Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (40 page)

Chapter Nine

NANCY

When Tallulah made her debut in
The Green Hat,
she was not the only woman in London reputed to be the inspiration for its lovely, errant heroine, Iris. Idina Sackville, with whom Tallulah had lodged at Olga Lynn’s, was mooted as one possibility, but an even more likely candidate was Nancy Cunard. The physical match was compelling—Nancy was tall and blonde like Iris—and both women regarded themselves as fugitives from society.
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More compelling still was the fact that Nancy had been romantically involved with Iris’s creator, Michael Arlen.

Nancy had known Arlen slightly during the war, but it was early in 1920 that she began to fall in love with him. He was Armenian by birth, a small, tightly strung man with dark liquid eyes and a very flamboyant, un-English style of dress. To Nancy’s male friends, Arlen appeared gaudy and meretricious. ‘I really can’t see why you like this ghastly Oriental rug merchant,’ griped St John Hutchinson. Yet their contempt only made his foreignness more beguiling to her.
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It was Arlen’s writing that most attracted her, however. Nancy had always fantasized about a life of shared literary endeavour, and the Baron, as she called him then,
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had already published several essays, short stories and a play, and was halfway through his first novel. She was awed by his output, believing it would be a spur to her own poetry, and after she had vowed to start a new life in Paris, it was Arlen she took with her on long, exploratory visits to the city.

He was, it seemed, the perfect companion, matching Nancy’s own inquisitiveness and delight: ‘It was always champagne,’ she recalled, ‘and our heads were often swimming.’
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They liked to walk the maze of gravel paths that criss-crossed the Jardins du Luxembourg, or watch the busy river traffic on the Seine. They dined among Pigalle prostitutes at their favourite restaurant La Perle, and after jazzing in the clubs of Montmartre they wandered back to their hotel room in the misty flush of the Paris dawn. Yet Nancy’s romance with the city could not soften the critical, edgy reaction that always set in with any man who wasn’t Peter. By the autumn she was finding fault with every aspect of Arlen. He was proving irksomely proprietorial as a lover: becoming ‘sullen as distant thunder … brooding and brewing’ if another man showed an interest in her.
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He was talking of marriage, enraging Nancy as much by his presumption that she would accept him as by his obliviousness to the fact that marriage to Sydney had made her swear she would never again be anyone’s wife.

Even his role as an outsider was becoming an irritant. Nancy had felt shocked sympathy for what Arlen’s family had suffered when they’d been exiled by the Turks in 1901, but she couldn’t understand the exhaustingly personal grudges he continued to hold against the world. One long, winter evening, when he launched into a litany of the insults he had suffered, the querulousness of his tone grated so badly that she realized she was shredding the pages of the new book she was meant to be cutting.

But above all Nancy could not overlook Arlen’s literary flaws. When he gave her the draft of his first novel,
Piracy,
to read, she was impressed by its ‘beautiful gift for observation’
⁴
and its courage in charting the sexual and social issues of their generation. Yet Arlen was squandering his talents on a fantasy of London life whose banality and snobbery made her wince. ‘You go on and on writing about Cocktails with a capital C,’ she berated him, ‘and ladies and gentlemen of Mayfair the likes of whom never existed.
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Even more disconcertingly, it was her own life that he was using to flesh out this fantasy. On almost every page of
Piracy
she met an exaggerated but recognizable version of herself. Virginia Tracy, the novel’s heroine, was her blonde, aristocratic and rebellious twin. During the war she had escaped from her socially formidable mother to a restaurant virtually identical to the Eiffel Tower, where ‘tawny haired women of almost barbaric fairness [toyed] with their food and their poets’. She acquired a reputation for ‘glamour and a rottenness’ that meant even ‘decent men [took] licence with her name’.
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Nancy was conscious that Arlen had to make a living, and initially she tolerated his literary plunderings, but they continued long after
Piracy
was published and their affair was over. When
The Green Hat
first appeared in the bookshops in 1924 she was furious to see that yet again Arlen had rifled her personal life. To her friend Janet Flanner she complained that everyone was talking about it – a complete stranger, a ‘perfect swine’, had come up to Nancy at a party and begun interrogating her as to ‘whether or no I was the Green Hat’.
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On a very fundamental level she was not: despite their shared reputation for social and sexual deviancy, Iris lacked Nancy’s intellectual stringency and wit. Yet however quick she was to brush off the connection, Arlen’s borrowings remained a violation. Some were only a betrayal of small intimacies, such as the scene in which Iris, alone with her lover, dreamily traces her name in candle smoke, just as Nancy herself had once done. But one in particular was a brutal invasion of her privacy.

