Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

by Mackrell, Judith

  * * *

  During the first half of the decade, Nancy worked hard on her poetry. As she moved from hotel to hotel she kept her notebooks and pens close by; even when she was holidaying across Europe she maintained a writer’s discipline, using her diary entries and letters to hone her eye and her style. By April 1921 she had had her first volume of poetry published, and received some encouraging attention. The tone of Outlaws might be marred by traces of Nancy’s old adolescent posturing, with lines in which she cast herself as ‘the perfect stranger/Outcast and outlaw from the rules of life’, but as a collection it was welcomed by the Nation, who judged it a volume of ‘entirely genuine and strangely individual, if imperfect poems’.

  George Moore, writing in the Observer, thought Nancy showed signs of ‘genius’, ‘a special way of feeling and seeing’, even if he demurred over a lack of ‘handicraft, tact [and] judgement’.26 But Moore of course was tenderly biased, and Nancy was given a far more relentlessly objective assessment of her work when she sent a poem to Ezra Pound, hoping for help in getting it published. Pound’s response was personally affable, but he made it clear that Nancy was still a novice, with much to learn, and that her voice, if she had one, was hard to discern under the muffling influence of her favourite childhood poets.

  Lovely Nancy,

  I will take the poem to the Dial this evening, but, my dear, why why the devil do you write in that obsolete dialect with the cadences of the late Alfred Tennyson …

  Iambic pentameter is a snare because it constantly lets one in for dead phrases … rhyme is no good unless you use it without letting it disturb the order of the words …

  Damn it all, midnight is midnight, it is not ‘this midnight hour’.27

  The list of her shortcomings was hard to read, but Nancy stuck the letter into her poetry scrapbook and kept it. Pound’s editorial toughness had the status of holy writ amongst writers she revered,* including T.S. Eliot, with whom, according to one biographer, she’d had a brief sexual encounter the previous year. There was another reason for cherishing the letter however – the sweetness of its tone and the hint it contained of something more intimate. Pound was now living in Paris (Nancy had written to him from London) and there was a kind of invitation in his closing paragraph: ‘I wish you would come back and deliver me from the ferocious mercies of wandering American females.’

  Nancy had had a slight crush on Pound ever since he’d come to tea with Maud in 1915 – the sartorial brio of his gold earring and green baize trousers as impressive to her as his intellect. And there is some evidence to suggest that after her return to Paris, she began an affair with the poet. It could only ever have been intermittent. In his own fashion, Pound remained committed to his wife, the English painter Dorothy Shakespear, and the longest period Nancy ever had him to herself was a walking holiday in Southern France in 1922, which they took while Shakespear was away. To Nancy it seems to have been a near perfect time. Large landscapes were always liberating to her, and Pound, with his vehement opinions and boundless curiosity, was their human equivalent. The fact that she couldn’t ever possess him only made him more desirable.

  She tried to arrange other rendezvous, taking an apartment in Venice in the autumn of 1922, where they might write poetry together. ‘Do come. I can see us at breakfast splitting a fig, muttering over the foulness of the tea … There will be hours devoted to the two typewriters.’ She believed she might be a better poet, even a better person, if only she could have more contact with him: ‘I am dull without you … I have no application. I am getting so drunk on this Bianco Vermouth alone, surrounded by the Paris nostalgia.’28

  But Pound never came. He cared for Nancy, but he preferred his mistresses to be less complex, less hard work, and their affair, such as it was, petered down to an exchange of letters and occasional meetings. Even so, Nancy’s second collection of poems, Sublunary, was charged with his presence.* Memories of their holiday in France were filtered into ‘Pays Hanté’; in ‘You Have Lit the Only Candle’ she paid homage to Pound’s cleansing effect on her sexually, his ‘straight flame’ of desire, ‘absolving’ her from the muddle and ‘shame’ of her own.

  This 1923 collection paid homage to Pound’s critical influence, too, as Nancy laboured to tighten her style. But it was in her third and most important work, Parallax (1925), that she attempted her own version of his modernist poetic. This extended work, written in multiple voices and registers, was very evidently inspired by the structure of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which had been published three years earlier and had been closely edited by Pound.† However, the landscapes in which Nancy placed her poetic voices and the issues she broached were very personal to her. Parts of Parallax read like extracts from her diaries, vivid travelogue jostling with confessional self-doubt and earnest, intellectual argument.

