Spanish
Civil War Cunard
went to Spain where she wrote for the Manchester
Guardian. In 1937 she polled British writers on their attitudes
towards the Spanish conflict and published their comments in the booklet,
Authors Take Sides.
Cunard
also campaigned for Spanish refugees and Republican prisoners. Cunard
joined Sylvia
Townsend Warner and
Mary
Valentine Ackland as
part of the British delegation to the Second Congress of the International
Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture in Madrid
in 1937.
Later
work by Cunard included Norman
Douglas (1954), George
Moore (1956) and the posthumously published These
Were the Hours (1969). Nancy
Cunard died
in 1965.
(1)
Nancy Cunard, Manchester
Guardian (9th
February, 1939)
At Le Perthus, from nine o'clock this morning
until 4.30, I have been watching soldiers pass between the two stone
posts that are actually the frontier-line. They have come by in thousands
and thousands, in groups, singly, and in numberless lorries. At the
posts stand the French soldiers, who immediately search them for arms.
The Spanish soldiers give up their arms in an orderly fashion. The
pile of rifles, revolvers, cartridge belts, dirks, and even a knife
or two grow throughout the day. Two machine-guns have been brought
in; farther up, an armoured car.
But all this is only the
beginning; we are told: 'Tomorrow the rearguard of the army, and afterwards
- the army that has fought.' On the mountains each side they come,
so that the whole landscape seems to be moving. Soldiers on horseback,
wounded men, women, children, a whole population, and cars and ambulances.
Many of the ambulances are British and of the 'Centrale Internationale
Sanitaire', one of whose doctors tells me of the appalling lack of
supplies, of staff, and of help.
In fact, there is enough
of nothing save the now excellently distributed food rations which
are made by France. There was a good supply of food at La Junquera,
as the food parcels that had been intended for parts of Catalonia
now taken by the enemy were being used there. All medical centres
and staffs are over-powered, however; at Cerbere, for instance, a
doctor told me, are 1,500 wounded soldiers with hardly any sanitary
necessities at all. Lack of sufficient transport for them is another
difficulty. Dr Audrey Russell, who is well known for her fine work
in Spain for many months, said that she had just been able to get
her last canteen into French territory.
General Molesworth was
another English worker at Le Perthus, where he was indefatigably trying
to get the internationals together. 'Only a handful have come through
so far,' the General told me.
(2)
Nancy Cunard, Manchester
Guardian (10th
February, 1939)
Some
of the camps to which the Spanish refugees are going are not fit to
receive human beings. The problem has been too vast to be dealt with
as yet.
At the great central camp
at Le Boulou are thousands of men, women, and children. On one side
of the road is an enclosure with wire fencing. On the other the refugees
who walked down from Le Perthus yesterday are lying, sitting, standing,
doing nothing this cold end of a February afternoon. It is a horrible
sight, and all of them, men, women and children, are in the utmost
depression. This 'camp' is a large, flat, bare area, the grass trodden
down into a sort of grey compost. They sleep here, in the open. A
few have rigged up some vague kind of shelter.
As for medical aid -just
one case I saw will show the state of things. A woman lamented that
she could do nothing for her child. She took off the little girl's
bonnet and said: 'These dreadful sores are the result of typhus.'
They come and stand around you and talk; they argue among themselves
in front of you: 'Are we worse off here today than we might be in
Spain?' Then a woman cries out, 'I shall never get into a train without
knowing where it is going, for I have heard that they want to send
us back to Franco.' Other voices broke out: 'Ninety-five per cent
of us want to go to Mexico - anything rather than return to Spain
as it will be under the fascists.' At the village town hall a girl
I knew in Spain says she thinks the women she is one of in a long
queue may get a permit to go to Perpignan some time soon. All the
men, says a French guard, are going to Argeles; when? No one knows.
In all of this families get separated; the men are taken from their
families in some cases. Every phrase ends in 'I don't know.' As for
the wounded - they are lying in the ditch among their crutches; a
man limps by in obvious agony.
Somehow one becomes accustomed
to such sights after ten days. But they become more real again when
I try to set down just a fraction here and compare this mass-wretchedness
with the 'business-eye' of some Marseilles white-slave traffickers
who have made their appearance. There are many pretty girls in the
Spanish migration.
(3)
Langston
Hughes on Nancy
Cunard (1965)
Nancy Cunard was kind and good and catholic
and cosmopolitan and sophisticated and simple all at the same time
and a poet of no mean abilities and an appreciator of the rare and
the off-beat from jazz to ivory bracelets and witch doctors to Cocteau
but she did not like truffles at Maxim's or chitterlings in Harlem.
She did not like bigots or brilliant bores or academicians who wore
their honors, or scholars who wore their doctorates, like dog tags.
But she had an infinite capacity to love peasants and children and
great but simple causes across the board and a grace in giving that
was itself gratitude and she had a body like sculpture in the thinnest
of wire and a face made of a million mosaics in a gauze-web of cubes
lighter than air and a pinata of a heart in the center of a mobile
at fiesta time with bits of her soul swirling in the breeze in honor
of life and love.
(4)
George
Seldes on Nancy
Cunard (1965)
I knew Nancy Cunard only slightly; but enough
to be impressed by her, to honor and admire her. We who talk and write
about nonconformity rarely have the courage to live the lives of nonconformists,
but Nancy Cunard had the courage and paid the price society still
demands. England and America are bad enough, but Nancy when I knew
her was the dissenter, the rebel, the heretic in the Spain of today,
which is still in the shadow of the 17th century.
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