In December 1920, when Nancy’s affair with Arlen was coming to an end, she was admitted to a private clinic in Paris for a curettage or scraping of the uterus lining. The procedure may have been to terminate a pregnancy – the high surgeon’s fees suggest that discretion was part of the price – or it may have been related to an underlying gynaecological condition: Nancy always complained of painful periods. But either because it was badly botched, or because she was suffering from something more serious, in early January a second, more drastic operation followed, in which the whole of Nancy’s womb was removed.

In 1920 a hysterectomy was a major surgical event, and afterwards Nancy developed a series of near-fatal infections. She made little of the episode afterwards, referring to it in the baldest of factual terms in her diary:

Dec, Jan, Feb. in the hospital in Paris

1st Op
Curettage

2nd Op
Hysterectomy

3rd Op
Appendicitis, Peritonitis, Gangrene with ‘a two per cent chance of survival’.
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Arlen, however, helped himself freely to the details of her suffering, first in
Piracy
and again in
The Green Hat.
It must surely have been horrible for Nancy to revisit his melodramatic embroiderings:

‘It hurts,’ she whispered ‘… Frightful … There’s things inside me,’ she said with a sob. ‘Steel things. They’ve left them in there … holding things together … Look,’ she said pitifully. And she lifted up her hands under the clothes, and he saw that they were tied together with a handkerchief. ‘That’s to stop me tearing the things out and killing myself.’
⁹

A decade later Nancy would suggest that she had happily embraced the hysterectomy, which put an end to all cumbersome contraception and fear of abortion, but in truth it was a blow to her always precarious health, leaving her physically scarred and with her hormones harrowingly askew. In 1951 she would admit to her friend Solita Solano that she believed her lifetime of bad ‘nerves’ had been caused by ‘those operations of 1921 – gland deficiency of some kind’.
¹⁰
And even though she had rarely expressed any interest in being a mother, apart from when she had fantasized about a life with Peter, twenty-five was still a very young age for Nancy to have her reproductive future taken away from her; a very young age to have yet another door slammed on her chance of ordinary happiness.

When Nancy recovered, she seemed to resume her old busy life. In Paris, she moved between different hotels, looking for a place to settle. She danced at the Plantation Club and Le Grand Duc, where Bricktop sang and the Harlem poet Langston Hughes worked as a waiter; she drank at the Dingo and the Jockey. She grew familiar with the Left Bank crowd, who drifted between the bookshops owned by Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, and the little art galleries, bars and cafés of Montparnasse. She may have noticed Tamara, smoking and watchful at her solitary table, minding her centimes and planning her career. But mostly Nancy would have been too busily in the thick of café conversation, talking about Freud, Diaghilev or jazz, her curiosity and intellect at full stretch.

The
Daily Mail
delighted in tracking her new lifestyle. ‘Nancy vows she wont stand us anymore. Whenever she can she leaves us for Paris … As a rule, Nancy affects the Society of Futurist Artists and Highbrows, whereas the friends of Lady Cunard are either statesmen, brilliant Society beauties, or operatic celebrities who don’t bother their heads about books and things.
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Other papers were assiduous in tracking Nancy’s travels around Europe as she moved with the summer flock of tourists.

