By Fate Misbred

If Nancy Cunard had not existed, someone would have had to invent her. As it is, many have done so anyway. There are famous images of her by, among others, Kokoschka, Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, and Brancusi; one finds characters based on her in novels, stories, and plays by Aldous Huxley, Michael Arlen, Wyndham Lewis, Evelyn Waugh, and Tristan Tzara; and she figures in poems by Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Louis Aragon, and Pablo Neruda. This is to name but a few. Naming but a few is all one can reasonably be expected to do in this case, since Nancy Cunard seems to have known—most often in the biblical sense—everyone who was anyone, as well as everyone who was not, and a great many who never came close. And in that order, since the biography of Nancy Cunard is among other things a story of grandeur et décadence. Balzac would have had fun with her, as would Zola. But to do full justice to the first part of her life might have required a more unbridled pen: the Marquis de Sade perhaps, or, even better, Petronius.

When William Carlos Williams called Nancy Cunard "one of the major phenomena of history" (xiii), he was surely referring to her fantastic sexual exploits. She seems to have been something like an early Paris Hilton crossed with Woody Allen's Zelig: a fabulously rich heiress of whom one may never have heard, but who turns out to have been present behind the scenes at almost every major movement in the twentieth century, and to have slept with a truly heroic number of the major figures in the arts. Her story is, among other things, a history of the century seen through a life at once extraordinary—it could hardly have been otherwise, given her background—and exemplary. It is exemplary in the sense that Nancy Cunard threw herself into every cause that she encountered, and she encountered a great many of them. She conformed to every form of nonconformism the first half of the twentieth century had to offer. Artistically, for instance, she became a proponent and practitioner of vorticism, imagism, dadaism, surrealism, and modernism in general. Politically, she embraced among others the causes of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, the Resistance in France, and, in particular, that of Black liberation.

The subtitle of this biography calls her "heiress, muse, political idealist," and that order of importance (as well as chronology) seems to be about right. The fabulous wealth and privilege she was born into allowed her to become an extremely prolific muse, and her sexual and financial generosity to a remarkable number of the twentieth century's creative spirits resulted in the inclusion of versions of her in a great many works of poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, and photography. Her political idealism operated in similar ways. Throughout all of this, she wrote a great deal, and published several collections of poems. While Lois Gordon tries to make a case for the quality of her poetry, the examples we are given justify the subtitle's exclusion of this aspect of her activity; her poems are generally pale imitations of the work of whomever she was sleeping with at any given moment. Since her early conquests include Pound and Eliot, it is not difficult to discern her poetic influences.

She was, however, a talented and energetic anthologist, and her magnum opus was magnum indeed. The 855-page Negro, published in 1934, was a labor of love, inspired by her relationship with Henry Crowder, an African-American jazz musician. It was also an encyclopedic compendium of scholarly and personal essays on a variety of afrocentric subjects, containing 200 entries written by 150 contributors, including a truly dazzling array of authors brought together by Cunard. Among them were Harold Acton, Theodore Dreiser, W. E. B. DuBois (who both contributed to the volume and came under attack in its pages for insufficient revolutionary zeal), Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Pound (by this time highly...