Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (41 page)

Aldous Huxley became one of the bewitched when he had a brief affair with Nancy in the spring of 1922. Touchingly earnest in her desire to be a poet, terrifyingly assured in her beauty and wealth, infuriating in her fashionable mannerisms, she seemed a maddening enigma, and he became obsessed with the need to solve it. Initially, she was receptive to his interest. She’d met him briefly during the war, when they had both been published in the same anthology. And while he’d then been a poorly paid schoolteacher, rarely able to afford his few ‘whizzing’ trips to London, now, with the publication of his debut novel,
Crome Yellow,
he was being talked of as the new comic-philosophical voice of English fiction. It was his writing more than any physical attraction that caught Nancy’s interest. Pale and lanky Huxley was not a type to appeal to her – although the writer Anita Loos thought him beautiful: ‘A giant in height – with a … magnificent head; the head of an angel drawn by William Blake.’
¹⁶

Yet as casually as she allowed Huxley into her bed, Nancy was ready to discard him. Socially he was of little use to her: he despised the sloganizing and philosophical hot air of the literary Left Bank; he found the smoky atmosphere of bars and clubs deleterious to his weak lungs and he liked to be in bed early. And bed, unfortunately, was the place where Huxley was even less use to Nancy. He adored her body and was aroused to a tender reverence by her sharp-edged fragility, yet the sensitivity of his love-making was almost repugnant to her. Later, without mercy, she confessed to a friend that it was ‘like being crawled over by slugs’.
¹⁷

It was a point of honour to Nancy that she would never fake desire or a sentiment she did not feel, and she tried to convince Huxley that the affair was over. He could not accept it, however, continuing to write her letters and importune meetings. On one desperate night he paced outside her window like ‘a dim haunting ghost’.
¹⁸
Even after his wife, Maria, finally dragged him away to Italy, Huxley was unable to sever himself from Nancy. She was an idée fixe, an obsession lodged inside him, and he wrote about her and niggled away at her again and again in his fiction.
*

His first literary portrait of Nancy appeared in
Antic Hay,
a satire of post-war London that skewered the intellectual vacuities and artistic pretensions of the age. Myra Viveash was a brittle society beauty whose cultivated smartness and atrophied heart were symbolic of the world in which she moved; to the extent that she was Nancy, it was a cruel lampooning. Yet despite Huxley’s satiric intent, the portrait remained charged with his first fascinated adoration of her. He described Myra-Nancy with a lover’s attentive detail: her ‘palely brightly inexpressive eyes’, the eerie grace of her dancer’s walk: ‘placing her feet with meticulous precision one after the other in the same straight line … Floating she seemed to go, with a little spring at every step.’
¹⁹

He was also conscientious about excusing her deadened affect through the sufferings of her past – Myra, like Nancy, had lost her first, great love. However, the more distant from Nancy Huxley became, the fewer redeeming qualities he gave her fictional incarnations. Barbara in
Those Barren Leaves
(1925) was a crass artistic snob; Lucy Tantamount in
Point Counter Point
(1928) was the sexually depraved and intellectually lazy product of ‘too much money and leisure’. When Lucy recollects being half raped by a stranger, her account hums with perverse excitement: ‘He came at me as though he would kill me. Letting oneself be hurt, humiliated, used like a doormat – queer. I like it. Besides the doormat uses the user. It’s complicated.’
²⁰

*   *   *

Arlen and Huxley’s fiction set in motion a literary mythologizing of Nancy, and it was a process continued by many others. The writer Harold Acton later commented that she had ‘inspired half the poets and novelists of the twenties’.
²¹
Some were her lovers, others more distant acquaintances, including Evelyn Waugh, who would scatter a generalized Nancy-glitter over several of his fictional characters. In
Unconditional Surrender
(1961), she would inspire the figure of Virginia Troy, who was presented as the emblem of a fascinating generation, a ghost of romance, ‘exquisite … doomed and … damning … we shall never see anyone like her again in literature or in life’.
²²

Later, Nancy lost interest in her own artistic celebrity, but when she was young it was simultaneously flattering and disruptive to be cast as muse to so many – there were painters and photographers as well as writers. During the early 1920s she still felt unformed and uncertain of herself: as she groped to find a poetic voice and to create a life in which she could believe, it didn’t help to see herself in the distorting mirrors of other people’s fantasies.

