Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (44 page)

Henry, even less accustomed to such games, was similarly bewildered. But what hurt him more was Nancy’s new affair with his friend Mike, the cockily handsome banjo player in the Alabamians. Everyone was gossiping. Richard Aldington smirked that black musicians had now become Nancy’s ‘stronger sexual drug’: that she’d adopted the ‘
culte des nègres
’ and was ‘no longer interested in poor white trash’.
⁵³

For Henry, this very public cuckolding marked the end of his unconditional infatuation with Nancy. However, he loved her sufficiently and was pragmatic enough to accommodate himself to this new state of affairs. He realized that Nancy would always be more powerful than him, that he would always be ‘a pawn upon her chessboard of life’,
⁵⁴
but he believed that he could also choose to play the game on his terms. His motive for coming to Europe had been to enrich himself, culturally as well as financially, and it was clear that Nancy’s breadth of experience and ‘independence of thought’ were the best education he could hope for. Finally, he accepted that it was a privilege to be part of her life, for the ‘innumerable new things’ she could show him.
⁵⁵

He didn’t like everything he saw, though. Oliver Messel, arriving at a party with his ‘eyelashes done in silver’ disgusted him, and at first he was deeply affronted by Janet and Solita’s lesbian relationship, which offended every principle of his Baptist upbringing. Yet Henry’s inquisitiveness and intelligence were stronger than his prejudice; he grew fond of Janet and Solita, he learned how to flirt safely with the queers. And as Nancy took him round Paris he began to feel himself a figure of interest, even of fame.

For a couple of months the relationship remained in this state of equilibrium. But just before Christmas, Henry and the Alabamians were put out of work after Mike, the banjo player, was thrown into jail following a brawl with another musician that had escalated into a gunfight. New gigs were hard to find in the winter season, and Nancy suggested that Henry come down to Réanville, where she was continuing to work for half the week at The Hours Press. At first it was almost idyllic: during the evenings Henry played piano while Nancy read and did her accounts; during the days he helped work the press and made repairs to the house. But being at Nancy’s beck and call, as well as being financially dependent on the small assistant’s wages she paid him, made his situation increasingly uncomfortable.

Nancy could be tactless and very cruel about money. She had grown up in a world where wealth was equivalent to status, and despite her passionately held egalitarian theories, she found it hard to respect Henry, who had nothing. Despite the guilt she felt at living off her family’s capital, she inherited Maud’s tendency to use money as a weapon and means of control. In Réanville, if Henry angered her by making a mistake at the press, or simply inflamed her with his imperturbably patient manner, she accused him with breathtaking unfairness of being too lazy to go out and earn a proper living.

This was one of the few insults that could get a rise out of Henry, who was acutely sensitive to any suggestion that he was Nancy’s gigolo. It made him feel his situation at Réanville was untenable in every way, not only financially but sexually (the knowing look on the face of Nancy’s driver spoke insolent volumes of the casual fling she had previously had with him). By the spring he could stand the atmosphere no longer and moved back to the city, where he found a job playing piano at the Bateau Ivre nightclub.

Nancy, too, was keen to leave Réanville. She was tiring of the weekly commute to Paris and believed she could secure more business for the press if she relocated it to the city. She had already found a suitable shop and workroom at 15 rue Gueneguad, and over the spring and early summer she transported the whole of The Hours’ operations there. In commercial terms it was a clever move: the shop window and interior were strikingly dressed with Miro paintings, Brazilian headdresses and choice African art, and Nancy’s sales figures rose as a result. However, now that she was living in the city, without the relative calm of her interludes at Réanville, her health began to suffer.

