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| From shipping lines to lines
of pure poetry |
Nancy Cunard’s poems remain passionate
odes to the causes the bohemian heiress fought for, writes Martin
Green
Poems of Nancy Cunard Edited by John Lucas
Trent Edition, £8.99
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A portrait of Nancy by John Banting in the 1930s
Jazz musician Henry Crowder
Nancy with Louis Aragon in the 1930s
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THE poetry of Nancy Cunard is principally of interest because
of who she was and the life she lived. An heiress of the Cunard
shipping family, she was introduced to the literary and bohemian
world of London in the 1920s, meeting such figures as Wyndham
Lewis and Ezra Pound.
Being slim, gorgeous and rich, many men fell in love with her.
Though she never had a relationship that lasted more than a couple
of years she did have a brief marriage to a wealthy young man.
Of her publications, the two best remembered were Negro: An Anthology,
a collection of poems by black American poets, and her edited
edition of Authors Take Sides on the Spanish Civil War which she
collected with the communist poet Randall Swingler, both of which
reflect the two causes she was interested to promote, that of
the black descendants of slaves and the socialist Republican cause
in the Spanish Civil War.
Nancy Cunard spent some time in Paris, where she had an affair
with the French writer Louis Aragon, later buying a house in Normandy,
where she and Aragon bought a printing press and published work
by Richard Aldington, Roy Campbell, Robert Graves, George Moore,
Ezra Pound, Laura Riding and the young Samuel Beckett. Later she
had an affair with black jazz musician Henry Crowder.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out she went to Spain, where
she met Pablo Neruda, which was the inspiration for her anthology
Authors Take Sides on the Spanish Civil War and which inspired
most of the poems in this collection.
Following Franco’s victory over the Republic, she went to
Chile, Mexico and the West Indies. After World War II she returned
to France and found that her house in Normandy had been wrecked
and plundered and her press broken up.
Thereafter, she went into alarming decline, erratic behaviour,
ill-health and delirium, on one occasion being imprisoned in Holloway
and briefly being certified as insane. She finally died alone
and paranoid in 1965.
Her poems read like a diary of her life and passionate commitment
of the causes she took up. Her earliest, Prayer, written when
she was 18, challenges the religious belief she was brought up
in: “Make me symbolically iconoclast/The ideal Antichrist,
The Paradox”; her second, Adolescence, written after the
outbreak of World War I, leaves her “Scanning the crossroads
of a violent world”. From then on we have poems about the
delight of France and the Mediterranean and poems about love,
one mentioning her lover Louis Aragon.
Back in England we have a poem addressed to the National Hunger
Marchers who walked from Glasgow to London in 1934. After the
outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, there are a number
of poems written in Madrid and Barcelona, concluding with “The
Exodus from Catalonia…1939” when the retreating Catalans
fled into France where they were interned.
Following the outbreak of World War II, we find her in the West
Indies, with her ‘Psalm for Trinidad’ and other poems
addressed to Trinidadian poets. The series is concluded by the
long poem “Man Ship Tank Gun Plane”, the final lines
of which are:
“The landscape no longer khakhied, the man
On the rick with a hayfork,
The tank led out with the horse to furrow –
Piers Plowman at peace”.
Trent Editions have done our socialist literary heritage a service
by publishing this collection. Earlier on they published the poems
of Randall Swingler, the Communist poet who collaborated with
her on the anthology Authors Take Sides on the Spanish Civil War.
• Martin Green is a poet and playwright |
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