It wasn’t simply the puzzle of her behaviour that challenged so many to write about her. Raymond Mortimer, then an aspiring novelist, found her beauty heart stopping when he first met her in 1921 on a boat crossing the Channel. ‘Everybody old, it is hoped, can look back to one person who was incomparably bewitching: and I have never met anyone to equal Nancy Cunard.’
²³
Writers scrabbled for adjectives to capture the essence of her uncompromising beauty. To David Garnett it was the brilliant pallor of her skin, ‘as white as bleached almonds’;
²⁴
to Harold Acton it was the shapeliness of her small head, ‘carved out of crystal’, and the arctic brightness of her unwavering blue-green gaze. To Carlos Williams it was the tapering length of her legs and the delicate poise of her ankles, a ‘tall blond spike of woman’;
²⁵
to George Moore it was her beautiful back, ‘as long as a weasel’s’ (and given to Brigit, a character in his 1926 novel
Ulick and Soracha
).

Nancy’s distinctive appearance was equally appealing to journalists and photographers. Fashion was being marketed on a mass scale after the war, but the more widespread its reach, the higher the premium placed on individual style. People wanted to be seen in the latest trends, yet they also wanted their clothes to be an expression of their personality. A woman who spent her wages on a cape of vibrant chevron design, or an art deco powder compact, believed she was making choices that were no less creative than the bright young aesthetes fashioning outfits for a costume ball, art students adopting gypsy skirts and headscarves or sapphists in their tailored suits and green carnations.

Few, however, dressed more creatively than Nancy. The turbans and scarves she customized in the early 1920s, the geometric fabrics she commissioned from the artist Sonia Delaunay, the enormous African earrings and ivory bangles she began wearing in the mid-1920s, all looked astonishing on her and were seized upon by journalists as the possible start of a trend. Even her make-up was different – eyes elongated with a dramatic line of kohl, her lipstick a slash of scarlet that gave her mouth a determined, even savage tension. During these years any publication that made use of Nancy’s face could guarantee itself a frisson of modernity.

Certainly there was barely a photograph in which she didn’t appear perfectly in control of her image, from casual snapshots taken by friends to the formal portraits of Cecil Beaton. In the famous series he shot in 1929, Nancy’s pose had the quality of an abstract artwork – sharp chin resting in the palm of her hand, thin arms loaded with ivory and ebony bangles. Yet while she lavished time and passion on her physical appearance – and many would say she had a genius for it – Nancy was wary of being defined by it. It was never her clothes for which she wanted to be famous, only her writing.

*   *   *

During the first half of the decade, Nancy worked hard on her poetry. As she moved from hotel to hotel she kept her notebooks and pens close by; even when she was holidaying across Europe she maintained a writer’s discipline, using her diary entries and letters to hone her eye and her style. By April 1921 she had had her first volume of poetry published, and received some encouraging attention. The tone of
Outlaws
might be marred by traces of Nancy’s old adolescent posturing, with lines in which she cast herself as ‘the perfect stranger/Outcast and outlaw from the rules of life’, but as a collection it was welcomed by the
Nation,
who judged it a volume of ‘entirely genuine and strangely individual, if imperfect poems’.

George Moore, writing in the
Observer,
thought Nancy showed signs of ‘genius’, ‘a special way of feeling and seeing’, even if he demurred over a lack of ‘handicraft, tact [and] judgement’.
²⁶
But Moore of course was tenderly biased, and Nancy was given a far more relentlessly objective assessment of her work when she sent a poem to Ezra Pound, hoping for help in getting it published. Pound’s response was personally affable, but he made it clear that Nancy was still a novice, with much to learn, and that her voice, if she had one, was hard to discern under the muffling influence of her favourite childhood poets.

