Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (43 page)

Other women were thriving in similarly practical endeavours: Sylvia Beach had expanded her bookshop into a publishing venture, producing the first English edition of Joyce’s
Ulysses
in 1922. And in 1928, when the Paris-based Three Mountains Press was put up for sale, Nancy saw her opportunity. She was able to purchase a magnificent nineteenth-century hand press, with leftover stock of Vergé de Rives paper and Caslon Old Face type from the press, and its former owner, William Bird, also introduced her to a French printer, Levy, who would be willing to instruct her in her new craft.

Impatient to begin, and enthusiastically supported by Aragon, Nancy made the necessary preparations at Le Puits Carré, and early that summer she was ready to start her apprenticeship. Levy, a political radical and a proudly traditional craftsman, was inclined to patronize his Parisian pupil, informing her she would require a seven-year apprenticeship before she could go into business. But Nancy was wilfully quick to learn, and within a few weeks declared herself, and The Hours Press, ready for production.

The money for this press, and perhaps a little of its inspiration, had come from her father. By the mid-1920s she was seeing very little of Sir Bache: after the divorce from Maud necessitated the sale of Nevill Holt, her rare visits to her father were an ordeal for both of them. The world they had shared during her childhood had shrunk to a remote memory: ‘It seems fantastic now to think of the scale of our existence then, with its numerous servants, gardeners, horses and motor cars,’ and she couldn’t begin to explain to him the way she lived in Paris.
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But Nancy loved her father, and when Sir Bache’s health started to fail in autumn 1925, she went to watch over him. It was ‘rather terrible’, she wrote to Sybil Hart-Davis, but sitting beside him as he died brought Nancy closer to her father than she had been during his lifetime. His instructions for the simplest possible funeral – ‘I would prefer to go to my grave in a farm wagon rather than a hearse,’ moved her deeply, as did the bequest to her of all his remaining capital – £14,500.
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In some ways The Hours became Nancy’s tribute to her father. Living and working in the Normandy countryside, she was nearer to his spirit than to Maud (who disdained both the countryside and manual work). Just as Sir Bache’s happiest hours had been spent in his metal workshop, Nancy discovered an unexpected peace and fulfilment working long days with Aragon or Levy. A photograph shows her hefting the handle of the giant nineteenth-century press like a natural, despite being elegantly dressed in a high-collared shirt and heeled shoes. From the start she felt an affinity for her craft. The slow, shaping process of assembling type for a poem was almost like giving birth: ‘Letter by letter and line by line, it rises from your fingers.’
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The special visual alchemy between font, paper and cover design came easily to her, and The Hours publications were always beautiful – their covers in vermilion, yellow, or duck-egg blue, with illustrations by Man Ray or Tanguy. She even came to prize the permanent ‘slight ingrain of grey’ that the printing left on her fingers: ‘The smell [of the ink] pleased me greatly, as did the beautiful freshness of the glistening pigment. There is no other black or red like it.’
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Nancy had hoped to make The Hours a platform for new and experimental writing, but initially she had to take her commissions where she could find them. Her first publications were a pamphlet by her friend Norman Douglas, a short story by George Moore and Aragon’s translation of Lewis Carroll’s
The Hunting of the Snark.
During the three years in which she was in business, however, the list grew impressively. Nancy would publish the first editions of works by Robert Graves, Havelock Ellis and Arthur Symons, as well as a one-volume edition of Pound’s
Cantos
(1930). She would give a platform to young writers and her greatest coup, although it would take her some time to know it, was to publish, at her own expense, one of the very first works by Samuel Beckett.