  It was her most experimental, and her most intensely visualized, poem. Raymond Mortimer saw in it ‘a desolate sort of beauty … particularly poignant to my contemporaries’; the Times Literary Supplement admired it as the ‘creation of a resilient mind’.29 Yet others could not see past its debt to Eliot, and continued to question the individuality of Nancy’s style. And this was a doubt that was slowly, unhappily, beginning to grow in her mind too. She might be able to create brilliant, original effects with make-up and clothes, yet that same flair eluded her with language and form.

  Eliot himself had already passed judgement on Nancy’s poetry. An early draft of The Waste Land had included the voice of a rich socialite, Fresca, whose literary pretension far out-weighed her ‘mishmash pourri’ of talent. It was almost certainly Nancy who was satirized in the lines: ‘When restless nights distract her brain from sheep/She may as well write poetry, as count sheep’. Pound thought so too: in 1921 when he read the draft through, he crossed out those lines, advising Eliot to cut the entire Fresca section.

  Nancy would have been mortified to read those lines, but in a self-flagellating moment she might have acknowledged their point. She was mixing with many professional writers now, and in contrast to Fitzgerald, Hemingway or Pound, she knew herself to be a privileged dabbler, too easily distracted from her desk by a new lover or by the prospect of a new city or landscape. She was still frequently in transit. There were regular trips back to London to see Maud, to whom she remained bound by habit and a reluctant need, and some of her old friends like Iris Tree, Diana and Duff Cooper, Tommy Earp, St John Hutchinson and the Sitwells.

  Nancy still loved England, but more and more it was to Europe that she felt bound. She’d inherited Maud’s passion for the Venice season, and for several weeks each summer rented a palazzo apartment in the city. Like the Marquesa Casati, if on a less expensive scale, Nancy became a local attraction. Dressed in her remarkable outfits and surrounded by her often remarkable entourage of friends, the sight of her feeding pigeons in St Mark’s Square, or shopping in the Rialto market, would frequently draw a small crowd. Bar owners begged for her business, artists pleaded to paint her portrait.

  As well as Venice there were trips to Monte Carlo, Rome and Florence, where Nancy was almost always guaranteed to meet someone she knew, including the writer Norman Douglas, to whom she had become very close. The Twenties were a decade on the move: there were passenger flights between London, Paris and Berlin; the Train Bleu whisked fashionable holiday-makers down to the French Riviera; ever faster, more luxurious liners criss-crossed the Atlantic. Although passports, introduced during the war, remained mandatory, Nancy and her circle regarded themselves as citizens of a newly accessible world.

  As a traveller she also cherished the discovery of little places – the fishing port of Sanary on the Mediterranean coast; the remoter villages of Normandy. She craved the solitude and exhilaration of empty spaces. And there are lines in her early poem ‘Voyages North’ that evoke a very different Nancy from the tormented heroines depicted by Huxley or Arlen – an invigorated, independent Nancy, standing alone ‘on a northern hilltop/shouting at the sun’.

  Nanc
y regarded such moments as a necessary escape from urban life; even so Paris, her adopted city, remained her base for most of the 1920s. It was in early 1924 that she found the perfect apartment, a ground-floor flat on the Ile Saint-Louis. This elegant sliver of old Paris, with its narrow houses shadowed by high trees, was, to Nancy, purely romantic. The view from her window opened out to the river and Notre Dame, and the interior of the apartment, though small, was elegantly proportioned.

  Rue le Regrattier was her first real adult home, a place where she could assemble all her precious belongings – her books, African carvings and a growing art collection that included works by de Chirico, Tanguy and Picabia. She could also entertain, holding regular soirées with the help of her new maid, Anna. Nancy’s guests reflected the interlocking circles in which she now moved. There was the party crowd, centring on Jean Cocteau; the avant-garde artists, revolving around Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and his green-eyed lover Kiki de Montparnasse; there was also her growing number of literary friends, including Pound, Carlos Williams, Kay Boyle and Ernest Hemingway.

