Нэнси Кунард: Жизнь, любовь и борьба с расизмом.

English writer, heiress and political activist (1896–1965)

Nancy Clara Cunard (10 March 1896 – 17 March 1965) was a British writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class, and devoted much of her life to fighting racism and fascism. 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. MI5 documents reveal that she was involved with Indian diplomat, orator, and statesman V. K. Krishna Menon. In later years she suffered from mental illness, and her physical health deteriorated. When she died in the Hôpital Cochin, Paris, she weighed only 26 kg (57 pounds / 4 stone, 1lb).

Cunard's father was Sir Bache Cunard, an heir to the Cunard Line shipping businesses, interested in polo and fox hunting, and a baronet. Her mother was Maud Alice Burke, an American heiress, who adopted the first name Emerald and became a leading London society hostess. Nancy had been brought up on the family estate at Nevill Holt, Leicestershire. When her parents separated in 1911, she moved to London with her mother. Her education was at various boarding schools, including time in France and Germany. In London, she spent a good deal of her childhood with her mother's long time admirer, the novelist George Moore. It was even rumoured that Moore was her father, and although this has been largely dismissed, there is no question that he played an important role in her life while she was growing up. She would later write a memoir about her affection for "GM". On 15November 1916 she married Sydney Fairbairn, a cricketer and army officer who had been wounded at Gallipoli. After a honeymoon in Devon and Cornwall, they lived in London in a house given to them by Nancy's mother as a wedding present. The couple separated in 1919 and divorced in 1925. At this time she was on the edge of the influential group The Coterie, associating in particular with Iris Tree. She contributed to the anthology Wheels, edited by the Sitwells, for which she provided the title poem; it has been said that the venture was originally her project. Cunard's lover Peter Broughton Adderley was killed in action in France less than a month before Armistice Day. Many who knew her claimed that she never fully recovered from Adderley's loss.

Nancy Cunard moved to Paris in 1920. There, she became involved with literary Modernism, Surrealists and Dada. Much of her published poetry dates from this period. During her early years in Paris, she was close to Michael Arlen. In 1920 she had a near fatal hysterectomy, for reasons that are not entirely clear. She recovered, and was then able to lead an active sexual life without the fear of pregnancy. A brief relationship with Aldous Huxley influenced several of his novels. She was the model for Myra Viveash in Antic Hay (1923) and for Lucy Tantamount in Point Counter Point (1928). In Paris, Cunard spent much time with Eugene McCown, an American artist from the hard drinking set whom she made her protégé. It has been suggested that she became dependent on alcohol at this time, and may have used other drugs. In 1928, the year she founded her publishing company, Hours Press, she met Henry Crowder, with whom she lived until 1933.

Cunard's style, informed by her devotion to the artefacts of African culture, was startlingly unconventional. The large scale jewellery she favoured, crafted of wood, bone and ivory, the natural materials used by native crafts people, was provocative and controversial. The bangles she wore on both arms snaking from wrist to elbow were considered outré adornments, which provoked media attention, visually compelling subject matter for photographers of the day. She was often photographed wearing her collection, those of African inspiration and neckpieces of wooden cubes, which paid homage to the concepts of Cubism. At first considered the bohemian affectation of an eccentric heiress, the fashion world came to legitimize this style as avant garde, dubbing it the "barbaric look". Prestigious jewellery houses such as Boucheron created their own African inspired cuff of gold beads. Boucheron, eschewing costly gemstones, incorporated into the finished creation green malachite and a striking purple mineral, purpurite, instead. It exhibited this high end piece at the Exposition Coloniale in 1931. It brought out the first separately published work of Samuel Beckett, a poem called Whoroscope (1930); Bob Brown's Words; and Pound's A Draft of XXX Cantos. Cunard published old friends such as George Moore, Norman Douglas, Richard Aldington and Arthur Symons, and brought out Henry Music, a book of poems from various authors with music by Henry Crowder, two books by Laura Riding, the Collected Poems of John Rodker, poems by Roy Campbell, Harold Acton, Brian Howard and Walter Lowenfels. Wyn Henderson had taken over day to day operation of the press by 1931; in the same year it published its last book, The Revaluation of Obscenity by sexologist Havelock Ellis.

In 1928 (after a two year affair with Louis Aragon) Cunard began a relationship with Henry Crowder, an African American jazz musician who was working in Paris. She became an activist in matters concerning racial politics and civil rights in the USA, and visited Harlem. In 1931, she published the pamphlet Black Man and White Ladyship, an attack on racist attitudes as exemplified by Cunard's mother, whom she quoted as saying: "Is it true that my daughter knows a Negro?" She edited the massive Negro Anthology, collecting poetry, fiction, and nonfiction primarily by African American writers, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. It included writing by George Padmore and Cunard's own account of the Scottsboro Boys case. Press attention to this project in May 1932, two years before it was published, led to Cunard's receiving anonymous threats and hate mail, some of which she published in the book, expressing regret that "[others] are obscene, so this portion of American culture cannot be made public." She identified as an anarchist.

After the war, Cunard gave up her home at Réanville and travelled extensively. In June 1948, she travelled from Trinidad to the United Kingdom, on board the The voyage and the ship later became well known because the other passengers on board included one of the first large groups of post war West Indian immigrants to the United Kingdom. In September 1948 she started renting a small house in the French village Lamothe Fénelon in the Dordogne Valley. In later years she suffered from mental illness and poor physical health, worsened by alcoholism, poverty, and self destructive behaviour. Her body was returned to England for cremation and the remains were sent back to the Cimetière du Père Lachaise in Paris. Her ashes rest in urn number 9016.