An Interview with Lois Gordon

Q: What interested you most about Nancy Cunard?nnLois Gordon: Everything! Nancy was a gifted poet, publisher, journalist, and indefatigable social activist. She was also an extraordinarily beautiful woman who set fashion styles, inspired some of the greatest writers and artists of her time, and fascinated men of great fame and achievement. Sadly, she never emotionally survived her privileged but lonely childhood, as her demanding and uncaring mother paraded her many infidelities in front of the growing child, while continually criticizing her for being “totally worthless.” This, along with the guilt Nancy experienced for surviving the Great War when many of her friends had been killed, as well as her keen awareness of suffering throughout the world, strongly motivated her behavior. But all the alcohol she consumed and affairs she pursued—in addition to her many lifelong friendships with both men and women—could not soothe the troubled sense of self that drove her during her amazing and heroic life.nnQ: Who were some of the most famous men—lovers or friends—whom you discuss? And her women friends?nnLG: Certainly in the first category, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Pablo Neruda, Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, Aldous Huxley, Richard Arlington, Wyndham Lewis, Raymond Michelet, Georges Sadoul, John Strachey, Michael Arlen, Jean Cocteau, George Padmore, Alvaro Guevara, and Curtis Moffat; among her possible lovers but certain friends were Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Paul Robeson, Edward, the Prince of Wales, Arthur Symons, William Carlos Williams, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Pablo Casals, Constantin Brancusi, Juan Miró, Langston Hughes, and Harold Acton. Her women friends included Virginia Woolf, Kay Boyle, Janet Flanner, Solita Solano, Margaret Anderson, Josephine Baker, Marie Beerbohm, Nina Hamnett, Laura Riding, Iris Tree, Mary Reynolds, Margaret Anderson, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and, for a time, Edith Sitwell.nnQ: What were her major political causes? Lois GordonnnLG: After her involvement in the cause of the Scottsboro boys and the Ethiopian Crisis, Nancy immersed herself in studying the history of blacks and racial injustice. She studied in libraries and museums; she traveled the world; she interviewed people. In 1934, she edited and published the 855-page Negro, the first comprehensive study of African history and culture and a celebration of the achievement of Africans throughout the world. Her contributors included Theodore Dreiser, Harold Acton, George Antheil, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Ezra Pound, Josephine Herbst, Arna Bontemps, W.C. Handy, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, George Padmore, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, E. Franklin Frazier, Sterling Brown, Walter White, Arthur A. Schomburg, and Alain J. Locke. Samuel Beckett translated eighteen essays on a broad spectrum of subjects, including a manifesto by the French Surrealists and essays on Louis Armstrong and jazz, the history of Haiti, the Congo, and Madagascar, and commentaries on imperialism. Nancy furnished a poem, an extensive history of Jamaica, an impassioned defense of the Scottsboro boys, and essays on Harlem, color bias, and the “reactionary” W.E.B. Du Bois and NAACP which, she argued, were pandering to the white ruling class. She also added editorial notes to several essays. For her esteem and friendship with blacks, she was disinherited by her family and many friends. For most of her adult life, she remained a reporter for various newspapers, including the American Negro Press, distributed in Europe, Africa, and America. During the Spanish Civil War, she reported battle from the front lines as well as FrancoÕs inhumane treatment of his conscripted Moors.nnQ: And the Spanish Civil War?nnLG: Yes, this was her greatest cause. Nancy went to the fronts to write eyewitness reports, help carry the wounded to safety, and feed the hungry; after Franco’s victory, now the Manchester Guardian’s sole eyewitness reporter, she walked with the refugees as they trudged to Perpignan and to their “holding centers”—really French concentration camps. With Hitler’s planes bombing everyone on the road, Nancy became accustomed to running for her life. With the little money she had, she bought and distributed food at the fronts; then she badgered the Manchester Guardian to collect money for refugee food centers. Later, when she made countless visits to the camps, she bribed guards to give food to the starving Republican soldiers. She also risked her life in helping soldiers escape the camps, and during the periods journalists were forced to leave Spain, she sought out homes for the refugees in Central America. Nancy remained a one-person army for years to come. She lived an isolated life in a modest farmhouse near the French-Spanish border, which allowed her to walk to Spain and continue her work with underground organizations; she engaged in guerilla activities.nnQ: Was Nancy the Romantic you seem to be describing?nnLG: Yes, in both the literary and everyday sense of the word. She found in nature, at least temporarily, the ability to transcend the sadness of the world and to be released of “analytical introspection” and the guilt of sexual dissipation. Nature allowed her the elation of spiritual transcendence, and she could become one with the universe, and “stand on a northern hill-top/ shouting at the sun!” Of her early and “entirely genuine and strangely individual poems” the Times Literary Supplement said: “Nancy Cunard has an unquestionable gift of language, even of eloquence, . . . a poet worth watching.” The New Age agreed that “she lifts herself above the throng of poets of our time.” Nancy also found in romantic love another way of connecting with a transcendent, transforming reality. In one of many poems to Ezra Pound (“You Have Lit the Only Candle”), she pays religious homage to her lover. In their sexuality, she feels pure and blessed, uplifted and innocent in her desire, “absolved” of sin and “barren” of shame. As though he were a saint, his “sharp/Straight flame” of love performs its ministrations and lends her a “steadfast radiance.” It is “the only candle that shall illumine my wayward paths,” she writes, and given such blessedness, she will remain in a state of grace until death, when she may face judgment from other forces of the universe, “some great wind of eternity that rends and masters” the flame. When Pound became pro-fascist, Nancy furiously denounced him.