"NANCY CUNARD"

A BIOGRAPHY

Nancy Clara Cunard (10 March 1896 – 17 March 1965) was a British writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class, and devoted much of her life to fighting racism and fascism. She became a muse to some of the 20th century's most distinguished writers and artists, including Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Tristan Tzara, Ezra Pound and Louis Aragon—who were among her lovers—as well as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Constantin Brâncuși, Langston Hughes, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams. MI5 documents reveal that she was involved with Indian socialist leader V. K. Krishna Menon. Nancy Cunard moved to Paris in 1920. There, she became involved with literary Modernism, Surrealists and Dada. Much of her published poetry dates from this period. During her early years in Paris, she was close to Michael Arlen.

A brief relationship with Aldous Huxley influenced several of his novels. She was the model for Myra Viveash in Antic Hay (1923) and for Lucy Tantamount in Point Counter Point (1928).

In 1928, the year she founded her publishing company, Hours Press, she met Henry Crowder, with whom she lived until 1933In 1927, Cunard moved into a farmhouse in La Chapelle-Réanville, Normandy. It was there in 1928 that she set up the Hours Press. Previously the small press had been called Three Mountains Press and run by William Bird, an American journalist in Paris, who had published books by its editor from 1923, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams' The Great American Novel, Robert McAlmond and Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time. Cunard wanted to support experimental poetry and provide a higher-paying market for young writers. Her inherited wealth allowed her to take financial risks that other publishers could not. The Hours Press became known for its beautiful book designs and high-quality production.

It brought out the first separately published work of Samuel Beckett, a poem called Whoroscope (1930); Bob Brown's Words; and Pound's A Draft of XXX Cantos. Cunard published old friends such as George Moore, Norman Douglas, Richard Aldington and Arthur Symons, and brought out Henry-Music, a book of poems from various authors with music by Henry Crowder, two books by Laura Riding, the Collected Poems of John Rodker, poems by Roy Campbell, Harold Acton, Brian Howard and Walter Lowenfels. Wyn Henderson had taken over day-to-day operation of the press by 1931; in the same year it published its last book, The Revaluation of Obscenity by sexologist Havelock Ellis.

In 1928 (after a two-year affair with Louis Aragon) Cunard began a relationship with Henry Crowder, an African-American jazz musician who was working in Paris. She became an activist in matters concerning racial politics and civil rights in the USA, and visited Harlem. In 1931, she published the pamphlet Black Man and White Ladyship, an attack on racist attitudes as exemplified by Cunard's mother, whom she quoted as saying: "Is it true that my daughter knows a Negro?"

She edited the massive Negro Anthology, collecting poetry, fiction, and nonfiction primarily by African-American writers, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. It included writing by George Padmore and Cunard's own account of the Scottsboro Boys case. Press attention to this project in May 1932, two years before it was published, led to Cunard's receiving anonymous threats and hate mail, some of which she published in the book

She identified as an anarchist

In the mid-1930s Cunard took up the anti-fascist fight, writing about Mussolini's annexation of Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War. She predicted, accurately, that the "events in Spain were a prelude to another world war". Her stories about the suffering of Spanish refugees became the basis for a fundraising appeal in the Manchester Guardian. Cunard herself helped deliver supplies and organize the relief effort, but poor health – caused in part by exhaustion and the conditions in the camps – forced her to return to Paris, where she stood on the streets collecting funds for the refugees.

In 1937 she published a series of pamphlets of war poetry, including the work of W. H. Auden, Tristan Tzara and Pablo Neruda. Later in 1937, together with Auden and Stephen Spender, she distributed a questionnaire about the war to writers in Europe. The results were published by the Left Review as Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War

(WIKIPEDIA)

THE WRITER:

ANNE CHISHOLM

Anne Chisholm is a biographer and critic who has also worked in journalism and publishing. Her first biography, Nancy Cunard (1979), won the Silver PEN prize for non-fiction; in 1992 the biography of Lord Beaverbrook she wrote jointly with her husband, Michael Davie, was runner up for the Hawthornden prize. In 1998 she wrote the life of the writer Rumer Godden.  Frances Partridge: The Biography was published in 2009.

As a journalist, her first job was on Private Eye; subsequently she was on the staff of Time Magazine in New York and of the Observer. At present, she reviews regularly for the Sunday Telegraph. She has worked as a reader and occasional editor for Jonathan Cape and Bloomsbury, and has been a judge for the Booker Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize for non-fiction and for the V.S. Pritchett short story prize.

(www.rcwlitagency.com)

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ILLUSTRATED WITH SOME NICE (HISTORIC) PHOTO'S IN BLACK-AND-WHITE

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THE PUBLISHER:

PENGUIN BOOKS

1981

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SIZED:

CENTIMETERS: 13 X 19,5

PAGES: 480

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CONDITION

GENERAL:

REASONABLE TO GOOD, SOME SMALL WRITING IN PENCIL ON FIRST PAGE

COVER:

BIT RUBBED, DIRTY AND DISCOLOURED, SOME LIGHTLY CRACKED BENDS AND SMALL DAMAGE ON EDGES

SPINE:

IDEM

PAGES: 

LITTLE DISCOLOURED, HARDLY TO NO SIGNS OF USAGE

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