  Nancy looked splendid at ‘the Grattery’: thin and animated against the backdrop of her books and paintings; bracelets clacking on her arms as she gestured with her cigarette; dancing to a snatch of jazz playing from her gramophone. And talking, always talking. Brian Howard wrote, ‘She is the only woman I know who can be really impassioned about ideas almost continuously’;30 Carlos Williams equally admired her ‘courteous cultured and fearless mind’.31

  Two of Nancy’s most regular visitors at the flat were an American couple, Janet Flanner and Solita Solano. Both were writers and they became her first close female friends since Iris and Sybil. With Janet and Solita she could talk seriously about books and poetry, but equally she could spend intimate, hilarious evenings talking about sex, food and clothes. Maud was still buying beautiful couture for Nancy, wanting to believe her daughter was dressing well, even if her life was going to bohemian rack and ruin. Often when Janet and Solita arrived at the Grattery to pick Nancy up for an evening in the city, she would spread out her new bounty from Poiret or Vionnet for the three of them to wear – Janet sometimes sporting the addition of Sir Bache’s old top hat. They made a piquant trio: Solita small and precise, with her clear assessing gaze and dark bell of hair; Nancy sharp-boned and blonde; Janet sardonically handsome. Solita recalled that painters were always ‘begging’ to use them as models.

  In 1925, when Janet was hired to become French correspondent for the New Yorker magazine, Nancy and Solita accompanied her as she trawled clubs, parties and gallery openings for copy. By the mid-1920s, every fashionable American wanted to know about Paris, and Janet’s fortnightly letters, written under the pen name of Genet*, were required reading. It was through Janet’s column that Nancy was introduced to Isadora Duncan, still a legend despite the maudlin alcoholism into which her life had unravelled, also the lesbian grande dame, Mercedes de Acosta.

  Janet herself had had a brief affair with de Acosta back in New York; when they met again in Paris in 1926 Mercedes was involved with Tallulah’s first love, Eva Le Gallienne, but also with Alla Nazimova – Gallienne’s original lover and Tallulah’s early stage idol. This international lesbian coterie and its Parisian hub at rue Jacob intrigued Nancy, but she had no desire to become part of it.* Sexually she had little interest in women and she certainly had no intention of complicating her bond with Janet and Solita. She hadn’t learned the trick of successfully combining sex and friendship, and no one else could give her the simple steadiness these two provided. Solita fondly avowed that the three of them were a model of ‘modern female fidelity’; they referred to each other as 1, 2 and 3, signing off letters with the symbol of a three-legged stool.32 And although some of the demands that Nancy made on that fidelity were extreme – she swore she would never forgive Janet and Solita if they allowed themselves to be annexed by Maud – the two women were as close to family as anything in her life.

  * * *

  Rue le Regrattier became Nancy’s settled base, but around her Paris buzzed in what she described as ‘an extraordinary and permanent state of avant gardism’.33 Writers and artists were drawn to the city from all over Europe, America and England; the cafés and bars were noisy with the competing languages of Freudians, Communists, Dadaists and Surrealists. London could not compare. Even though its post-war gloom had lifted by the mid-1920s, Nancy saw nothing like the joyful proliferation of experiment she encountered daily in Paris. The shrieking baby flappers and the exquisite drawling boys who were Britain’s Bright Young Things seemed like bored children to her, indulging in nursery-room naughtiness with their treasure hunts, fancy dress parties and car races.

  Nancy had left all that behind. It was intellectual and political rebellion that interested her now, and in 1924 she found them with her new lover, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara. Slender and dandified – Tzara always sported a monocle – he was the most buoyant of cultural terrorists. On the one hand he passionately avowed the fundamental Dadaist tenet that truth and civilization lay in ruins, yet he enjoyed himself with what, to Nancy, was an irresistible and eclectic vitality.

