A kind of heroine

Biography is one of the most popular genres for readers and book buyers. Most libraries have well-stocked and well-used shelves of life stories about all sorts and varieties of people. Isn't it a great escape to peer into the lives of others, to see what they have done, how they have lived and been shaped by their families, their relationships and the times they have lived through?

I recently picked up a copy of the life of Nancy Cunard (1896-1965). Published in 1979, the biography is entitled simply 'Nancy Cunard' and the author is Anne Chisholm. It is a clearly written work, enhanced by a number of photographs, that tells the story of one woman's remarkable life.

Nancy's great-grandfather on her father's side was Samuel Cunard, founder of the Cunard line of steamships, who was created a baronet by Queen Victoria. Her mother, the famous society hostess and patron of the arts, Lady Emerald Cunard, was from a wealthy Californian family. Thus Nancy, an only child, was born into wealth and its attendant privileges, especially the entry it gave her to a world of fashion, travel and the arts.

These interests dominated Nancy's life. She took to them with a passion in the context of troubled times - World War 1, the 'roaring twenties', the 1930's 'Great Depression', the rise of communism and fascism, the Spanish Civil War and World War 2. She turned out a rebellious, independent woman whose way of life often scandalised both her contemporaries and her elders, including her mother. When Nancy lived and traveled openly with her black lover in the early 1930s, it opened up a split with her mother that was never healed. Mother and daughter were never to speak or meet again. Lady Cunard died in 1948.

While Nancy was briefly married during the First World War, she could not conform to the limitations that marriage threatened to impose on her freedom to love, travel and express herself as she pleased. She was a complex person whose personality and interplay of her many relationships are explored in the biography. Late in her life, after a period of disturbing behaviour, she was certified insane and kept for some time in a mental hospital. Alcohol played a big part in her troubles at this time.

Nancy Cunard deserves attention and respect for her serious work as a poet, publisher and journalist. Virginia and Leonard Woolf published her long poem 'Parallax' at their Hogarth Press in 1925, and she continued to write poetry and sometimes have it published for the rest of her life. In 1928 she established her own 'Hours Press' at her home in Normandy in the French countryside. She learned the whole printing process, setting type and printing herself and turning out some significant publications including one of Samuel Beckett's first published poems, 'Whoroscope'.

Her fascination for African art and decoration led her to collect an enormous number of ivory bracelets and other items. She delved deeply into black culture through relationships with black people including jazz musicians, writers and civil rights' activists. In 1934 her encyclopedic book 'Negro' was published. This was an unwieldy project where she brought together black writers, commentators on aspects of black culture and images of black culture. The volume is now rare (most of the stock was lost in the London blitz in the Second World War), and first editions now sell for more than twenty thousand dollars.

By the late 1930s Nancy was very much involved in the anti-fascist movement in Europe. Like others of her generation, she was a passionate supporter of the republican side in the Spanish Civil War which she also reported from as a journalist.

Nancy Cunard, despite, or possibly because of her privileged inheritance, lived a life that connects her as a kind of heroine to the modern world. She was an enormously eclectic artist who championed poetry, black rights, freedom for women and anti-imperialist movements. She certainly had her blind spots and may have been difficult to know and impossible to live with, but I'm willing to place her in my pantheon of stars from the past whose lives become known to us through the scholarship of modern writers.