Parallax

by Nancy Cunard

Inclassificabile, indomita, tragica, ha finito per inghiottirne l'opera. Erede di una ricchissima famiglia di imprenditori navali, Nancy Cunard ha tenuto sotto scacco il secolo. Amata da Louis Aragon e Aldous Huxley, temuta da T.S. Eliot e W.H. Auden, Nancy adorava sottomettere gli intellettuali dell'epoca. Fu antifascista, anarchica, un'esteta della difesa dei diritti civili dei neri (un noto musicista jazz afroamericano fu, tra l'altro, il suo più acceso amante). A differenza di molti, la Cunard tutto amò e tutto soffrì. Con la sua casa editrice, raffinatissima, la Hours Press, pubblicò i primi lavori di Samuel Beckett. Superba, fu eternata da Man Ray in fotografie di imperiale bellezza: impose la moda "barbarica"; amava i monili africani, i bracciali, ma vestiva da maschio, all'occorrenza. Ezra Pound la stimolò a perfezionare la scrittura: Parallax (pubblicato nel 1925 dalla casa editrice di Virginia Woolf) è tra i grandi poemi del secolo, micidiale controcanto alla Terra desolata dell'amico Eliot. Cantò il turbamento, la gioia, la solitudine. "Sfrenata sono stata, e sciocca, e impavida, / e ho amato a piene mani", scrive. Ci vuole coraggio.

Genres: Poetry

170 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1925

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.