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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 order this book
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, illhealth 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.
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