Nancy could not claim to have discovered Beckett – he’d been working in Paris as James Joyce’s assistant, and had already published some work in translation – but her publication of one hundred beautifully printed copies of ‘Whoroscope’ (the poem he wrote in response to a poetry prize she launched) raised his profile considerably. So, too, did his association with Nancy. Dissimilar as they were in situation and ambition, Nancy and Beckett became friends. There was an odd physical kinship between them, both so very tall, pale and thin, and Nancy thought his face exceptional, with ‘the fierce austerity of the Mexican eagle’.
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It’s even possible that they were lovers for a night or two, though Beckett had little interest in matching Nancy’s sexual or social drive. The night he got swept into a Montmartre club with her, he berated himself miserably: ‘What in God’s name am I
doing
here.’
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And while they continued to correspond for years, and spoke of each other with affection and loyalty, their worlds inevitably ceased to coincide.

The months during which Nancy was setting up The Hours were among the most satisfying of her life. The ink stains on her fingers, the ache in her muscles, were all solid evidence of the structure she had found for herself. Even so, this settled period of productivity was doomed, as always, by the sheer rage of frustration that descended on Nancy. She began heading off to Paris for days on her own, needing to prowl around the city and be away from Aragon. When Nancy was in this state, her moods were impossible to predict. According to Michelet, she could switch in an instant from being ‘as hard as an independent woman, used to playing with men’ to a ‘tremulous romantic’ who would ‘weep with emotion … like a young woman taken by surprise by unexpected and suddenly burgeoning love.’
⁴⁴

Aragon couldn’t stand the strain. That summer they were locked into a second downward spiral: both drinking too much and both very angry. Nancy, at flash points, could turn unrecognizably violent, her small, white face contorted and savage as she lashed out with her fists. Yet despite the mutually degrading misery of their fights, they were still not done with each other, and Nancy insisted that Aragon accompany her on her summer trip to Venice.

This was yet another punishment, for Aragon had no money to spend on holidays. At the beginning of their affair it hadn’t mattered that Nancy paid for most of the food, drink and travel, or that she subsidized much of Aragon’s work. Now, however, he squirmed at the extent of his financial dependency, and would only agree to accompany Nancy to Venice when some money of his own came through from the sale of a painting. Perhaps he hoped that a change of scene might restore her to her old sweetness and generosity. But while for Nancy that holiday was ‘a hell of a time, gay and mad, fantastic and ominous’, for Aragon it was simply hell.
⁴⁵

He had believed that the cash from his painting would guarantee him a modicum of financial dignity, but Nancy’s impossibly expensive round of restaurant dinners, drinks and dawn revels at the Lido meant he either had to ask for money or stay in the palazzo on his own. He felt himself to be in ‘a false position perfectly intolerable’, and Solita, who was among Nancy’s guests, overheard terrible rows, with Aragon threatening to commit suicide and Nancy taunting him that he lacked the courage.
⁴⁶

She was wrong. One night, after yet another brawl, Aragon stormed out and failed to return. This was not his usual pattern, and as the hours passed even Nancy became alarmed. A search began of the local hotels, and eventually Aragon was found unconscious, having taken an overdose of sleeping pills. He was resuscitated and there was no serious damage done, but he swore that if he remained near Nancy he would try and kill himself again. Leaving for Paris as soon as he was fit, he composed a heartbroken reproach in his ‘Poème à crier dans les ruines’.

Aragon was venomous in his despair: ‘Let us spit if you want/ On what we have loved together.’ But in Venice Nancy appeared almost indifferent to his loss. She had recently counselled the writer Richard Aldington through some emotional difficulties with the advice: ‘Never mind darling you’ll [just] solve those complications by getting into others.’
⁴⁷
This was what she’d always done herself and it was what she did now. While Aragon grieved in Paris she was already moving on, towards the next set of complications, the next lover and the next project.

*   *   *

September drew in, and as Venice began to empty Nancy fell into a routine of going with her cousin Edward Cunard for evening drinks in St Marks Square. She’d taken a fancy to the black jazz quartet playing at the Hotel Luna, and one night, as the musicians were packing up to leave, she invited them to her table for a drink. It was the pianist who most interested her, a man in his late thirties, tall, broad-shouldered and neatly dressed. His round face had a natural sweetness, but there was a craggy authority in his wide cheekbones. His name was Henry Crowder, and over the next few weeks Nancy would fall in love with him – attracted as much by the difficulties he had overcome in his life as for his looks, personality and talent.

