The work week’s nearly finished, at least technically; barely a few hours left. Truth is it was over the moment you went to lunch. What are you accomplishing? You’re not getting anything done between now and quitting time. Cut out and stop pretending. Make it a POETS Day and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.
First, a little verse.
***
Factinate appears to be a slapdash updated Tiger Beat or National Enquirer cousin for the SEO age: a digital scandal rag, numbered and fractured by “You won’t believe what happened next!” anticipatory phrase variations as segue to the next “You won’t believe what happened next!,” anticipatory phrase variation. It’s a fun, untrustworthy listicle and gossip sheet about famous places, and more interestingly, famous figures conveniently dead enough to not sue. Though it’s in the style of a tabloid, there’s nothing of the moment about it. It’s aimed at trashy people who read or at least paid attention enough in high school and college to know enough not to out themselves as dullards in front of those who actually know things, at least until an hour after introductions are made. I kinda love it.
Given the salacious and contrary life lived by Nancy Cunard—Cunard shipping line heiress, publisher, and poet or poetaster depending on how kindly or cruel you’re feeling—their expose on her is tame. Contrast with Wikipedia’s dry statement of verifiable fact. Even without a hint of sensationalism or wink-and-nod moralizing, Wikipedia out gossips Factinate by a furlong. Compare:
Factinate:
“She Slept with a Literary Celebrity”
Wikipedia:
“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.”
The way they dropped “—who were among her lovers—“ in the middle tells me those listed before were the lovers and those after were merely among the inspired-by-her-as-muse fellas, but good for Wikipedia on placing “as well as” to leave a little doubt (I checked. No known affairs with the latter.) That’s how you get tongues wagging.
The “Literary Celebrity” Factinate undersells is TS Eliot. They lead by telling us Eliot “was fusty, uber Catholic, and married, was scornful at best of their brief dalliance.”
I like “fusty” in describing him. He wasn’t “uber Catholic.” He wasn’t even Catholic. Their confused because Eliot subscribed to Anglo-Catholicism, a practice under the umbrella but not in the mainstream of the Church of England. He certainly wasn’t in communion with Rome. In short, Eliot preferred an outwardly Catholic practice of Anglicanism—more ceremonial, more magisterial. That made him an eccentric by protestant standards and a heretic by Catholic ones; not “uber” in regards to either. Factinate tells a good but unreliable story, but that’s not a big deal if you don’t mind checking. They almost nailed the last part. That Eliot was “scornful,” is factual, but then they muff things up by tacking on “at best.” He was extraordinarily scornful.
Cunard, for her part, was mum about the whole affair. It wasn’t immediately until after Eliot’s death in 1965, in a poem called “Letter,” delivered in a letter to John Hayward, that she acknowledges the affair. She writes surprisingly lucidly given that the letter was sent in January. Scant three months later, in March, she’d be confused and inebriated on a Paris street, an alcoholic mess, weighing sixty-five pounds, and not knowing who she was. She was taken to a hospital where she died the next day.
from Letter
Nancy Cunard (1896-1965)We met, you and I, first, that summer night of 1922,
At a ball – You in ‘smoking’, I in a panniered dress
Of Poiret: red, gold with cascading white tulle on the hips.
The P. of W. was there (so polite, lovely face) and we danced together;
The hostess, that small termagent, in all her glitterings,
Brilliant was she, the hostess, at this sort of thing.
— Bored by it all was I.
After many dances we went down
Alone, by the grand staircase to the supper room.
It was then; Eliot, you came in, alone too, for the first time to my eyes;
Well-advised of you was I, already somewhat versed in you:
I mean Prufrock.
There doesn’t seem to be a full text of the letter or the poem available, but those who comment on it say she offered an invitation, there was a fireplace, and an evening was had. Factinate references a line from a letter from 1965 that was likely from the same Hayward letter, though I am uncertain: “Yes I DID know Eliot. I knew him. AND HOW!”
Cunard probably never knew that she made a veiled appearance in an early draft of Eliot’s The Waste Land as Fresca, a pretentious, sexually active socialite. In couplets recalling Alexander Pope’s aristocrat needling in “The Rape of the Lock,” we follow Fresca’s morning ritual: disdaining a maid, drinking chocolate, and reading novels on the toilet. Indulgent and unflattering stuff.