Lovely Nancy,

I will take the poem to the Dial this evening, but, my dear, why why the devil do you write in that obsolete dialect with the cadences of the late Alfred Tennyson …

Iambic pentameter is a snare because it constantly lets one in for dead phrases … rhyme is no good unless you use it without letting it disturb the order of the words …

Damn it all, midnight is midnight, it is not ‘this midnight hour’.
²⁷

The list of her shortcomings was hard to read, but Nancy stuck the letter into her poetry scrapbook and kept it. Pound’s editorial toughness had the status of holy writ amongst writers she revered,
*
including T.S. Eliot, with whom, according to one biographer, she’d had a brief sexual encounter the previous year. There was another reason for cherishing the letter however – the sweetness of its tone and the hint it contained of something more intimate. Pound was now living in Paris (Nancy had written to him from London) and there was a kind of invitation in his closing paragraph: ‘I wish you would come back and deliver me from the ferocious mercies of wandering American females.’

Nancy had had a slight crush on Pound ever since he’d come to tea with Maud in 1915 – the sartorial brio of his gold earring and green baize trousers as impressive to her as his intellect. And there is some evidence to suggest that after her return to Paris, she began an affair with the poet. It could only ever have been intermittent. In his own fashion, Pound remained committed to his wife, the English painter Dorothy Shakespear, and the longest period Nancy ever had him to herself was a walking holiday in Southern France in 1922, which they took while Shakespear was away. To Nancy it seems to have been a near perfect time. Large landscapes were always liberating to her, and Pound, with his vehement opinions and boundless curiosity, was their human equivalent. The fact that she couldn’t ever possess him only made him more desirable.

She tried to arrange other rendezvous, taking an apartment in Venice in the autumn of 1922, where they might write poetry together. ‘Do come. I can see us at breakfast splitting a fig, muttering over the foulness of the tea … There will be hours devoted to the two typewriters.’ She believed she might be a better poet, even a better person, if only she could have more contact with him: ‘I am dull without you … I have no application. I am getting so drunk on this Bianco Vermouth alone, surrounded by the Paris nostalgia.’
²⁸

But Pound never came. He cared for Nancy, but he preferred his mistresses to be less complex, less hard work, and their affair, such as it was, petered down to an exchange of letters and occasional meetings. Even so, Nancy’s second collection of poems,
Sublunary,
was charged with his presence.
*
Memories of their holiday in France were filtered into ‘Pays Hanté’; in ‘You Have Lit the Only Candle’ she paid homage to Pound’s cleansing effect on her sexually, his ‘straight flame’ of desire, ‘absolving’ her from the muddle and ‘shame’ of her own.

This 1923 collection paid homage to Pound’s critical influence, too, as Nancy laboured to tighten her style. But it was in her third and most important work,
Parallax
(1925), that she attempted her own version of his modernist poetic. This extended work, written in multiple voices and registers, was very evidently inspired by the structure of T.S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land,
which had been published three years earlier and had been closely edited by Pound.
^†
However, the landscapes in which Nancy placed her poetic voices and the issues she broached were very personal to her. Parts of
Parallax
read like extracts from her diaries, vivid travelogue jostling with confessional self-doubt and earnest, intellectual argument.

It was her most experimental, and her most intensely visualized, poem. Raymond Mortimer saw in it ‘a desolate sort of beauty … particularly poignant to my contemporaries’; the
Times Literary Supplement
admired it as the ‘creation of a resilient mind’.
²⁹
Yet others could not see past its debt to Eliot, and continued to question the individuality of Nancy’s style. And this was a doubt that was slowly, unhappily, beginning to grow in her mind too. She might be able to create brilliant, original effects with make-up and clothes, yet that same flair eluded her with language and form.