by Carla Kaplan
Very little remains of Nancy’s enormous archival record of Negro— her notes and drafts, her correspondence, her editing of the hundreds of contributions, or her accounts. When she returned to Réanville after the war, she found that her farmhouse had been subjected to “monumental pillage” and that everything there was now a shambles.
The collapse of everything save the roof. No doors, no windows, no furniture left. Books, books, books, flung higgle-piggle all over the bathroom floor . . . a sort of mattress of books, thick and deep. . . . Five years of destruction . . . the bath torn away from its fittings . . . two stone heads . . . broken in two. . . . Sticking out of some debris was my father’s first letter, torn out of a family album . . . my lovely blue landscape by Tanguy . . . shot full of bullet holes . . . a bayonet thrust through a part of the portrait Eugene MacCown had done of me in Paris in 1923 . . . traces of beads were left, mere fragments in the passage under the straw . . . of the entire collection of African and other primitive sculpture not one single piece remained, and most of the African ivory bracelets had vanished . . . outside under a tree all mashed and earth-trodden, I found a drawing by Wyndham Lewis.
Fortunately, a very little bit of her voluminous correspondence does survive in the archives of a few contributors, including Arthur Schomburg, Langston Hughes, and Sterling Brown. Nancy’s long correspondence with Claude McKay, the poetic architect of “New Negro” militancy, is especially interesting for what it reveals about the difficulties she faced and the strategies she developed as she put herself forward as black culture’s white ambassador. In his first letter to her, written from Morocco on December 1, 1931, McKay singled Nancy out from other whites in a way that must have been especially gratifying to her. “I feel very excited about your book,” he wrote. “We poor Negroes are literally smothered under the reams of stale, hackneyed, repetitious stuff done by our friends . . . but it is unimaginable that you could be handicapped or allow yourself to be by the social-racial reactions that hamper us sometimes.” No sooner had he paid her that high compliment, however, than he grouped her intended volume under the category of “white literature on blacks,” altogether ignoring that these were the boundaries Nancy expected Negro to smash. That a volume edited by a white woman could have anything other than a white perspective simply did not occur to McKay. That her volume would be anything other than blackness itself, pure and unmediated, would never have occurred to Nancy Cunard.
As it turned out, she and McKay were speaking past each other and failing to communicate on other levels as well. She was very disappointed to find out, a little later on, that McKay expected to be paid for his contribution to the volume. It was so clear to her that Negro could not possibly pay for itself (there wasn’t even enough money to cover its expenses) and that, moreover, it was a labor of love that she was surprised to see the question of remuneration raised. McKay, for his part, was enraged. Some other contributors shared McKay’s view. Sterling Brown expressed his disappointment in just the racial terms that Nancy believed no longer could apply to her: “You’se a rich white lady and I’se jes’ a po’ black boy,” he wrote to her ironically, “so I sho’ would ’preciate it if you’d pay me jes’ a little sumpthin.” Brown’s recent criticisms of Fannie Hurst suggested a parallel between the two women that could have only appalled Nancy.
Negro opens with a poem that cannily, and to insiders only, announces Nancy’s feeling about her role. The poem is Langston Hughes’s well-known “I, Too” and the lines “I, too sing America./I am the darker brother” could have been uttered as easily by Nancy, an answer to her critics through Hughes’s voice. They form another version of her saying, “Maybe I was African one time” and “I speak as if I were a Negro myself.”
Like any anthology, Negro is a mixed bag. William Carlos Williams’s paean to the attractiveness of black maids, for example, is something of an embarrassment, as is Nancy’s attack on Du Bois, whom she calls “bourgeois” and insufficiently militant. But there are many exceptional pieces as well, including some of the best writing Zora Neale Hurston ever did and William Pickens’s chilling essays on lynching, placed up front by Nancy. Unlike other black anthologies of the time, Negro was global, with hundreds of pages on African history and art, and articles from and about blackness in the West Indies, Latin America, Europe, and the Caribbean. Scholars of modernism today struggle to connect avant-garde aesthetic experimentation to African-American realism in the 1920s and ’30s. Cunard’s anthology made a strong case for a reconfigured notion of modernism—transatlantic as well as transracial. She placed contributions from realists such as Theodore Dreiser, Josephine Herbst, Pauli Murray, Michael Gold, and George Schuyler next to works by highly innovative modernists such Louis Zukofsky, Langston Hughes, and Samuel Beckett (who translated eighteen pieces for the volume). Cunard combined history, literature, art history, sociology, literary criticism, and reminiscences with historical documents—including Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation—essays, stories, poems, glossaries, newspaper excerpts, and speeches, as well as works commissioned for the volume (the bulk of its contributions), such as Josephine Cogdell Schuyler’s essay on race in America, “America’s Changing Color Line.” She divided the volume into sections on countries, “Negro stars,” music, poetry, sculpture, and ethnology, and, extending the “Poet’s Page” practice of publishing whites writing about blackness, she devoted a section to “Poetry by Whites on Negro Themes,” in which she participated.
