Nancy Cunard - Infinite Women

This bio has been republished from Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. See below for full attribution.

Born: 10 March 1896, United Kingdom
Died: 16 March 1965
Country most active: France
Also known as: NA

English heiress to the Cunard Steamship Company, Nancy Clara Cunard was born in the English midlands. The only child of American Maud Alice Burke and Sir Bache Cunard, she grew up a detached and solitary child. In 1916 Nancy met and married the handsome Sydney Fairbairn, army officer and amateur cricketer, when he returned home to England after being wounded at the battle of Gallipoli (Chisholm). Despite what was supposed to be a sobering marriage, her life in wartime London was characterized by debauchery. Her first affair and great love, Peter Broughton-Adderley, was killed in battle, after which she asked Sydney for a divorce.
Drawn to Paris by the freedom to work it offered women, Cunard moved there in early 1920 and ran with the Left Bank literati for most of the decade. A striking beauty with her mother’s features and father’s willowy limbs, Cunard sported the flapper fashions of the shingle bob, crimson lips, and short skirts accented with her own signature touches of African-inspired turbans, scarves, bangles, earrings, and kohl-lined eyes. Always entangled in multiple unstable affairs, she was notably involved with Dadaist Tristan Tzara in 1924 and Surrealist Louis Aragon in 1926.
Encouraged by her intellectual role model and her mother’s one-time lover the Irish writer George Moore, Cunard began writing poetry and published her first collection, Outlaws, in April 1921. When her third, most experimental book, Parallax (1925), was criticized as derivative of Eliot, she decided to try her at publishing instead, and in 1928 she founded the avant-garde Hours Press, which most famously published Samuel Beckett’s poem “Whoroscope” (1930).
Cunard’s relationship from 1928 to 1935 with black American jazz pianist Henry Crowder, supposedly the one man who never bored her, initiated her into the Civil Rights movement. In 1931 before she shuttered her press, she published the pamphlet Black Man and White Ladyship, to address racist attitudes in society, including those of her mother. She then began her crowning literary achievement, an integrated art and history anthology Negro (1934). It is a massive volume of 150 contributors, including Zora Neale Hurston, Williams Carlos Williams, and Langston Hughes among other prominent authors. Contributions to this anthology include representations from the genres of poetry, prose, translations, and music of the 20th-century. This anthology was mostly neglected in Cunard’s own time but has since become a cult classic and considered a source for serious scholars of the Harlem Renaissance and the modernist period. Having probably met at one of Natalie Clifford Barney’s salons in Paris, Cunard and Mina Loy mingled among the literati (Barney). Cunard later became Mina Loy’s muse in her poem entitled “Nancy Cunard,” which mentions George Moore by name and highlights Cunard’s “lone fragility/ of mythological queens” (lines 13-14), and praises her storied beauty (Lost Lunar Baedeker). From racial activism, Cunard moved onto the cause of the Spanish Civil War, and in 1936 the Associated Negro Press sent her to Barcelona as a war correspondent (Mackrell). After Franco’s triumph in 1939 she spent two years in South America, returning to London in 1941 to translate for the Free French forces.
After World War II Cunard relocated to the South of France, and for the next two decades summered in France and traveled the rest of the year. During these years, Cunard was arrested in both Spain and London for disorderly conduct and spent the summer in a sanatorium (Ford). Under the influence of alcohol and antidepressants she spiraled into paranoia. In 1965 she died, alone, penniless, and weighing only 57 pounds, in the public Hôpital Cochin, Paris.