The Rites of Spring

The chapter explores primitivism, African creation myths, and an analysis of Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring and Vernon Lee’s Satan the Waster in the context of Cunard’s poetic aesthetic. Marcus also contrasts Edith Sitwell’s anti-war Wheels anthology and Cunard’s engagement with African cultures and artifacts with Eliot’s primitivism. Additionally, the chapter investigates the visual primitivism of World War I and representations of the slaughter by William Roberts and Wyndham Lewis.

End Notes: An Afterword

The Afterword reflects on the editor’s personal and professional relationship with her mentor and friend, the author of Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger, Jane Marcus. Meeting in 2001 over discussions about Hope Mirrlees’s little known poem, Paris: 1919, published in 1920 by Virginia Woolf, Marcus pointed to the use of End Notes in the poem, a modernist signature usually attributed to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Mills uses Marcus’s suggestion about the generative nature of paratexts, raising more questions and leading to further avenues of inquiry, to the generative nature of their intellectual conversations, and to the afterlife of one’s research and scholarship, in general.

White Nympholepsy

The chapter is an investigation into and meditation on whiteness, purity, and cleanliness, as the author contextualizes Cunard’s development and childhood surrounded by the literary circle her mother, Maud “Emerald” Lady Cunard, fostered and encouraged. Marcus uses Moore’s Confessions, Manet’s painting Le Linge (the laundry), and Cunard’s relationship to her mother to explore women’s poverty, the role of women as muses to male artists, and Cunard’s identification with homelessness and exile.

Nanción’s Cancións

This chapter covers Nancy Cunard’s experiences as a war reporter during the Spanish Civil War. Marcus argues that Cunard and her leftist comrades “produced an international and multiracial cross-class culture of protest against fascism in journalism” throughout the thirties. The chapter also restores their efforts in poetry, theatre, poster art, film, radio, collage, and pamphlets in an effort to correct a history of radicalism that has been “so systematically erased or buried” that this “work of recovery has of necessity become oppositional to an established nationalist and elitist (male) canon.”

Between Men

Beginning with T.S. Eliot’s death and Cunard’s poem reflecting on their relationship, the chapter examines Cunard’s reputation and representation as it grew out of Eliot’s deleted portrayal of Cunard as Fresca in The Waste Land and later via scurrilous accusations of plagiarism in relation to her long anti-war poem Parallax. The chapter rereads Parallax from a feminist perspective, while unpacking Eliot (and Pound’s) misogyny, in general. Marcus also explores Cunard’s relationship to Henry Crowder, the publication of “Henry-Music” by the Hours Press, the radical left, and her launching of Samuel Beckett’s literary career.

Editor’s Introduction

This chapter charts the editor’s journey in re-organizing, editing, and seeing through to publication a posthumous unfinished manuscript by her mentor, Jane Marcus. The chapter highlights the book’s significance to feminist scholarship, Modernism, post-colonial and critical race theory, and to historians of race, gender, class, fascism, war, and peace. The book’s response to issues of reputation and representation are considered, here, while making connections to the uses of feminist anger in current debates and strategies in activism against racism and sexual assault.

Girlfriends, Boyfriends, and Bright Young Things

The chapter explores Cunard’s circle of bohemian friends as it gives an analysis of women’s independence and the identification of that independence with lesbian sexuality. The chapter also examines Cunard’s relationship to Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, and Louis Aragon, rereading Huxley’s fictional portrayal of Cunard as femme fatale and his engagement with English primitivism. Cunard’s contributions to Vogue and avant-garde aesthetics and leftist politics are also investigated.

Race on the Wire

This chapter addresses Nancy Cunard’s extensive journalism for the Associated Negro Press, and her transparency in claiming that she made “no attempt at all at objective reporting” as she argued against fascism and racism. With the help of gay, white artist and photographer John Banting, Cunard continued to stand up to the barrage of hostility directed at her for her on-going reporting on behalf of black and brown races, Arabs, and Africans. The chapter gives an account of her professional relationship with Charles A. Burnett, director of the Chicago-based Associated Negro Press and her interviews giving voice to black soldiers, war nurses, refugees, and prisoners.

Intellectual Nomads

Alongside her analysis of Cunard’s memoir of George Moore, Marcus reads her 1954 account of travel writer, Norman Douglas, within the contexts of exile, English primitivism, and the exploitation of antiquities abroad by representatives of Western culture. The chapter examines the funding of ex-Surrealist Michel Leiris and his Djibouti Expedition to collect African art and artifacts alongside Cunard’s unfunded and publicly excoriated intellectual and literary project to collect Black voices and cultures in the Negro anthology. Marcus also addresses Cunard’s problematic reading of accusations against Douglas of pedophilia and a text “torn between the desire to tell and the desire to hide the secrets” of his life and her own.

White Women, Black Books

Devoted to the making of the Negro Anthology, the chapter reads Cunard’s collection alongside and against white Englishwoman, Sylvia Leith-Ross, and her “official” project African Women, funded by two government grants to live and study in Nigeria in the same year as Negro’s publication, 1934. Marcus interrogates Leith-Ross’s treatment in the study of the Women’s War, or the “Aba Riots” as the British were anxious to diffuse the memory of their rebellion against colonial rule and oppression. The chapter focuses on the collective work of Negro and the challenges Cunard faced in bringing to the public a project that was unauthorized, unfunded, and surveilled.