MAGNIFICENT REBEL

The turbulent and complicated romantic life of legendary flapper Nancy Cunard (1896-1965).

In her latest, de Courcy, a prolific social historian and author of Chanel’s Riviera and The Husband Hunters, among other books, focuses on bewitching shipping heiress Cunard’s famous lovers and a key, long-lasting friendship with her mother’s lover, the Irish writer George Moore. The author also provides incisive profiles of her lovers. Drawing on Cunard’s revealing diaries, de Courcy zeros in on her 14 years living in the exciting milieu of Jazz Age Paris. The brilliant, independence-seeking Cunard lived an unconventional, remarkable life. She hastily married in 1916, but the relationship lasted less than two years, and her life became a promiscuous, boozy adventure tempered with writing poetry and lamenting the early death of a lover. In 1920, she escaped to Paris. “It was not long,” writes the author, “before Nancy, rich, gorgeous-looking and stylish…became one of the icons” of the Roaring ’20s and a muse to Michael Arlen, author of the popular The Green Hat, whose heroine was modeled on Nancy. Early on, Cunard met the flamboyant, married Ezra Pound, who had his own affairs. Unlike Arlen, de Courcy notes, she deeply loved him for five or six years. It wasn’t reciprocated, but they remained friends. She moved on to numerous cities and the writer and painter Wyndham Lewis, and then to Robert McAlmon, the American writer and influential publisher. Unlike Pound, Aldous Huxley fell “desperately and obsessively” in love with Cunard, but his wife put a firm end to it. Her next lover was Dadaist Tristan Tzara, and they shared a “light-hearted and fun” affair. After Tzara, Cunard experienced an “intense” and doomed “passionate” relationship with poet Louis Aragon. In 1928, Cunard founded the Hours Press, which published Samuel Beckett’s first poem, “Whoroscope,” and had the “most important love affair” of her life, with Henry Crowder, a married Black jazz pianist. Under his influence, she would later publish Negro, her own groundbreaking anthology about African American history, art, and politics.  

A fulsome portrait of a quixotic, disruptive, talented woman.