The image she presented was rich and confident, one of the cleverest and most stylish of the new decade’s flappers. The
Daily Express
fanfared her arrival in Monte Carlo in March 1922 with the promise of many interesting outfits to report: ‘Miss Nancy Cunard … who admires eccentricities in dress and appearance … carries out her ideas with courage and success. She was one of the first to adopt the Eton crop.’ The
Sketch
supplied further details of the ‘mauve tulle scarf tied across her eyebrows, with floating ends under a big grey felt hat, which looked, oh, so Spanish’.
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Yet however confident Nancy appeared, those who watched her closely saw a driven quality in her social gyrations. Leonard Woolf noted the vulnerability behind her smart opinions and clever clothes, while Mary Hutchinson, wife of St John, equally saw dark shadows moving behind her bright veneer. Everyone commented on how thin she was becoming.

Nancy looked ‘burned to the bone’, said William Carlos Williams, observing that some days she appeared to survive on little beyond champagne or cheap white wine.
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If she was not clinically anorexic, she was sometimes very close. To the poet Brian Howard, her ‘thinness … was a sort of thing in itself in her’, going far beyond fashionable slenderness. It was as though she were making herself as light and steely as possible, a thin blade of a woman cutting away her past, clearing her way towards a future.

Certainly she was putting as much distance as she could between herself and Maud. Year by year she grew more critical of her mother: despising the way she reduced art and ideas to trivial dinner table talk; finding her fashionable caprices increasingly contemptible. In 1926, when Maud changed her name to Emerald on the advice of a numerologist, Nancy refused to acknowledge it. She couldn’t bear to imagine that, among the several traits they shared, she had in any way inherited her mother’s flightiness. Three years later, when she responded to a literary questionnaire that invited her to list the qualities she most prized in herself,
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Nancy chose to describe herself as ‘impervious, concentrated, secret and unquestionable’.
¹⁴

Financially independent, ferociously well educated and fearlessly stylish, Nancy could easily give the impression of moving imperviously through the early years of the decade. She took many lovers, some of whom were fleeting diversions, some of whom, like Wyndham Lewis, were important to her. ‘Dear dear Lewis,’ she wrote to him in 1923, ‘I get warmed when I am with you – you are a sort of black sun, dark earth, rich and full of new things, potential harvests, always dark,
plein de sève,
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oil, blood, bread and comfort … I cannot get a nearer word than Rich.’
¹⁵
Yet whatever the seriousness of her affairs Nancy appeared to pursue them without fuss or guilt. She didn’t brag about them like Tallulah, nor did she elevate them into a feminist cause. She seemed almost wilfully not to care how other peopled judged or interpreted her.

But other people did judge, of course. While a man like Duff could run dozens of mistresses and be applauded for his vigour, a woman who took as many lovers as Nancy was either a hardened nymphomaniac or fascinatingly damaged. William Carlos Williams inclined towards the latter view: he saw a martyred quality in Nancy’s promiscuity, as if she were seeking a form of spiritual purity through physical excess. It was true, certainly, that beneath the casual trafficking of her love affairs, Nancy’s relationship with sex remained complicated. To every new relationship she brought the hope of finding an emotion as large and pure as the love she had felt for Peter, but she also brought an equal terror of becoming trapped, as she had been with Sydney. Hope and fear alike made her restless, critical and self-conscious, and these emotions were compounded by her difficulty in finding a lover who could satisfy her in bed.

Orgasm was very hard for Nancy; to experience any kind of arousal she needed to feel a degree of physical pain, and some men were made queasy by her demands. Wyndham Lewis, for instance, admitted to a friend that he had to break off with Nancy because he found her requests for anal penetration perverse. Far more sympathetic was Raymond Michelet, the young surrealist writer with whom Nancy had an affair in 1931, who understood that the physical scarring left by her gynaecological history had affected her sensitivity, making pain an essential stimulus to pleasure. Between Lewis and Michelet there were many other men who, while confused by the riddle of Nancy’s sexuality, were also bewitched by it. They fell in love with her because they wanted to understand her.