As Harold Acton observed, she was working and playing like a woman possessed: ‘The clock did not exist for her: in town she dashed in and out of taxis, clutching an attaché case crammed with letters manifestoes, estimates, circulars and her latest African bangle … A snack now and then but seldom a regular meal; she looked famished and quenched her hunger with harsh white wine and gutsy talk.’
⁵⁶
She was ricocheting between affairs, the latest of which was with another black piano player called Dan. Richard Aldington thought she was behaving atrociously, even by her standards: ‘She lacks not only elemental common sense but the capacity to love with any purpose, continuity, tenderness.’ Henry, too, was reaching the limits of his patience; increasingly mortified by a sense that people were ‘laughing at me and considering me a fool’, he was threatening to return to America.
⁵⁷

Yet as hard as Nancy seemed to be pushing Henry away from her, she did not want to let him go. Later she would claim that he was the man she had loved most, his sweetness and humour, his music and physical attraction retained their power however much she abused them. She saw him as both an artist and a noble savage. And by the end of 1929 he had begun to embody something even more necessary, an ideological cause and a political commitment. At first Nancy’s fascination with Henry’s colour had centred on her romance with jazz and African art. She had badgered him to travel with her to Africa to discover his cultural roots, and had been disappointed to discover how little he shared her curiosity. Partly, he’d foreseen the world of trouble that would await a black man and white woman travelling around Africa together, but as he pointed out to Nancy, that aspect of his heritage meant little to him: ‘I
ain’t
African, I’m
American.
’
⁵⁸

It was only gradually that Nancy came round to appreciating what being a black American meant. During the winter that she and Henry spent in Réanville, she began to question him closely about his past, and as he explained to her in detail about segregation, race riots and the re-emergent Ku Klux Klan, she felt a huge and intoxicating anger. It was from this point on that all the vague political sympathies she’d held in the past began to focus on Henry and the injustice meted out to his race.

She was now alert to every narrowed, hateful glance shot at Henry by the redneck American tourists who seemed to be everywhere in Paris in the late 1920s. She was mortified by the ignorance that even her close friends displayed about what it was like to be black. And by the summer of 1930 she had come up with her own means of restitution. She planned to publish an anthology of black art and history that would not only open the world’s eyes to the richness of black culture, but would chart the terrible centuries of persecution that blacks had suffered.

Negro
became a heroic obsession, eclipsing all of Nancy’s interest in The Hours, which she abandoned in 1931. It absorbed her energy and much of her money as she researched and commissioned the essays, stories, poetry, music and photographs that would fill its eight hundred and fifty pages. When the project took her to New York, the press portrayed her as a depraved English lady with a taste for black flesh; she received hate mail accusing her of being a ‘hoor’ and a ‘nigger fucker’. One threat came with the signature of the Klan, ‘I hope that when you try to free the lousy niggers down in Alabama the white people will lynch you.’
⁵⁹

Negro
also had the effect of alienating Nancy from many of her friends, and it dealt the final, fatal blow to her relationship with Maud. Nancy had, for a while, attempted to keep Henry a secret from her mother, knowing the exhausting and humiliating fuss that would inevitably ensue. However, Maud had finally been forced to confront the gossip circulating about her daughter when her old friend and rival Margot Asquith had enquired loudly after Nancy at a lunch party, ‘What is it now – drink, drugs or niggers?’
⁶⁰

Margot’s jibe was humiliating, but the timing was even worse: Nancy was about to arrive in London, with Henry in tow. She was trying to organize a private screening of the surrealist film
L’Age d’Or,
which had been banned in Paris as both blasphemous and obscene. To Maud, the knowledge that her daughter would be walking openly around London with a negro lover was intolerably shaming, and she hired private detectives to shadow the couple and find evidence of anything that might get Henry arrested and deported. Maud also set in motion a campaign of harassment, including anonymous phone calls being made to Rudolf Stulik, who had rented rooms to Nancy and Henry at the Tower, threatening him with jail unless the latter was evicted.

Nancy was sickened by her mother’s behaviour, and although Henry tried to calm the situation, begging Nancy not to quarrel on his account, she was beyond any possibility of compromise. The febrile energy with which she had been working and partying in Paris now channelled into this single issue, and it was from this moment that she began, obdurately, to see the world solely in terms of those who were with her and those who were not.

