Even his role as an outsider was becoming an irritant. Nancy had felt shocked sympathy for what Arlen’s family had suffered when they’d been exiled by the Turks in 1901, but she couldn’t understand the exhaustingly personal grudges he continued to hold against the world. One long, winter evening, when he launched into a litany of the insults he had suffered, the querulousness of his tone grated so badly that she realized she was shredding the pages of the new book she was meant to be cutting.
But above all Nancy could not overlook Arlen’s literary flaws. When he gave her the draft of his first novel, Piracy, to read, she was impressed by its ‘beautiful gift for observation’4 and its courage in charting the sexual and social issues of their generation. Yet Arlen was squandering his talents on a fantasy of London life whose banality and snobbery made her wince. ‘You go on and on writing about Cocktails with a capital C,’ she berated him, ‘and ladies and gentlemen of Mayfair the likes of whom never existed.5 Even more disconcertingly, it was her own life that he was using to flesh out this fantasy. On almost every page of Piracy she met an exaggerated but recognizable version of herself. Virginia Tracy, the novel’s heroine, was her blonde, aristocratic and rebellious twin. During the war she had escaped from her socially formidable mother to a restaurant virtually identical to the Eiffel Tower, where ‘tawny haired women of almost barbaric fairness [toyed] with their food and their poets’. She acquired a reputation for ‘glamour and a rottenness’ that meant even ‘decent men [took] licence with her name’.6
Nancy was conscious that Arlen had to make a living, and initially she tolerated his literary plunderings, but they continued long after Piracy was published and their affair was over. When The Green Hat first appeared in the bookshops in 1924 she was furious to see that yet again Arlen had rifled her personal life. To her friend Janet Flanner she complained that everyone was talking about it – a complete stranger, a ‘perfect swine’, had come up to Nancy at a party and begun interrogating her as to ‘whether or no I was the Green Hat’.7
On a very fundamental level she was not: despite their shared reputation for social and sexual deviancy, Iris lacked Nancy’s intellectual stringency and wit. Yet however quick she was to brush off the connection, Arlen’s borrowings remained a violation. Some were only a betrayal of small intimacies, such as the scene in which Iris, alone with her lover, dreamily traces her name in candle smoke, just as Nancy herself had once done. But one in particular was a brutal invasion of her privacy.
In December 1920, when Nancy’s affair with Arlen was coming to an end, she was admitted to a private clinic in Paris for a curettage or scraping of the uterus lining. The procedure may have been to terminate a pregnancy – the high surgeon’s fees suggest that discretion was part of the price – or it may have been related to an underlying gynaecological condition: Nancy always complained of painful periods. But either because it was badly botched, or because she was suffering from something more serious, in early January a second, more drastic operation followed, in which the whole of Nancy’s womb was removed.
In 1920 a hysterectomy was a major surgical event, and afterwards Nancy developed a series of near-fatal infections. She made little of the episode afterwards, referring to it in the baldest of factual terms in her diary:
Dec, Jan, Feb. in the hospital in Paris
1st Op Curettage
2nd Op Hysterectomy
3rd Op Appendicitis, Peritonitis, Gangrene with ‘a two per cent chance of survival’.8
Arlen, however, helped himself freely to the details of her suffering, first in Piracy and again in The Green Hat. It must surely have been horrible for Nancy to revisit his melodramatic embroiderings:
‘It hurts,’ she whispered ‘… Frightful … There’s things inside me,’ she said with a sob. ‘Steel things. They’ve left them in there … holding things together … Look,’ she said pitifully. And she lifted up her hands under the clothes, and he saw that they were tied together with a handkerchief. ‘That’s to stop me tearing the things out and killing myself.’9
A decade later Nancy would suggest that she had happily embraced the hysterectomy, which put an end to all cumbersome contraception and fear of abortion, but in truth it was a blow to her always precarious health, leaving her physically scarred and with her hormones harrowingly askew. In 1951 she would admit to her friend Solita Solano that she believed her lifetime of bad ‘nerves’ had been caused by ‘those operations of 1921 – gland deficiency of some kind’.10 And even though she had rarely expressed any interest in being a mother, apart from when she had fantasized about a life with Peter, twenty-five was still a very young age for Nancy to have her reproductive future taken away from her; a very young age to have yet another door slammed on her chance of ordinary happiness.
