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ABSTRACT
While Nancy Cunard is often understood in relation to the modernist and surrealist circles in which she moved in the early-twentieth century, as Jane Marcus’s recent work on Cunard indicates, her connections with late-Victorian aestheticism and decadent modernism were also quite strong. The decadent modernist Norman Douglas was a particularly significant influence on Cunard. This essay considers the manner in which decadent eroticism and Orientalism shaped Cunard’s consumption of Blackness and her relationship to the Black jazz musician Henry Crowder by paying close attention to two texts, her own Grand Man: Memories of Norman Douglas and Crowder’s account of his affair with Cunard, As Wonderful as All That? Placing these two texts in conversation with one another provides insight into the way Cunard’s admiration for Douglas informed and enabled her erotic appetites, illuminating the perpetual pull towards racial fetishism so evident within her practices. The impact of Douglas’s mentorship on Cunard serves here as a representative example of decadent cosmopolitanism’s more troubling afterlives, allowing for a consideration of the bad affects and disturbing attachments decadence fostered in its wake.
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Notes
1 Martin, “George Moore and Literary Wagnerism,” 33; Cunard, GM, 17; Marcus, Perfect Stranger, 194.
2 Hext and Murray, introduction to Decadence in the Age of Modernism.
3 Tree, “Nancy Cunard,” 72.
4 Cunard, These Were the Hours, 66.
5 Marcus, Perfect Stranger, 152. Eve Sedgwick’s discussion of the avuncular might serve to illuminate the nature of the relationship between Cunard and “Uncle Norman.” As Sedgwick notes, “because aunts and uncles (in either narrow or extended meanings) are adults whose intimate access to children needn’t depend on their own pairing or procreation, it’s very common, of course, for some of them to have the office of representing noncomforming or nonreproductive sexualities to children” (Sedgwick, Tendencies, 63). Douglas certainly played this role for many decadent modernists in the early-twentieth century. Sedgwick references the tradition of using the term “uncle” to refer to “the whole range of older men who might form a relation to a younger man (as patron, friend, literal uncle, godfather, adoptive father, sugar daddy) offering a degree of initiation into gay cultures and identities” (Sedgwick, Tendencies, 59). In Cunard’s case, Douglas offered to her as a younger woman initiation into modes of sexual rebellion and the rejection of moral injunctions against sexual freedoms.
6 Marcus, Perfect Stranger, 104.
7 See, for example, Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence; Stilling, Beginning at the End: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry; and Hext and Murray, Decadence in the Age of Modernism.
8 I borrow the term “disturbing attachments” from Amin’s Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History.
9 Cunard, foreword to Negro Anthology, iii.
10 Archer-Straw, Negrophilia, 163, 170.
11 Ibid., 165.
12 Moynagh, “Cunard’s Lines,” 70, 71.
13 Marcus, Perfect Stranger, 14, 213.
14 Pérez, A Taste for Brown Bodies, 101, 105.
15 Perry, Vexy Thing, 76.
16 Douglas, An Almanac, 1.
17 Allan, Grand Man, Grand Woman, 212.
18 Cleves, Unspeakable, 3, 13, 12.
19 Acton, “‘Uncle Norman,’” 237, 239.
20 Ibid., 239.
21 Ibid., 241.
22 Ibid., 241.
23 Aldington, Pinorman, 205, 118, 119.
24 Cleves, Unspeakable, 267.
25 Cleves, Unspeakable, 270; Cunard, Grand Man, ix.
26 Cunard, Grand Man, ix-x.
27 Ibid., 14, 17.
28 Ibid., 105.
29 Cleves, Unspeakable, 182.
30 Cunard, Grand Man, 108.
31 Ibid., 108.
32 Ibid., 110.
33 Ibid., 110.
34 In her discussion of contemporary responses to Douglas and his behavior, Cleves emphasizes that sexual morality is historically contingent and “pederasty was less taboo before the 1950s” (Cleves, Unspeakable, 13). However, the public outcry in response to, for example, W. T. Stead’s The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon (1885) indicates that, even in the late-nineteenth century, the dominant culture was troubled by intergenerational sex and the sexual assault of children and larger questions were being raised around the age of consent. Cunard’s caginess around her knowledge of Douglas’s transgressions indicates at least some awareness on her part of potential condemnation of his taste for children.
35 Ibid., 92–93.
36 Ibid., 127, 128.
37 Ibid., 129.
38 Marcus, Perfect Stranger, 204.
39 Cunard, Grand Man, 137.
40 Ibid., 137.
41 Ibid., 138.
42 Ibid., 138.
43 Ibid., 140.
44 Ibid., 140.
45 Marcus, Perfect Stranger, 211.
46 Pennypacker, From Scottsboro to Munich, 53.
47 Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 118, 119.
48 Gordon, Nancy Cunard, 174, 175.
49 Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 229.
50 Marcus, Hearts of Darkness, 196.
51 Marcus, Perfect Stranger, 31.
52 Crowder, As Wonderful as All That, 19.
53 Ibid., 186.
54 Ibid., 64.
55 Ibid., 65.
56 Ibid., 65.
57 Ibid., 66.
58 Ibid., 67, 71.
59 Ibid., 72.
60 Ibid., 80.
61 Ibid., 98, 104.
62 Ibid., 104.
63 Ibid., 92.
64 Ibid., 100.
65 Ibid., 111.
66 Ibid., 112.
67 Ibid., 139, 142.
68 Ibid., 142, 143.
69 Ibid., 150.
70 Ibid., 154.
71 Ibid., 158.
72 Ibid., 168.
73 Ibid., 174.
74 Ibid., 188.
75 Ibid., 176.
76 Ibid., 181.
77 Ibid., 183.
78 Ibid., 184.
79 Ibid., 185.
80 Allen, epilogue to As Wonderful as All That, 192.
81 Winkiel, “Nancy Cunard’s Negro,” 510.
82 Ibid., 510.
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Notes on contributors
Kristin Mahoney
Kristin Mahoney is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and a Faculty Fellow in the Center for Gender in a Global Context at Michigan State University. Her first book, Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015, and her new book, Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. She is currently editing a collection on the 1890s with Dustin Friedman for Cambridge UP’s Nineteenth Century Literature in Transition series.