She had tried so hard to hold her family together when she was little – foraging for toys to give her brother and sisters, dancing for them in the cellar of Gratiot Street – but she had lost that capacity for simple love, and she’d been treated as a star for too many years to settle for the compromises of domestic life. It was symptomatic that her final, sixth ‘marriage’* was both brief and symbolic; she and her ‘husband’, a playboy artist called Robert Brady, conducted most of their relationship by letter.
Yet if Josephine’s experiment in family life was chaotic, her true family had long been her public. There were moments when she flirted with the idea of retiring, when she felt herself teetering on the edge of absurdity and irrelevance, but her fans had always kept faith with her. The funeral that was staged in Paris was the climax of the long and loving relationship she’d formed with the city since 1925, and over the following decades the splendour of that event became part of the legend that accumulated around her. Not even Josephine could have anticipated the resonance her story has subsequently acquired. A black ghetto girl who clawed her way to stardom; a free spirit and political activist; a chorus dancer who became more famous than Pavlova – she’s been claimed as a role model by generations who never even witnessed her performances onstage.
* * *
Josephine’s public life reached its apotheosis with one of the most elaborate funerals in living memory, but the political crusades to which Nancy Cunard dedicated herself led only towards her progressive isolation. When she collapsed in Paris in March 1965, Nancy was spectrally thin, delirious and alone and the small funeral service that was held for her at the British Embassy Church was reported by the Evening Standard to have been a ‘sad, and lonely farewell to a toast of the Twenties’.5
In truth, Nancy had long since put the Twenties behind her. As she worked on the Negro anthology in the early 1930s, she was already turning her back on the frivolity of the previous decade – consumed instead by the feelings of righteous fury and disgust that had been roused by the black cause. Yet despite disassociating herself from her old friends and acquaintances she wasn’t settling into an alternative niche in political circles. Her views were simply too maverick. Just as the contents of Negro were perceived as confusingly eclectic in their spread of cultural and political history,* so Nancy was regarded as an ideological loose cannon. Her growing support for Communism was problematic for American blacks, her sexual morality even more so. Nancy refused to defer to local sensibilities when she was travelling in the States and refused to restrict her interest in black men; like Josephine she was unable to acknowledge the delicate, pragmatic circumstances within which civil rights activists had to operate. She saw only her own blazing vision of right and wrong.
It was the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War that provided Nancy with a mission even more consuming than the civil rights cause. During the writing and research of Negro she had forged links with the Associated Negro Press, and in 1935 was commissioned by them to report on talks held by the League of Nations after Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. Reporting suited her, channelling both her literary and political passions, and the following year the ANP sent her to Barcelona as their official war correspondent in Spain.
The train journey to Barcelona in the autumn of 1936 marked a dividing line in Nancy’s life – before Spain and after Spain. She fell in love with the country and even more with its people who, aside from Franco’s forces, came to represent for her the world’s struggle for freedom. During the two and a half years in which she reported on the Civil War she also had the exhilarating experience of feeling she was part of a unified movement. People like herself – writers, artists, journalists and idealists – were converging on Spain from all over Europe and America. Nancy was continually bumping into old acquaintances, such as Hemingway, and forging new and intense bonds with fellow travellers like the poet Pablo Neruda. All of them shared her belief that the battle against Franco would determine the course of the free world; and even though Nancy was frequently harrowed by what she saw – the hungry, wounded and dispossessed, the shattered towns and cities – she had rarely felt more purposeful and fulfilled.
Still she needed to do more. It was unbearable to her that anyone should remain unaffected or untroubled by the situation in Spain, and in 1937 she distributed a questionnaire among two hundred or so writers, demanding that they state their position on the Republican cause. Nearly one hundred and fifty complied, and the results were published in the New Left Review, under the title ‘Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War’. Most supported the Republicans, but there was an inflammatory tone to the questionnaire that inevitably prompted a number of inflammatory replies. George Orwell’s (unpublished) view was that the whole project was ‘bloody rubbish’ and the product of ignorant dilettantes. In his response he wrote, ‘I was six months in Spain, most of the time fighting, I have a bullet hole in me at present and I am not going to write blah about defending democracy or gallant little anybody.’
Orwell had been dismayed by the factionalism that was undermining the unity of Republican forces, and rightly considered the black-and-white politics of the questionnaire to be naive. However, he was unjust in condemning it as ignorant. While Nancy was in Spain she was often first among those who went to the most dangerous and beleaguered places; she accepted cold, hunger and sleep deprivation as a matter of course. Even when the Republican army was routed, she stayed on to witness the suffering of the half a million refugees who fled Franco’s army and were herded into temporary camps on the French border. Writing for the Manchester Guardian as well as for the ANP, Nancy’s impassioned reporting helped to spark a relief campaign that brought in crucial donations of food, money and clothes.