When Nancy recovered, she seemed to resume her old busy life. In Paris, she moved between different hotels, looking for a place to settle. She danced at the Plantation Club and Le Grand Duc, where Bricktop sang and the Harlem poet Langston Hughes worked as a waiter; she drank at the Dingo and the Jockey. She grew familiar with the Left Bank crowd, who drifted between the bookshops owned by Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, and the little art galleries, bars and cafés of Montparnasse. She may have noticed Tamara, smoking and watchful at her solitary table, minding her centimes and planning her career. But mostly Nancy would have been too busily in the thick of café conversation, talking about Freud, Diaghilev or jazz, her curiosity and intellect at full stretch.
The Daily Mail delighted in tracking her new lifestyle. ‘Nancy vows she wont stand us anymore. Whenever she can she leaves us for Paris … As a rule, Nancy affects the Society of Futurist Artists and Highbrows, whereas the friends of Lady Cunard are either statesmen, brilliant Society beauties, or operatic celebrities who don’t bother their heads about books and things.11 Other papers were assiduous in tracking Nancy’s travels around Europe as she moved with the summer flock of tourists.
The image she presented was rich and confident, one of the cleverest and most stylish of the new decade’s flappers. The Daily Express fanfared her arrival in Monte Carlo in March 1922 with the promise of many interesting outfits to report: ‘Miss Nancy Cunard … who admires eccentricities in dress and appearance … carries out her ideas with courage and success. She was one of the first to adopt the Eton crop.’ The Sketch supplied further details of the ‘mauve tulle scarf tied across her eyebrows, with floating ends under a big grey felt hat, which looked, oh, so Spanish’.12 Yet however confident Nancy appeared, those who watched her closely saw a driven quality in her social gyrations. Leonard Woolf noted the vulnerability behind her smart opinions and clever clothes, while Mary Hutchinson, wife of St John, equally saw dark shadows moving behind her bright veneer. Everyone commented on how thin she was becoming.
Nancy looked ‘burned to the bone’, said William Carlos Williams, observing that some days she appeared to survive on little beyond champagne or cheap white wine.13 If she was not clinically anorexic, she was sometimes very close. To the poet Brian Howard, her ‘thinness … was a sort of thing in itself in her’, going far beyond fashionable slenderness. It was as though she were making herself as light and steely as possible, a thin blade of a woman cutting away her past, clearing her way towards a future.
Certainly she was putting as much distance as she could between herself and Maud. Year by year she grew more critical of her mother: despising the way she reduced art and ideas to trivial dinner table talk; finding her fashionable caprices increasingly contemptible. In 1926, when Maud changed her name to Emerald on the advice of a numerologist, Nancy refused to acknowledge it. She couldn’t bear to imagine that, among the several traits they shared, she had in any way inherited her mother’s flightiness. Three years later, when she responded to a literary questionnaire that invited her to list the qualities she most prized in herself,* Nancy chose to describe herself as ‘impervious, concentrated, secret and unquestionable’.14
Financially independent, ferociously well educated
and fearlessly stylish, Nancy could easily give the impression of moving imperviously through the early years of the decade. She took many lovers, some of whom were fleeting diversions, some of whom, like Wyndham Lewis, were important to her. ‘Dear dear Lewis,’ she wrote to him in 1923, ‘I get warmed when I am with you – you are a sort of black sun, dark earth, rich and full of new things, potential harvests, always dark, plein de sève,* oil, blood, bread and comfort … I cannot get a nearer word than Rich.’15 Yet whatever the seriousness of her affairs Nancy appeared to pursue them without fuss or guilt. She didn’t brag about them like Tallulah, nor did she elevate them into a feminist cause. She seemed almost wilfully not to care how other peopled judged or interpreted her.