Henry had grown up in a poor but devout family in Georgia, learning his music in the church choir and playing piano for the YMCA. Like Josephine Baker he had yearned to live in a world where colour would not define him, and when he left home, he worked his way up to the more liberal cities of the north, washing dishes, taking handyman’s jobs and playing piano in a brothel. By the time America entered the war Henry had made a new life for himself – he was a married man, a father and a respected name on the Washington jazz scene.

The war, however, brought a run of bad luck. With many of America’s musicians drafted to Europe, the jazz business went into recession, and by 1918 Henry was unemployed and his marriage virtually over. He drifted between contracts in Chicago and New York, until finally his luck changed and the new band in which he was playing, Eddie South and his Alabamians, were offered the chance to perform in Europe.

To Henry, the peeling, listing grandeur of Venice was a revelation, as were the people he observed around the city. One woman who came regularly to drink at the Luna he regarded as most ‘peculiar [and] striking’. Normally Henry tended to distance himself from the bawdy comments made by the other band members about the women who listened to them play. But when they were invited to drink at Nancy’s table, he was fascinated by her appearance, ‘so thin, so white and so fragile’, and by the articulate passion with which she spoke to him about his music.
⁴⁸
When she invited him to dinner and began writing him romantic letters, he had no power to resist. As he later acknowledged, he became ‘infatuated beyond all reason’.
⁴⁹

Even so, becoming Nancy’s lover was a profoundly difficult step for Henry. Down in Georgia a black man could be lynched for being with a white woman. Even in the more tolerant cities of Chicago and Washington, where he had experimented with a couple of affairs, he felt as though he were ‘running with the devil’. The taboos of race ran deep, and in one early letter to Nancy he tried to explain the combination of terror and euphoria that their relationship induced in him: ‘It seems that I am bridging centuries in writing to you.’
⁵⁰

In Europe, too, those taboos had power. Nancy chose to linger in Venice after the summer crowd had departed, and she and Henry were much more exposed when they were out together in public. Children shrieked insults at Henry’s black skin; knots of black-shirted fascists watched them closely. Even at the hotel where Henry was lodging, the formerly accommodating proprietor turned hostile, clearly wanting to be rid of him. This kind of bigotry was familiar to Henry; he knew how to blank those looks and jeers, to sheer away from provoking trouble. What, for him, was a far more troubling issue was predicting how Nancy’s attitude would develop. His experience of other racially mixed relationships had taught him that the black man always ended up subservient to the white woman; they could never be equal. He had barely been Nancy’s lover for a fortnight before it became clear that, with her, it would be no different.

Nancy genuinely adored Henry – that much was evident to her friends when the two of them returned to Paris in October. He was unlike anyone she knew, his stories and opinions so interesting to her that she would always claim he was the one man who never bored her. Henry also possessed a touching natural gravitas and the strength to absorb her emotional storms. When Janet Flanner met Henry one day with bruises on his face, inflicted by Nancy’s fist and bangles, he mildly waved aside her concern: ‘Just braceletwork, Miss Janet.’
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Above all, Nancy loved Henry because he was black and a musician. She felt it was a rare privilege to sit alone with him as he improvised at the piano, conjuring jazz out of the keyboard just for her.
*
She felt she had been granted a special, insider status as he introduced her to the other black artists with whom he was now playing at the Plantation club and Le Boeuf sur le Toit.

Yet however much Nancy delighted in Henry and Henry’s world, she had no intention of changing, and shortly after arriving in Paris she started seeing Aragon again. She was piqued that he had found a new lover, a tiny red-headed Russian called Elsa Triolet, whom he would eventually marry, and it brought back a rush of her own feeling for him. Triolet was bewildered by the ease with which Nancy reeled Aragon back to her, the combination of ‘tenderness and snake-like power’ he seemed unable to withstand. After every meeting Aragon would return ‘in pieces’, yet he always went back for more.
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