Her setting established, Eliot attacks her as a poet:
almost from The Waste Land
TS Eliot (1888-1965)Fresca was baptised in a soapy sea
Of Symonds—Walter Pater—Vernon Lee.
The Scandanavians bemused her wits,
The Russians thrilled her to hysteric fits.
For such chaotic misch-masch potpourri
What are we to expect but poetry?
When restless nights distract her brain from sleep
She may as well write poetry, as count sheep.
And on those nights when Fresca lies alone,
She scribbles verse of such a gloomy tone
That cautious critics say, her style is quite her own.
Not quite an adult, and still less a child,
By fate misbred, by flattering friends beguiled,
Fresca’s arrived (the Muses Nine declare)
To be a sort of can-can salonnière.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
There were some seventy such lines set to begin The Waste Land’s “Part III: Fire Sermon.” It was neither regret nor kindness nor mercy that stayed Eliot’s hand. From the editorial notes of The Waste Land: A Facsimile & Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound edited by Valerie Eliot, TS says that Ezra Pound,
“…induced me to destroy what I thought an excellent set of couplets; for, said he, ‘Pope has done this so well that you cannot do it better; and if you mean this as a burlesque, you had better suppress it, for you cannot parody Pope unless you can write better verse than Pope—and you can’t.’”
To Eliot’s credit, she wasn’t a very good poet. From what I’ve read, she was good company in her early years. She ran with members of the Coterie, an intellectual aristocratic social clique known for heroin, chloroform, and orgies, ran with poets and artists in addition to the ones mentioned without flourish by Wikipedia, and set fashion trends. Toward the end, she was institutionalized for alcoholism and metal illness caused by or aggravated by drinking, disinherited, imposing on and dropping friends by the favor, insulting her hosts for having reached out.
She’s a known poet because she was a known person who also wrote poetry. Cunard was game for all manner of fun so she circulated. She used her wealth to start the Hours Press, a well regarded publishing house run from her Normandy farmhouse, so she was worth knowing. Hours published Pound, William Carlos Williams, a Hemingway novel, Richard Aldington, Laura Riding, Roy Campbell and Samuel Beckett. That’s an impressive stable. Add that she put out the Sitwell run annual anthology of Modernist poetry, Wheels. I get the sense that she wrote poetry because she saw herself surrounded by impressive people who wrote poetry, and though she wasn’t all that good—often bad—why wouldn’t the people who benefited from knowing her promote her work as well? If nothing else, it keeps them comfortably in the charms and graces of a publisher with patron means. That’s what I assumed until reading that Leonard and Virginia Woolf published a book of her verse. They were comfortably well off and catty as all hell. They must have seen something.
Here’s one of Cunard’s conventional, as opposed to experimental, poems. The parentheticals at the end confuse me. Dates are often printed at the end of poems and normally I don’t include them here. Why is this one in paranethesis? I have no idea whether “(Mijito: my very dear, a Chillenism)” was added by the author as an explainer or even as part of the poem. It seems like a note by an editor. Since I wasn’t sure and since the mystery comes after and so enclosing the date, I left them both. Make of them what you will.
Without the parentheticals, it’s a technically sound sonnet, if overly dramatic. She was friends with “The Most Beautiful Girl in England,” Lady Diana Cooper, leader of the Coterie, big fan of chloroform (“Jolly old chlorers!”), and silent film actress. I think about too grand silent movie gestures and wonder if Cunard didn’t pick up the habit of writing large as to compete with and upstage her theatrical friend.
Amaranth of Sunset
Done, undone, not done, and done too well –
Oh Chile of my despair, oh orb of thieves,
Oh whirlpool madness – oh you curious hell
Of love and hate, you cradle of all that grieves.