There were disappointingly few reviews, but Negro garnered Nancy Cunard long-awaited accolades from blacks, many of whom told her that she was unlike any other white woman they’d ever known. Alain Locke, already established as the leading anthologist of the Harlem Renaissance, told her that Negro was “the finest anthology in every sense of the word ever compiled on the Negro.” He said, “almost enviously,” that she had surpassed him. “All of us are grateful. . . . You will have endless vindications in the years to come.” She saved those letters of praise (as well as the hate mail she’d once received) and kept them with her until her death. The large binder that holds them begins with a letter from Henry Crowder, to whom the volume itself was dedicated:
What a spectacle of tireless energy. What devotion to your task. . . . Nothing short of the greatest love for the poor oppressed blacks could have prompted you to tackle and go through with the book in the manner that you have. . . . You have had splendid vision, and you have created the masterpiece with marvelous technical skill.—The gratitude of the Negro race is yours. . . . Nancy you have done well. You have made the name Cunard stand for more than ships. . . . Your deep sympathy for the Negro breathes through the pages.
Josephine Cogdell Schuyler loved the book. “My dear, it is so beautiful, it is absolutely the prettiest, handsomest, most provocative book I’ve ever seen. . . . I think you have done a brave, courageous and splendid thing!” She had been reading it through from cover to cover until her husband, George, had come home, she told Nancy, and had snatched it out of her hands. She couldn’t wait to get it back. Her friend Taylor Gordon confessed that “a lot of [black] people thought you were just here on a BALL” but that Negro had proved them wrong. Arthur Schomburg echoed Gordon, saying that Nancy had “made good” and “come through the rye with flying colors.” She had gone, he wrote, from being a “transient tourist” of black culture to the rare white person who can correct other whites: “merciless in her castigation of those white types who have not changed in their visions and perspective of life.”
Such praise had not come easily. And in spite of what an extraordinary achievement it was, Nancy Cunard never rested on the success of Negro. The day it appeared, she was not celebrating; she was continuing her commitment to the oppressed by donning a man’s coat, aviator’s helmet, and scarves to march with London’s hunger strikers.
“Reputations Are Simply Hell”
Reputations are simply hell and there’s nothing—or little enough—to be done about changing them.
—
Nancy Cunard
By the time she died in 1965, Nancy Cunard bore little resemblance to the mythic flapper she’d been in her youth. She was frail, cantankerous, in terrible pain, and nearly destitute. At the very end, desperately ill, she dodged doctors and friends and collapsed alone in the street.
She never succeeded in erasing the taint of sexual lunacy from her embrace of black politics and culture. Almost every aspect of her life has been pathologized and chalked up to selfishness, neurosis, attention grabbing, or worse. Her racial politics come in for even more condemnation now than they did in her own day, when her dedication—if nothing else—won her respect.
Women, interestingly enough, have been particularly hard on Nancy Cunard. Susan Gubar, for example, pronounced her a “self-loathing . . . vamp who used her social status” and her wealth for the “appropriation of a culture very much not her own.” Ann Douglas dismisses Nancy’s political life by collapsing it into the blows “she struck at her mother.” Lois Gordon considers Nancy’s lifelong “identification with those who were unempowered or unjustly punished” as a response to being “whacked on her hands” when she was a child. Even Anne Chisholm, whose view of Nancy is generally quite balanced, fails to challenge the perception that she was an “erotic boa constrictor.”
It did not help matters much that she ultimately did go insane, meeting a premature death as a raving alcoholic in a public hospital ward. For some observers, her death proved that she had been crazy to do what she did and that everything she had attempted was doomed.
But in between her escape from Nevill Holt and her death, Nancy Cunard neither wasted away nor raved. In fact, she had a long and distinguished career as a journalist, the only white woman to be a full-time reporter for the Associated Negro Press, the black community’s answer to the segregated Associated Press. She traveled to Moscow. She was in the Spanish Civil War, driving an ambulance and writing dispatches. She wrote books about British sophisticate and writer Norman Douglas and about George Moore; an epic antiwar poem that she was still working on at her death; unfinished books on African ivories; and a large work—seemingly never published—on the slave trade that was to begin with the slave raids in Africa by the British in 1767 and continue through “some matters of the contemporary scene” in America and that she was hoping would be made into a movie. The direction she’d found in the 1920s and ’30s remained the course she steered until her death.
Janet Flanner believed that Nancy had “the best mind of any Anglo-Saxon woman in Europe.” Yet she is known principally for her affairs and outrageous behavior. One wonders why so little of that other life is known, why she was so famous for some things and unknown for others. Did she have to come to such a sad end? Could things have been different for her? What if the community she chose had been free to fully welcome her? It is impossible to say. Perhaps she would have eventually imploded regardless of the place she found for herself in the world, destroyed by either her own intensity or her alcoholism or both. “She had to extract from each moment all there was to have,” Raymond Michelet remembered. “Nancy burned like a flame.”