Friends were urged to take sides. After she returned to Paris in January 1931, she wrote an emotional letter to George Moore, begging for his support and demanding to know ‘how YOU feel’. Moore, aged seventy-nine, couldn’t find it in his heart to make a choice between the two women he had loved for so long, and refrained from replying. Nancy’s agitation intensified when she heard intimations that Maud was planning to disinherit her. It would be a disaster, not only curtailing her lifestyle, but making it impossible for her to continue with
Negro.
In truth, Maud was merely planning to reduce Nancy’s allowance, blaming the recent collapse of the American markets, but Nancy was already consumed by righteous anger. To punish Maud, she wrote two vitriolic essays, both directly aimed at her.

The first was a short, satirical squib, attacking the stiff-upper-lipped bigotry of the British upper classes, and it concentrated most of its poison in the title, ‘Does Anyone Know Any Negros?’ – a direct quote from Maud.
*
The second, however, entitled ‘Black Man and White Ladyship’, was a devastating personal attack. Ostensibly this eleven-page pamphlet was a history of institutionalized racism, but Nancy had devoted nearly a third of it to a list of her mother’s perceived sins: her snobbery, her extravagance, her intellectual timidity and her prejudice.

Nancy’s hatred coursed through the essay, relentlessly mocking ‘her Ladyship’s snobbery’: ‘If a thing is
done
she will, with a few negligible exceptions, do it’; her extravagance: ‘I have not the faintest idea how much I spend on clothes every year. It may run into thousands’;
⁶¹
the vapid nature of her social life: ‘She is so alone – between little lunches of sixteen, a few callers at tea and two or three invitations per night’.
⁶²
The pamphlet was sent out, not only to her own friends but to all of her mother’s, including, allegedly, the Prince of Wales. It horrified almost everyone who read it. Janet and Solita squirmed, Henry thought it ‘atrocious’ and the general feeling was that Nancy could only be excused by the fact that her health was in such a bad state. Brian Howard, who had holidayed with her and Henry in February that year, had thought she was close to becoming unhinged, even then: ‘She talked so much, seemed unable to stop. The whispery, disjointed voice goes on and on. A kind of sober drunkenness. Drinking is now fatal to her.’ Howard also noted that she was ‘bickering’ constantly with ‘the infinitely patient, stupid Henry’, whose impassivity was almost as intolerable to witness as Nancy’s agitation.
⁶³

In fact, Henry wasn’t so much patient as numbed: ‘My reaction … was an absolute blank,’
⁶⁴
he wrote. He knew now that Nancy was ill, possibly close to a breakdown, and even though he didn’t fully break off their relationship until 1935, he had almost given up believing he could help her. Even Maud understood that Nancy was barely answerable for her actions. With careful restraint she refused to react to the insults her daughter had published, commenting only that ‘one can always forgive anyone who is ill’.
⁶⁵

Nancy, however, did not want to be forgiven. Publishing ‘Black Man and White Ladyship’ had been a deliberate act of matricide, killing off her relationship with Maud. She never saw her mother again and refused even write to her, putting her away with the rest of her past: the unhappy, privileged limbo of her childhood, the burnt-out excesses of the war, the flapper frivolity of Charleston lessons and of Parisian café chatter. Thin-skinned and angry, Nancy believed the time for playing was over. Others might have considered her to be the most stylish muse of the 1920s, but she herself was turning her face towards a new decade – and a new life of political activism.

Chapter Ten

ZELDA

When Zelda and Scott came to Paris in May 1924, they were as hopeful for new beginnings as Nancy had been four years earlier. Sunshine filtered through late-blooming horse chestnuts, and lovers drank wine in pavement cafés as if Prohibition had never been invented. With the exchange rate at nineteen francs to the dollar and rising, the Fitzgeralds felt themselves to be rich and free. As they walked together down the Champs-Elysées, Scott flourished a jaunty silver-headed cane and Zelda wore a simple blue frock of her own design. She called it her Jeanne d’Arc dress.