All Shakespeare vested in one small drunk man,
All of the poets in this love of mine,
All of the sorrows on that raft of wine;
Was this the man for me, the final man,
Who knows? Gone – to the amaranthyn last
Shaft as he watched it muttering “Never more…”
I see my poet walking by the shore
Of time alone as I, locked in our past,
Snarling, quiescent. And then up speaks the wine:
“You to your life, mijito; I, to mine.”(1940)
(Mijito: my very dear, a Chillenism)
“Letter” isn’t half bad. It’s not my cup of tea, but there’s a narrative, a consistent voice, and well delivered details to set the mood. Free verse need to develop a rhythm of its own or it’s pointless as poetry, and she doesn’t develop rhythm here. But it’s not a bad piece of prose. I could do without the affected subject/verb inversion: “Brilliant was she,” and “Bored by it all was I.”
I can’t say when “Letters” was written, but I’m inclined to think it she wrote it later in life if not in 1965 when it was delivered. Cunard shows a restraint in “Letters” I don’t see in the, admittedly limited amount that I’ve read, free verse from earlier in her career. Compare “Letters” to “Love, Death, Time Weather” from 1929. The latter is a rapid fire stream of consciousness where locale dropping hints at an insecure need to let the reader know she’s in the midst of important, relevant stuff. It’s a collage of attitude that was worth a try, I suppose, but not every experiment works. I think she calmed for the better as she aged.
Love, Death, Time Weather
so’s your Englishman –
O go-for-a-sailor as it’s peace-time,
And shatter the context of the blue-red-white.
Say, do they touch at Colon, do they fetch up in the Toulon Darse?
They do, they swing about – and it’s up to you.
After so many other afters is there no now?But I don’t think the Poste Restante
Changes our inner geographies nor yet heals hearts,
Much, nor yet do time’s heels
Properly leaden heart’s spring buds under, nor now nor finally.
Man, your brief uncoiled ache flips back into place like a curl.
– Three, four… will my love come?
Late late, on morning’s wings
A-mourning what’s got, not held.
What’s held?
That hand on the bed-cover, that’s surely a finality,
In visible focus, punkt –
Held, or for later? (such things have been.)Had I no love I’d a-many,
I’m wrongly angrooved –
Eve and I of myself, how did I come to live in this place,?
Shifting zones of the centre!(But the north-wings calmy nebulate round the Philippine rice-gods –
This stamp to what collector?)
I’m sympathetic and so kinder towards pushing boundries. I’m willing to write off experimental poetry that falls apart as a shot that was taken, no harm no foul, brave attempt. If the experiment persists without improvement, if its replication makes me think the author believes themself to be on to something, I’m not so sympathetic or kind. There’s not a ton of Cunard’s poetry to be found, at least not enough to be found easily. Project Gutenberg is mum, Internet Archive has books about her rather than by her. I’m relying on descriptors that pin her as an “experimental poet” and allowing what consideration I can muster, but she’s trying.
In 1928, Cunard started dating Henry Crowder, a celebrated and influential American jazz musician initially famous as a member of the group Eddie South and his Alabamians. It was a rough time for both.
There were highs. Henry co-founded Hours Press with Nancy and they put out a successful book of Henry’s music interspersed with poems from Aldington and Beckett called Henry Music.
There were struggles. Henry was black and that didn’t settle well with Nancy’s family. Per Nancy, her mother’s reaction was “Is it true that my daughter knows a Negro?” In 1931 they published Black Man and White Ladyship, a pamphlet detailing and publicly exposing her mother as a racist. As a result, her mother, Lady Emerald Cunard, reduced Nancy’s allowance by a quarter, later by half, and shortly thereafter completely cut her daughter off financially and socially.
There were lows. Cunard fetishized African baubles, wearing ivory and bone jewelry in excess and photographed in surprisingly long—past the elbow—sleeves of bracelets crafted in imitation of tribal dress. At first she was seen as eccentric, but her style briefly caught on. The Paris jewelers Boucheron designed a line in imitation but the fad was short lived. The greatest impact of the increasingly drunken and violent Nancy’s African fashion phase fell on Henry who described the frequent bruises seen on him as “bracelet work.” The couple split in 1935.
You never want to impugn someone’s motives on a hunch. That said, the more I read, the more I feel that Nancy may well have loved Henry but certainly loved social movements. I suspect she took a social thrill at furtive glances and whispers, real and imagined, about the woman who dated a negro. She threw herself at causes. I don’t know that Henry was a statement more than a partner. I certainly suspect some aspect of fetishization beyond jewelry possessed her.