  In his company she went to the tiny surrealist galleries opening up near the Jardins du Luxembourg, she jazzed at Cocteau’s club, Le Boeuf sur le Toit, and attended one of Etienne de Beaumont’s costume balls – annual bacchanalia for the rich, aristocratic and deviant. She was photographed by Man Ray wearing a silver trouser suit, a mask and her father’s top hat; and with Tzara kneeling to kiss her hand she radiated pleasure and anticipation. She took a dancing role in one of his theatrical events LECMOM 3rd Diens and inspired another (Tzara claimed he’d written Mouchoir des nuages after he’d suffered a sneezing fit, showing off to Nancy by eating an entire pot of mustard).

  ‘Lord how we laughed,’ she wrote. The affair with Tzara was one of the most purely joyous periods of her life.34 Yet however much she delighted in his sweet-natured anarchy, the old restlessness gnawed at her, and by early 1926 Nancy had moved on again – to an affair with Louis Aragon. Aragon was tall, dark and thin, his searching blue eyes set in a finely drawn face, and Nancy thought him one of the most inspiring men she had ever met. The surrealist movement he had founded with André Breton two years earlier combined experimental art, revolutionary politics and Freudian theory in a way that to her made captivating emotional and intellectual sense.

  Freud’s theories of the unconscious were much in vogue now, cited as explanation for the forces of destruction that had been unleashed during the war, as well as for the pleasure-seeking, taboo-breaking culture that had emerged in its wake. Nancy herself had been reading Freud since 1919, searching for clues to her own precarious mental health and to her unresolved antagonism to her mother. Through her new lover, however, she felt she was encountering larger views of psychoanalysis, as Aragon explained how techniques of dream study and automatic writing might unlock the collective unconscious, providing a route to the political transformation of human nature.

  For many months Aragon seemed a man as close to Nancy’s ideal as she had ever met. She was spellbound by his literary facility as he poured out poetry, journalism and theory. ‘He is delicious,’ she admitted to Janet and Solita, ‘in perfect training, always to write at will any place, of any thing.’35 They shared other pleasures, too, hiking in the countryside, travel, jazz and African culture. Some of their happiest times together were trawling through the clubs of Montmartre in search of the most authentic black pianist, or visiting port towns to buy African masks and carvings that sailors had brought back from the West Indies. Even if Aragon, as a good surrealist, lectured Nancy on the superior authenticity of black culture, on the decadence of Europe, he didn’t judge her more frivolous concerns: the African jewellery with which she was now beginning to decorate herself; the Charleston lessons she was taking from the nightclub singer Bricktop.*

  Some of Aragon’s comrades in the surrealist movement, however, were wary of Nancy’s fashionable shimmer. She might have rebell
ed against her class, but the fact that she still lived off her mother’s money, and spent some of it on trivial pleasures, made the most intransigent among them distrust her. Above all, they disapproved of her emotional independence. Despite the surrealists’ theoretical commitment to female emancipation, they expected their women to be faithful helpmeets to the cause. By her own standards, Nancy remained loyal to Aragon – this affair was one of the longest and most intimate of her life – yet by 1927 she had become sexually and emotionally fidgety and was running several other affairs in tandem.

  She knew she was giving in to old destructive habits: ‘He is a very sweet person,’ she wrote to Janet. ‘Were I not myself so irreducibly myself I should be very happy. I am as far as can be.’36 Yet according to the ever-forgiving Raymond Michelet, Nancy was always trying to find some new way to out-run her demons: she ‘forged ahead, fleeing from something, never stopping to consider, never turning back, burning everything behind her, things she had loved, people she might have loved’.37

  Aragon, however, found her infidelities difficult either to understand or forgive, and their relationship would probably have ended by the summer had Nancy not found a new and practical way to channel her energies, which gave them both a reprieve. For some time she’d been thinking of buying a house in the country, a refuge from the nervous intensity of Paris. In 1927 she found it in an old farmhouse, sixty miles north-west of the city. Le Puits Carré, named after the ancient stone well in its front courtyard, was set just outside the village of Chapelle-Réanville in a small hectarage of fields and orchards, surrounded by a tangle of wild flowers. It was a modest building, constructed in classic peasant style, and Nancy did little to change it beyond stripping the walls of her bedroom back to the original stone, painting the walls of the dining room green and moving in favourite pieces of furniture from Nevill Holt, along with books, paintings and her by now enormous collection of ivory bracelets.