Clearly Nancy Cunard was too contradictory to live a normal, contented life. William Carlos Williams remembered her as a woman of “passionate inconstancy.” “Baffling contradictions,” another friend said. Michael Arlen, one of Nancy’s closest friends, who devoted his novel The Green Hat to trying to pin down Nancy’s character, described her, finally, as outside all categories: “some invention, ghastly or not, of her own. . . . She didn’t fit in anywhere. . . . You felt she had outlawed herself. . . . You felt she was tremendously indifferent to whether she was outlawed or not.” There was nowhere she really belonged. She was a modernist who walked away from modernism. She could have been a New Woman but, like Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, found Village bohemia altogether too tame. The 1920s bored her. She wanted to be part of black culture, but black people did not always want her.
Nancy Cunard was a play of contrasts that might have been considered noble in a man but were unacceptable in a woman. She was, for example, extravagant and austere, passionate but unromantic, mercurial but steadfast (even dogged), grim and witty, loyal and unforgiving, unconventional but fastidious, politically committed but an anarchist, and an icon of the 1920s who thought the 1920s were a waste. Nancy was happy as a celebrity but believed she could escape caricature. She was a pioneer of what we now call the “free play of identity,” but it is precisely that free play for which she is most often caricatured today.
Nancy embodied contradictions. But it was fundamental to her character to be always doing, doing, doing, trying to hurl herself past conflicts and contradictions in a frenzy of activity. Sometimes, in her haste, she made the complexity she refused to acknowledge that much more apparent. Then she was at her most discomforting to others. Convinced that she could shed her background as an act of solidarity and will, she made colossal missteps. Once a young black man tried to pay Nancy for a “small kindness” and she replied, “I am your mother. There is no payment due.” In such moments she was both the villain and the victim of her own story.
Epilogue: “Love and Consequences”
Being black for a while will make me a better white.
—Janis Joplin
You never dream of asking a woman ‘what sort of woman are you?’ so long as she keeps to the laws made by men,” a literary character modeled on Nancy Cunard points out. Miss Anne found out the truth of that quickly. Refusing to follow the rules, she risked her womanhood, discovering that society proffers or withholds it at will. But Miss Anne could not help it; she led with her passions. She was committed to fair play. But she was also self-interested. Her rule breaking was designed, in part, to help her fashion a more exciting life. This makes her a messy role model for the act of identifying with others.
Miss Anne did not have role models. No one was doing the things she tried to do. Even today, her combination of qualities is frowned upon. Women who are politically impassioned—Emma Goldman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton—are lightning rods for criticism and are caricatured as masculine and unnatural. It is still considered unseemly, evidently, for a woman to take too much pleasure in her politics. And the pleasure of identifying with others has always been suspect.
Miss Anne’s pleasures and politics raised hard questions: When does empathy become appropriation? Is speaking for others unethical? Is it possible? What is the line between sacrificing for others and exercising one’s own privilege and social mobility? When is imitation flattery, and when is it theft? Failing to conform to any of the social scripts of gender, race, or class, she raised those questions in especially awkward and uncomfortable ways. To some, that just made her “crazy.”
A few years ago, I was invited to give a talk at the New York Public Library on the women in this book. It was an early spring day, and the audience was filled with historians, biographers, archivists, novelists, poets, and literary critics. The lecture hall was marble and oak, lit by massive wrought-iron chandeliers, and I remember thinking that this was the architecture of clarity and knowledge, of answers and certainty. My talk that day focused on Nancy Cunard. A little nervously—since the audience was unusually august and the room was austere—I described Nancy Cunard’s involvement with Scottsboro, her writings, her ideas about race. I talked about how difficult it was to come to terms with someone who had tried so hard to make a contribution but had been so vexing in many of her assumptions and behaviors, her postures and personae. How do we judge, I asked, someone who in spite of the “penalty she had to pay for her interest in the Negro” remains, for so many, a “modern white aristocrat”? What can we make of someone who saw herself as a champion of black people even as she used them to her own advantage?
At the end of my talk, an eminent historian and senior colleague rose. He squared his black oxfords on the dark oak floor, swayed for a moment in his gray suit, and then shouted—shouted—at me, “I knew Nancy Cunard, and she was crazy, I tell you!” He turned slig
htly purple. “She was crazy! I knew her, I tell you, and she was crazy!”
It took me a few days to calm down enough to do the math. It was not impossible that my eminent historian had met Nancy Cunard. But given her death in 1965 and his age, he could not have been more than six years old when she died. In the weeks that followed, I wondered if I should be writing about Nancy Cunard at all if she could still deprive eminent historians of their manners and good sense. But perhaps that is exactly the point. If Nancy Cunard, with all of her flaws and failures, can still be a source of agitation and outrage, then surely—given the ramifications of what she was after—she merits a second look.