Sublunary

by Nancy Cunard

Poems by Nancy Cunard. With a portrait of the poet by Wyndham Lewis.

106 pages, Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 1923

About the author

Nancy Clara Cunard was a writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class but strongly rejected her family's values, devoting 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, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Langston Hughes, Man Ray, and William Carlos Williams.

She moved to Paris in the 1920's, where she became involved with literary Modernism, Surrealists and Dada. In 1928 she set up the Hours Press. Cunard wanted to support experimental poetry and provide a higher-paying market for young writers; her inherited wealth allowed her to take financial risks that other publishers could not. Hours Press became known for its beautiful book designs and high-quality production. It brought out the first separately published work of Samuel Beckett, and also Ezra Pound's Draft of XXX Cantos. Cunard published old friends like George Moore, Norman Douglas, Roy Campbell, Harold Acton, Brian Howard, and Robert Carlton Brown.

In 1928 she began a relationship with Henry Crowder, an African-American jazz musician. She became an activist in matters concerning racial politics and civil rights in the USA. In 1934 she edited the massive Negro Anthology, collecting poetry, fiction, and non-fiction primarily by African-American writers. In the mid-1930s she took up the anti-fascist fight as well, writing about Mussolini's annexation of Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, Cunard worked, to the point of physical exhaustion, as a translator in London on behalf of the French Resistance.

In later years, Cunard suffered from mental illness and poor health, worsened by alcoholism, poverty, and self-destructive behaviour. She was committed to a mental hospital after a fight with London police; but, after her release, her health declined even further. In 1965, she was found penniless on the streets, her weight having dropped to 60 pounds. She was taken to the Hôpital Cochin in Paris where she died two days later.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

It may be argued that the post-WWI writers were trying to recapture an innocence they knew before the war, instead finding there the foreboding that exists only in hindsight. ("There were no ruins yet; each hour was gold") The hindsight afforded by our twenty-first century perspective attributes a different meaning to this foreboding: a precursor to WWII. As if these writers between WWI and WWII somehow knew, prophetically or unconsciously, that WWI was only the beginning of something bigger...
Indeed, this was confirmed by the political unrest that swept Europe in the aftermath of WWII, a political unrest that enabled the rise to Fascism.

This foreboding is perhaps most notable in T. S. Eilot's Wasteland, being the wasteland of Europe in the wake of WWI. The "Great War" representing for this generation a new scale of death and destruction hitherto unseen. Indeed, unimaginable. Impossible for this generation not to look at images of the trenches and not see the "wasteland" that we see in images of concentration camps or Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In Nancy Cunard's poems there is the same trace of this foreboding. Perhaps to a lesser extent than her contemporaries, but I don't want to make that statement without undertaking an extensive comparative study. Something I don't have time for (at the moment). What I can state with some certainty is that Cunard's "wasteland" is understated. Indeed, more foreboding in its peripheral presence.

Lines such as "Here on the brink of darkness" ("Sublunary", pg. 10) - although it refers, in the context of the poem, to something unrelated - can be applied to the post-WWI condition. Whereas lines such as "Scanning the crossroads of a violent world" ("Adolescence", pg. 22) refer directly to the war while retaining the same subtlety...

SUBLUNARY
They are met at midnight in the windy tower,
Alchemist and student of alchemy,
Beneath a failing moon's reluctance; dark,
The narrow glen each side breathes mystery.
Moon without shadows streaming wan, and night
Again returning to its silences
After the laughing clamour on the hill..
All these are past: they come to assignation,
In ruined chapel sit. Humbly at first,
The summer dews around them, solacing,
Each soul is lightened of its pain and made
Contemplative, desirous of hidden wisdom.
The mast speaks, the crucible has grown
More red with throbbing secrets, dice are tossed
Till one has thrown the number winning speech.
He ponders daily thoughts, would know if friends
Are true when faithful words leap from their lips,
And if the heart should trustingly respond.
Then a new-comer, tantalising truth,
Voices the eager questions of love:
"Shall every coin be spent, and every tear
Given from eyes revulsed in sacrifice -
And master, shall the profit outweigh loss?"
"But," said another stranger, "we know love -
How treasuring it, our faith is kept serene;
Yet we are heavy with our uncertainties
Here on the brink of darkness - master, tell
Secret divine of clue we know not yet;
So that in dawns after most sorrowful dreams
We may unwrap ourselves from pain subconscious,
Making of haunted night a better day."
"I have lost track of love," another said.

Their ardent words assailed the midnight wizard,
And the dead saints looked down from their high walls,
At rest on dreaming still of the centuries past.
The moon grew yet more slight, ethereal, western,
And in the great world's streets thin cats and ghosts
Trod the transparent shadows, liberated
By this rare interval of dark and dawn.
So, full of striving each man told his tale
And would have known an answer to all things,
Thinking, "we have that faith that walks the waves,
Faith of the holy parables indeed,
To-night alone - a miracle shall reward."
But they were given symbols, further doubts,
And stuff that fades with daylight; while the lord
Of their enchantment, wrapped in manifold mists,
Grown dim, was lost in far philosophies,
Unconscious to their calling. They were chilled
By the swift sudden wings of morning eagles
stirring the empty space, and all the fire
Leapt in the crucible in one last flame
Of taunting laughter, fallen grey with ash.
Then from this company of questioners
That had adventured into wizardry
And sat around the stealthy science of truth,
Arose four friends and fled the haunted dew,
Descending silent to the dawn-white valley.

*

ADOLESCENCE

I am in years almost the century's child,
At grips with still the same uncertainty
That was attendant to me at the school.
The classics set before us, twenty voices
Took up enunciation, I was dumb -
Then goaded by the teacher's stony finger
Trembling arose to read a meagre essay.
Next History went by, its wars and glories,
And politics that fill young minds with dust 
Of Corn-laws and Reform - severe decades
When England topped the century with Victoria.
But we might never know Queen Katharine
Who rules imperially adventurous Russia,
Nor hear the Borgias' crimes, the papal swindles;
For us no pages on the Medicis,
No panorama of past things in Rome,
But thorny sums, and German verbs rapped out.
For Art we had the photographic torsos
Of Jove and all his Venuses, with words
That lay less easy on the lecturer's tongue:
We never doubted that her themes were Whitman,
Browning and Wordsworth - here we had examples,
Morals and principles. . . . ("Now these two terms
Must be explained to show you've understood.")
The winter spent at this came Tennyson.
By half-past twelve all done and rest would go
With confident memories, but I forgetful
Scattered the lesson's fragments in the street,
And hated life, with adolescent sense
Of wrong that dallies with tearful introspection.
I knew I could not learn, despite the prize
Between my hands the day that I was free.
 . . . . . . . . . .
That summer went in solitude, with thoughts
Humming in concourse, as the thronging stars
Appear before the eyes of travellers
Descending to new lands on hurrying feet.
If at some time each man says: "world is mine,"
Then doubtless rang this clamour in my heart,
And many a fire was lit and worshipped there,
Ascetically, with pride, and so with longing.
I held the very world's perplexities,
Throbbing of questions, stirring of heart's blood
Urging hysterical things till dawn had come.
 . . . . . . . . . .
A year of riot grew, with carnivals,
Music and wines beneath the million lamps
That flanked the threshold of advancing war.
There were no ruins yet; each hour was gold
That reddened in the fires of its adventure -
Then had I thought of its aftermath, and stood
Uncertainly between the opened gates
Scanning the crossroads of a violent world.