But other people did judge, of course. While a man like Duff could run dozens of mistresses and be applauded for his vigour, a woman who took as many lovers as Nancy was either a hardened nymphomaniac or fascinatingly damaged. William Carlos Williams inclined towards the latter view: he saw a martyred quality in Nancy’s promiscuity, as if she were seeking a form of spiritual purity through physical excess. It was true, certainly, that beneath the casual trafficking of her love affairs, Nancy’s relationship with sex remained complicated. To every new relationship she brought the hope of finding an emotion as large and pure as the love she had felt for Peter, but she also brought an equal terror of becoming trapped, as she had been with Sydney. Hope and fear alike made her restless, critical and self-conscious, and these emotions were compounded by her difficulty in finding a lover who could satisfy her in bed.
Orgasm was very hard for Nancy; to experience any kind of arousal she needed to feel a degree of physical pain, and some men were made queasy by her demands. Wyndham Lewis, for instance, admitted to a friend that he had to break off with Nancy because he found her requests for anal penetration perverse. Far more sympathetic was Raymond Michelet, the young surrealist writer with whom Nancy had an affair in 1931, who understood that the physical scarring left by her gynaecological history had affected her sensitivity, making pain an essential stimulus to pleasure. Between Lewis and Michelet there were many other men who, while confused by the riddle of Nancy’s sexuality, were also bewitched by it. They fell in love with her because they wanted to understand her.
Aldous Huxley became one of the bewitched when he had a brief affair with Nancy in the spring of 1922. Touchingly earnest in her desire to be a poet, terrifyingly assured in her beauty and wealth, infuriating in her fashionable mannerisms, she seemed a maddening enigma, and he became obsessed with the need to solve it. Initially, she was receptive to his interest. She’d met him briefly during the war, when they had both been published in the same anthology. And while he’d then been a poorly paid schoolteacher, rarely able to afford his few ‘whizzing’ trips to London, now, with the publication of his debut novel, Crome Yellow, he was being talked of as the new comic-philosophical voice of English fiction. It was his writing more than any physical attraction that caught Nancy’s interest. Pale and lanky Huxley was not a type to appeal to her – although the writer Anita Loos thought him beautiful: ‘A giant in height – with a … magnificent head; the head of an angel drawn by William Blake.’16
Yet as casually as she allowed Huxley into her bed, Nancy was ready to discard him. Socially he was of little use to her: he despised the sloganizing and philosophical hot air of the literary Left Bank; he found the smoky atmosphere of bars and clubs deleterious to his weak lungs and he liked to be in bed early. And bed, unfortunately, was the place where Huxley was even less use to Nancy. He adored her body and was aroused to a tender reverence by her sharp-edged fragility, yet the sensitivity of his love-making was almost repugnant to her. Later, without mercy, she confessed to a friend that it was ‘like being crawled over by slugs’.17
It was a point of honour to Nancy that she would never fake desire or a sentiment she did not feel, and she tried to convince Huxley that the affair was over. He could not accept it, however, continuing to write her letters and importune meetings. On one desperate night he paced outside her window like ‘a dim haunting ghost’.18 Even after his wife, Maria, finally dragged him away to Italy, Huxley was unable to sever himself from Nancy. She was an idée fixe, an obsession lodged inside him, and he wrote about her and niggled away at her again and again in his fiction.*
His first literary portrait of Nancy appeared in Antic Hay, a satire of post-war London that skewered the intellectual vacuities and artistic pretensions of the age. Myra Viveash was a brittle society beauty whose cultivated smartness and atrophied heart were symbolic of the world in which she moved; to the extent that she was Nancy, it was a cruel lampooning. Yet despite Huxley’s satiric intent, the portrait remained charged with his first fascinated adoration of her. He described Myra-Nancy with a lover’s attentive detail: her ‘palely brightly inexpressive eyes’, the eerie grace of her dancer’s walk: ‘placing her feet with meticulous precision one after the other in the same straight line … Floating she seemed to go, with a little spring at every step.’19
