A University of Sussex PhD thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details Nancy Cunard: Collector, Cosmopolitan by Jenny Greenshields Dissertation submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature University of Sussex February 2015 2 I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be submitted in whole or in part to another university for the award of any other degree. Signed ....................................................... 3 Nancy Cunard: Collector, Cosmopolitan Jenny Greenshields Dissertation submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature, University of Sussex, February 2015 Summary of Thesis Part One of my thesis reads Nancy Cunard (1896-1965) as a modernist collector, situating her material and literary collections in relation to the vogue nègre of the 1920s and 30s, when European fascination with black expressive culture reached unprecedented heights. It also looks at how Cunard’s collecting practices translate into an ‘aesthetic of assemblage’ in her work as an anthologist, and shows how the African sculpture section of her Negro anthology (1934) reflects the collecting cultures of early twentieth-century Europe. Part Two of my thesis reads Cunard in relation to cosmopolitan identity formations in the early twentieth century through an analysis of her poetry and private correspondence, and the fictional representations of Cunard that appeared in the novels of the period. It also examines her efforts to foster transnational networks between writers and artists across America, Europe and Africa, and the role her Communist politics played in forging these connections. 4 Acknowledgements I am deeply grateful to my supervisor, Professor Stephanie Newell, for her inspirational teaching, friendship, guidance and support, right from my very first seminars with her as an undergraduate at Sussex. For encouraging, reassuring and distracting me, thank you to my family and friends, especially my mum, Rosemary, and also Amy, Richard, Dan, Nozomi, Joe, Ellie, Fay and all my colleagues at Liberty. I am indebted to the AHRC and the University of Sussex for funding my research and enabling me to visit the Nancy Cunard archives at the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas. Thank you to Margaret for being such a welcoming host during my time in Austin. This project would also not have been possible without the assistance of staff at the Harry Ransom Center, the New York Public Library, Dorset County Museum, the University of Sussex Special Collections and the Southern Illinois Special Collections Research Centre. My particular thanks to Paul Gansky, Aaron Lisec and Chelsea Weathers for their help in providing me with scans of materials. Thank you also to Nancy Cunard’s literary executor, Robert Bell, for granting me permission to quote from the materials in her archive. Finally, thank you to Keston, to whom I dedicate this with my love. Your kindness, patience and love helped me through this project from beginning to end. 5 Abbreviations & Citations Citations from the Nancy Cunard Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas have been abbreviated to HRC NCC in my footnotes. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Nancy Cunard’s Negro anthology are taken from the 1934 first edition, published by Wishart & Co. Where it is clear I am quoting from this book, citation references are given parenthetically within the text. 6 Contents List of illustrations 7 Introduction – Nancy Cunard (1896-1965): An Alternative Modernist 8 Note on terminology 17 Part 1: Collector 1. Collecting Selves, Collecting Others 19 1.1 Material Biographies: Cunard as Collector 1.2 Narratives of Discovery: Paris and Primitivism 1.3 Collecting Henry: Henry-Music 2. Documentary Modernism: The Negro Anthology as a Modernist Collection 68 2.1 The Aesthetic of Assemblage: Negro and its Intertexts 2.2 Negro’s collection of African Art Part 2: Cosmopolitan 3. From Flâneuse to Cosmopolitan: Travel, Gender and Identity 112 in Parallax, The Green Hat & ‘Harlem Reviewed’ 3.1 Parallax and the Modernist Flâneur 3.2 Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat and the Cosmopolitan ‘Modern Woman’ 3.3 ‘Harlem Reviewed’ 3.4 Race, Gender and Miscegenation in Cunard’s Hate-Mail File 4. ‘Authors Take Sides’: Transnationalism and Modernist Literary Culture 156 4.1 The Scottsboro Nine 4.2 Authors Take Sides: Poetry, Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War 4.3 Pan-Africanism and Decolonisation in The White Man’s Duty Afterword 183 Bibliography 185 7 List of Illustrations Figs. 1-3: Cunard’s ivory bracelets, displayed on racks Fig. 4: African objects on display at Nancy Cunard’s farmhouse, Le Puits Carré, in La Chapelle-Réanville Fig. 5: Jeune Fille Sophistiquée (Portrait of N.C.) in