Knowing she had done something, however small, to mitigate the sub-human conditions of these camps brought Nancy an unusually solid sense of achievement. But Franco’s triumph was a personal agony to her. After Spain, Nancy went to recuperate with friends in South America, and when the Allies went to war against Germany she initially had neither the energy nor the courage to confront this new fight against fascism.
It wasn’t until 1941 that she finally returned to Europe and with much apprehension settled in London. Nancy had long felt an entrenched wariness towards her home city, and her antagonism towards Maud and the British establishment had precluded her from staying there for more than a few months at a time. The war, however, left her with no option, and despite the bombing and rationing, she was oddly at peace during the three and a half years that she lived there. For the first, and only, time in her adult life she found herself emotionally and politically in tune with the rest of the population. She was focused on useful work, mostly translating for the Free French forces, but also finding the time to write poetry and edit a volume of poems in celebration of her beloved, desecrated France.
The end of the war was, in some ways, a wrench, as Nancy was forced to reconsider her circumstances. Where should she settle? What should she do? The house in Réanville was out of the question. Returning to assess the state of it after the war, she was traumatized to discover that all her precious books and artworks had been looted or desecrated. Worst of all, some of the most viscious acts of vandalism had been committed not by the enemy, but by her French neighbours.
Nancy couldn’t bear to stay, and instead travelled south, finding a small and very basic new home in a rural hamlet, Lamothe Fénélon. She was far from wealthy, but she was still independent, and for the next two decades she fell into a pattern of summering in France, then escaping the winter cold by travelling and visiting friends.
It was a life that allowed her to remain free, but it was often lonely. No new political activity had replaced the camaraderie she had found in Spain, and while she raged against Franco’s continuing dictatorship, and against the world’s continuing abuse of blacks, she lacked both the financial resources and the personal contacts that would have allowed her to embark on any concrete plan of action. She was not a natural joiner of
formal groups or political parties, and just as she became more politically marginalized, so she grew more isolated in her personal life.
Nancy never lacked for company. She remained a charismatic presence – witty, informed, surprising to talk to and still astonishingly stylish. Aspects of her appearance might look eccentric in the 1950s – her armloads of bangles and flamboyant scarves – but her beauty was even sharper in middle age, and some men still found her mesmerizing. During her fifties she continued to find new friends – and lovers – wherever she travelled. Yet she was able to depend less on her older friends, as age, illness or geography unravelled the close communities she’d known in Paris and, at times, in London. When she and Iris Tree accidentally met in Rome, they both winced at the realization that it was twenty years since they had last seen each other. Iris, however, was far more shocked at the changes she saw in Nancy. She wrote to Diana that she feared their friend was living a life that was ‘somehow malevolent, bereft of surrounding sympathy or love’.6 Certainly the rift between Nancy and her mother had never healed. During the war, as Lady Cunard was driving through London she had caught sight of Nancy walking along the pavement but hadn’t stopped the car. By 1948 it was too late. Diana contacted Nancy to tell her that her mother was dying and begged her to attempt a last reconciliation, but Lady Cunard had not asked for Nancy, and Nancy did not want to make any gesture of appeasement.* The only family she saw were her cousins Victor and Edward. Her unofficial father, George Moore, had died long before the war, in 1933.
Nancy wrote a loving memoir of Moore, which, along with the book she wrote about her old friend Norman Douglas, was one of her finest pieces of post-war work. She still wrote much of the time, never abandoning her poetry, even though she had given up expecting any acclaim for it. However, the one book that publishers and readers most desired, her autobiography, was one she felt unable to write. She wanted no part in reiterating old gossip about Paris and the 1920s, believing that there was something morally repugnant in writing about any of her close friends who were still alive. It would be a betrayal of their intimacy.
Nevertheless, Nancy was perfectly capable of undermining friendships by other means. Iris was right to observe that she wasn’t living well in the Fifties, drinking too much, eating too little and obsessing over the political wrongs of the world. Strangers might fall under Nancy’s spell, but to friends she could be taxing company. Even those who loved her best were nervous of inviting her to stay for extended periods, knowing that they would have to deal with the volatility of her alcohol-drenched mood swings and her inevitable, exhaustive grilling of their views on Spain.
That country still consumed her, and she visited it as regularly as she could. Yet captivated as she was by the people, the landscape and the culture, she could not give up her personal crusade against its fascist rulers, and anxious friends began to observe the corrosive effect this was having on Nancy’s mental health. During the late 1950s her behaviour grew more aggressive; she insulted the Spanish police, picked political fights with complete strangers and made reckless public statements calling for the release of political prisoners. During one visit in 1960, her actions were so provocative that she was arrested and thrown out of the country.
In the old days Nancy would have been exhilarated by such a stand-off; now it acted as a destructive catalyst. As she travelled back to London, her always precarious mental state was disintegrating, and by the time she arrived she was emotionally fractured and deeply paranoid. Friends who tried to calm her down were accused of being fascist spies: unable to rest quietly she roamed the streets, insulting policemen and making outrageous sexual approaches to strangers. When she ended up in jail, it was evident to the doctor who was called to examine her that she was in desperate need of psychiatric treatment.