He was also conscientious about excusing her deadened affect through the sufferings of her past – Myra, like Nancy, had lost her first, great love. However, the more distant from Nancy Huxley became, the fewer redeeming qualities he gave her fictional incarnations. Barbara in Those Barren Leaves (1925) was a crass artistic snob; Lucy Tantamount in Point Counter Point (1928) was the sexually depraved and intellectually lazy product of ‘too much money and leisure’. When Lucy recollects being half raped by a stranger, her account hums with perverse excitement: ‘He came at me as though he would kill me. Letting oneself be hurt, humiliated, used like a doormat – queer. I like it. Besides the doormat uses the user. It’s complicated.’20
* * *
Arlen and Huxley’s fiction set in motion a literary mythologizing of Nancy, and it was a process continued by many others. The writer Harold Acton later commented that she had ‘inspired half the poets and novelists of the twenties’.21 Some were her lovers, others more distant acquaintances, including Evelyn Waugh, who would scatter a generalized Nancy-glitter over several of his fictional characters. In Unconditional Surrender (1961), she would inspire the figure of Virginia Troy, who was presented as the emblem of a fascinating generation, a ghost of romance, ‘exquisite … doomed and … damning … we shall never see anyone like her again in literature or in life’.22
Later, Nancy lost interest in her own artistic celebrity, but when she was young it was simultaneously flattering and disruptive to be cast as muse to so many – there were painters and photographers as well as writers. During the early 1920s she still felt unformed and uncertain of herself: as she groped to find a poetic voice and to create a life in which she could believe, it didn’t help to see herself in the distorting mirrors of other people’s fantasies.
It wasn’t simply the puzzle of her behaviour that challenged so many to write about her. Raymond Mortimer, then an aspiring novelist, found her beauty heart stopping when he first met her in 1921 on a boat crossing the Channel. ‘Everybody old, it is hoped, can look back to one person who was incomparably bewitching: and I have never met anyone to equal Nancy Cunard.’23 Writers scrabbled for adjectives to capture the essence of her uncompromising beauty. To David Garnett it was the brilliant pallor of her skin, ‘as white as bleached almonds’;24 to Harold Acton it was the shapeliness of her small head, ‘carved out of crystal’, and the arctic brightness of her unwavering blue-green gaze. To Carlos Williams it was the tapering length of her legs and the delicate poise of her ankles, a ‘tall blond spike of woman’;25 to George Moore it was her beautiful back, ‘as long as a weasel’s’ (and given to Brigit, a character in his 1926 novel Ulick and Soracha).
Nancy’s distinctive appearance was equally appealing to journalists and photographers. Fashion was being marketed on a mass scale after the war, but the more widespread its reach, the higher the premium placed on individual style. People wanted to be seen in the latest trends, yet they also wanted their clothes to be an expres
sion of their personality. A woman who spent her wages on a cape of vibrant chevron design, or an art deco powder compact, believed she was making choices that were no less creative than the bright young aesthetes fashioning outfits for a costume ball, art students adopting gypsy skirts and headscarves or sapphists in their tailored suits and green carnations.
Few, however, dressed more creatively than Nancy. The turbans and scarves she customized in the early 1920s, the geometric fabrics she commissioned from the artist Sonia Delaunay, the enormous African earrings and ivory bangles she began wearing in the mid-1920s, all looked astonishing on her and were seized upon by journalists as the possible start of a trend. Even her make-up was different – eyes elongated with a dramatic line of kohl, her lipstick a slash of scarlet that gave her mouth a determined, even savage tension. During these years any publication that made use of Nancy’s face could guarantee itself a frisson of modernity.
Certainly there was barely a photograph in which she didn’t appear perfectly in control of her image, from casual snapshots taken by friends to the formal portraits of Cecil Beaton. In the famous series he shot in 1929, Nancy’s pose had the quality of an abstract artwork – sharp chin resting in the palm of her hand, thin arms loaded with ivory and ebony bangles. Yet while she lavished time and passion on her physical appearance – and many would say she had a genius for it – Nancy was wary of being defined by it. It was never her clothes for which she wanted to be famous, only her writing.
Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation Page 30