polished bronze, Constantin Brancusi, 1928 Fig. 6: Jeune Fille Sophistiquée (Portrait of N.C.) in wood, Constantin Brancusi, 1928 Fig. 7: Cunard at the Hours Press shop, 15 Rue Guénégaud, Paris, with Joan Miró painting, African sculptures and Hours Press publications. Spring 1930. Fig. 8: Covers of Henry-Music, with photomontage by Man Ray Fig. 9: Bieri Reliquary Head Fig. 10: Konde fetish figure, Raoul Ubac Fig. 11: Bayaka mask, Raoul Ubac Fig. 12: Kifwebe mask, Raoul Ubac Fig. 13: Cunard with Tristan Tzara at the Beaumont Ball, Man Ray, Sketch Magazine,1925 Images 1-8 & 13 reproduced with the permission of the Harry Ransom Center. Images 9-12 taken from the Negro anthology (1934) 8 Introduction Nancy Cunard (1896-1965): An Alternative Modernist Nancy Cunard was kind and good and catholic and cosmopolitan and sophisticated and simple all at the same time and a poet of no mean abilities and an appreciator of the rare and the off-beat from jazz to ivory bracelets to Cocteau. […] [S]he had a body like sculpture in the thinnest of wire and a face made of a million mosaics in a gauze-web of cubes lighter than air. Langston Hughes1 Nancy Cunard was a poet, a publisher, an anthologist, a muse, a translator, a collector, a campaigner, and a journalist. The only child of the American heiress Maud Cunard, and Sir Bache Cunard of the famous English shipping line family, Nancy Cunard spent much of her life resisting her privileged background. Reporters were sent demands for retractions when they gave her titles in their articles (‘My name is NOT the Hon. Nancy, it is Nancy Cunard’2) or referred to her as a shipping heiress, the company by then having passed out of the hands of the Cunard family. When she and Langston Hughes first met in Paris in the 1930s at the beginning of their long friendship, he told her he had come to France on a Cunard ship ‘thinking it would please her’, to which she responded that she had never set foot on a Cunard vessel, and never would, because of the company’s racial segregation policy.3 Her childhood was spent in rural England and her teenage years with her socialite mother in London, after Maud (now calling herself ‘Emerald’) had left her husband for the famous conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. In January 1920, Cunard moved to Paris where she was quickly drawn into the circles of some of the most important figures of European modernism, and it was also around this time that she began assembling her famous collection of African ivory bracelets. Among those writers and artists she formed close 1 ‘Nancy: A Piñata in Memoriam – If one could break it in her honor’, printed in Brave Poet, Indomitable Rebel 1896-1965, ed. Hugh Ford, (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1968), p.1. 2 Nancy Cunard, Letter to the Press, 2nd May 1932, New York, HRC NCC, Box 10, Folder 6. 3 Langston Hughes, Autobiography: I Wonder As I Wander, Vol. 14 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, ed. Joseph McLaren, (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 311. 9 relationships with were the Dadaist Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon and others of the surrealist movement, Solita Solano, Wyndham Lewis, Michael Arlen, Janet Flanner, Ezra Pound and Aldous Huxley. She also inspired sculptures by Constantin Brancusi, drawings by Wyndham Lewis, paintings by Oskar Kokoschka, John Banting and Eugene McCown, and was photographed by some of the most celebrated photographers of the day, including Cecil Beaton, Curtis Moffat and Man Ray. In 1928, she set up her own printing press, The Hours Press, at her farmhouse in Réanville in Normandy, purchasing the equipment from Bill Bird’s Three Mountains Press. Collaborating with George Sadoul, Louis Aragon, Henry Crowder and others, Cunard hand-printed beautiful editions of works by famous writers such as Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, Harold Acton, Laura Riding and Robert Graves, often bound in surrealist-inspired covers, which were produced by artists such as Man Ray, Len Lye and Yves Tanguy. The Hours also printed Samuel Beckett’s first individual publication, Whoroscope, in 1930. Cunard had little early success as a poet and devoted her later efforts to her dynamic work as a publisher, journalist, anthologist, and antiracist campaigner. As Susan Stanford Friedman has written, Nancy Cunard’s name is one that ‘crisscrosses the map of modernism—not so much as a poet but more as a tireless advocate, a progressive spirit, a charismatic dynamo, a woman who fascinated and frightened people with her passions.’4 These passions took her to 1930s Harlem as a political travel writer; to civil war Spain as an eyewitness correspondent, Republican activist and publisher; and to the Caribbean as a researcher and journalist.