No matter what the case, she threw herself at the civil rights cause. In addition to publishing anthologies of black poetry and prose, she traveled to the US to visit Harlem and sailed with the first wave of Caribbean immigrants to England on HMT Empire Windrush from Trinidad. She was passionate on the subject for the rest of her life.
Less Than the Slave
She stood breast-high..yes, that is it, breast-high,
Faith with a cutlass armed in the still wood,
Amid the alien…yes, transplanted; stood
Saying “If God spare life this ends, and I
Need work no more for twenty cents a day!”
Lily! You knot from Africa! You thing
Less than the slave of old – fill baskets, bring
Cocoa and coffee; pick those beans; they’ll weigh.
So – you are worth two dimes, and men worth four
In those Antillian glades. Black, ragged, bowed
With agues, tired, illiterate – see their crowd
Dancing the cocoa on the drying-floor,
Democracies? Not here! IS as HAS BEEN –
Rulers, behold the sweet in your machine.
Her other great cause was anti-fascism. Mussolini’s annexation of Ethiopia raised her hackles and the Spanish Civil War sent her into a fury. As she did with civil rights, Cunard made it her mission to let the world know of injustice and let the world know she was at the forefront feeling passionately about it. It’s hard to say which was the more important goal.
Regarding the Spanish Civil war, she sent out a questionnaire to two hundred literary types. Per Wikipedia, in it she asked “Are you for, or against, the legal government and people of Republican Spain? Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism? For it is impossible any longer to take no side.”
One hundred and forty-seven people responded, overwhelmingly for the Republic, a few claiming neutrality, and only five in favor of Franco. The results were published in The Left Review so readers could decide if they still liked Auden’s poetry or Waugh’s prose.
The most notable response came from Orwell, apparently exasperated by her attempts to be outspoken.
“Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish. This is the second or third time I have had it. I am not one of your fashionable pansies like Auden or Spender, I was six months in Spain, most of the time fighting, I have a bullet hole in me at present and I am not going to write blah about defending democracy or gallant little anybody…. “
I’ve tried, in reading her poetry and about her life, to find her anything but self aggrandizing. I haven’t been able to shed the assessment. Adolescent angst like this doesn’t help.
from Pamiatnik – Memorial of Bittersweet
There is nothing we can do for it, nothing, oh nothing;
It hates us, it hates us, it hates us –
It is like me,
It is like life.
I see her well meaning crusades as fetishes; baubles to beat those around her with as a claim to relevance until they appreciate her passion. It’s sad and I hope I’m being terribly unfair. I hope I’ve misread the whole lot. She drove people away, drank herself to an asylum and later a grave. She must have been exhausting to know.
Here she is in adherence to mundane verse form. Without the excuse of being experimental as distraction or excuse, her talent’s laid bare. It’s not flattering.
In the Studio
Is it March, spring, winter, autumn, twilight, noon
Told in this distant sound of cuckoo clocks?
Sunday it is – five lilies in a swoon
Decay against your wall, aggressive flocksOf alley-starlings aggravate a mood.
The rain drops pensively. ‘If one could paint,
Combine the abstract with a certain rude
Individual form, knot passion with restraint …If one could use the murk that fills a brain,
Undo old symbols and beget again
Fresh meaning on dead emblem … ’ so one liesHere timeless, while the lilies’ withering skin
Attests the hours, and rain sweeps from the skies;
The bird sits on the chimney, looking in.Zeppelins
I saw the people climbing up the street
Maddened with war and strength and thoughts to kill;
And after followed Death, who held with skill
His torn rags royally, and stamped his feet.The fires flamed up and burnt the serried town,
Most where the sadder, poorer houses were;
Death followed with proud feet and smiling stare,
And the mad crowds ran madly up and down.And many died and hid in unfounded places
In the black ruins of the frenzied night;
And death still followed in his surplice,, white
And streaked in imitation of their faces.But in the morning men began again
To mock Death following in bitter pain.
[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]