Nancy spent the summer incarcerated in the Holloway Sanatorium, a few miles outside London. The combination of rest, sedatives and proper nutrition stabilized her condition, but it left her pitifully bereft. In July she wrote to Janet Flanner, mourning how little her life seemed to have amounted to: she was proud of Negro, she said, and of her reporting in Spain, yet she had failed to find love and she had failed as a poet.
When she was released in September, it was with a regime of anti-depressants and strict orders to avoid alcohol. But while she regained her old responsive alertness, Nancy’s physical health was now failing, and in 1963 she was diagnosed with emphysema. She had always depended on being fit, with a body that was responsive, light and free. As Michelet had observed, she needed to be able to outrun her demons. This new experience of being short of breath and unsteady on her feet was intolerable to her; and numbing her frustration with more and more alcohol, inevitably she took a bad fall in early 1965, when she tripped and broke her thigh. After being told by her doctors that she couldn’t move for three months, she had to allow herself to be taken care of by an old friend, the French painter Jean Guérin.
Guérin’s Riviera villa was delightful and he was a tender host, but Nancy was beyond taking any pleasure in either. Even before the fall she had been worrying about her independence: the capital she had inherited was fast diminishing and living costs were rising.* Now with her broken thigh she was terrified that she might never be able to travel again or to live on her own. And as she fecklessly mixed her prescribed drugs with consoling doses of alcohol, that fear pitched Nancy back towards madness.
She became impossible to care for, disobeying her doctors, refusing to eat and being vilely rude to those around her. After she had thrown one particularly distressing scene, Guérin suggested that she leave and Nancy, somehow impelled by the force of her own rage, managed to drag herself and her few belongings onto a train. She ended up on the doorstep of Solita Solano, who was living just outside Paris, but by this point she was raving and urgently in need of medical care. Solita had no room to accommodate her properly, and the next day arranged for her to go and stay with Janet Flanner in the centre of the city.
Nancy never arrived. For some reason she was determined to seek refuge with Raymond Michelet, even though his tiny apartment had even less room than Solita’s little house. Michelet was shocked by Nancy’s ravaged state, and with the help of Georges Sadoul (their mutual friend from the surrealist days), he begged Nancy to let him book her into a hotel where she could be properly examined by a doctor.
Sadoul doubted, however, that a doctor could do anything to help. Nancy seemed lost to them: ‘Her mind was cracked, her beautiful intelligence had clouded over and she hardly knew what to do but insult her best friends, present and absent.’7 She trusted no one, and that night worked herself up to the conviction that the doctor summoned by Michelet was part of a fascist conspiracy against her. On the morning of 12 March she set fire to the few papers she had with her and tried to make her escape. The taxi driver she hailed outside the hotel took one look at her dishevelled clothing, trembling limbs and wild expression and drove her to the nearest police station.
Two days later, in the ward of a public hospital, Nancy died. It was a small and pitiful death, and to those who had known her, a tragic one. Yet even in those desperate straits she remained oddly true to her nature. Throughout her life she had followed the compass of her own convictions; and even though her mind and body had been battered to a point where she was barely recognizable, she had refused to conform to what others had wanted for her; the terms on which she died had somehow remained her own.
* * *
For Zelda Fitzgerald, all hope of freedom seemed to be stolen from her with the onset of her first breakdown in 1930. Confined in the Prangins clinic in Switzerland, she was not only suffering the mental anguish of hallucinations and depression, but was also tormented by the eczema, which now flared across her face, shoulders and neck. During the periods when she was well enough to write, she sent long letters to Scott, trying to understand how she had arrived at such a pass, begging for his help as she tried to ‘unravel this infinite psychological mess’.
She wav
ered between guilt and rage, sometimes berating herself for her ‘hideous dependency’ on Scott, sometimes railing against his drinking and self-absorption. He, in turn, was as gentle with her as he knew how: ‘I love you with all my heart,’ he wrote in one undated letter, ‘because you are my own girl and this is all I Know.’8 Yet because he was wretched – and exhausted – he could not prevent himself retaliating, writing letters in which he angrily itemized all of Zelda’s crimes and derelictions. For more than a year, the two of them were in hell, stumbling and quarrelling through the wreckage of their past.
In the autumn of 1931, Zelda was well enough for them to sail back to America and, for a while, to live at home in Montgomery while Scott worked. But early in 1932 the shock of her father’s death precipitated another breakdown, and she was admitted to the Phipps clinic in Baltimore. It would, however, prove a very different experience from her time at Prangins, for it coincided with an intense period of creativity. Even though the doctors at Phipps found Zelda silent and withdrawn, inside her head she was flying, working for hours every day on her autobiographical first novel Save Me the Waltz.
Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation Page 44