By Ian Butcher
Nancy Cunard: Socialite, Bright Young Thing, Poet, Heiress, Promiscuous Lover, Publisher, Activist, Muse, Drunk…
Nancy Cunard
…a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua…from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia…but time will tell…but not so fast… Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry of Essy-in-Possy of Testew and Cunard…the labours unfinished of Testew and Cunard…the labours of Fartov and Belcher left unfinished for reasons unknown of Testew and Cunard…many deny that man in Possy of Testew and Cunard that man in Essy that man in short that man in brief in spite of the strides of alimentation and defecation wastes and pine wastes…Steinweg and Peterman…the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara…the stones Cunard…Cunard…unfinished…
Lucky’s absurd, logorrheal monologue in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is one of the most iconic in theatre, a highlight of one of the most important and enigmatic plays of twentieth century drama. Lucky, the downtrodden servant of Pozzo, attached by a noose and loaded up with bags and baskets, is silent until Pozzo carefully puts the hat on Lucky’s head, positions him for maximum effect and abusively bellows “Think, pig!”. As Pozzo, Vladimir and Estragon look on in awe, Lucky shouts out his torrent of words in rapid-fire and with seemingly no hesitation or punctuation.
Within this incoherent mass of words (Beckett referred to it as a “tirade”) there is a sort of absurd logic. There is much talk of a God, a gross distortion of academic, theological terminology and references to serious philosophy. For example, “Essy-in-Possy” is a reference to George Berkeley (mentioned in the speech) and his credo of Esse est percipi [to be is to be perceived]. Beckett was influenced by the scepticism of the eighteenth-century Irish philosopher and even mentions him in his first published novel Murphy. The fictitious academic papers mentioned come with comic scatological names – “Fartov and Belcher”, and French-inspired jokes which are not so obvious in English. For example, “Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry”: “caca” and “popo” being French childhood words for shit. “Peterman” is a wordplay on the French “peter” meaning to fart. Some of the academic sounding words (apathia, athambia) do not actually exist. The speech gradually degenerates into a stuttering, rambling “aphasia”, a silence or loss of speech. Ironically, Beckett himself was diagnosed with aphasia in 1988.
Scholars have speculated over and analysed the speech for decades. The focus of this article will be a small but important recurring reference from the speech: the fact that “Cunard” is mentioned six times. Who or what is Cunard will be explored, and the significance of Cunard to Beckett and more broadly to a number of major authors of the time.
Background
Samuel Beckett was born in Ireland in 1906, and was a writer of novels, shorts stories, poetry, literary criticism and plays. He spent most of his adult life in France, even serving in the French Resistance during the war. The waiting for orders he experienced in his role in the war was formative in the waiting he describes in Waiting for Godot.
In 1946, Beckett took his half-full notebook and drew a line across the page. Everything below the line was in French, and he never looked back. Almost everything he wrote from that moment was written in French first and then he worked as his own translator for most of his plays. As a break from writing problematic novels, he started on a play in French. The working-title was En Attendant [while waiting], but this became En Attendant Godot [Waiting for Godot] whose first production was in January 1953 at the Theatre de Babylone, a former butcher’s shop, in Paris. It was not until 1953 that the English “version” was produced. Beckett “translated” the play himself, but there are significant variations in the French and English versions as he chose to revise and eliminate certain passages. For example, changing references of French regions to places in Ireland or England, “Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham…Connemara”.
In the French version of Lucky’s speech, he uses the word “Connard” a total of seven times. The word can be usefully translated as “asshole”. This is transposed in the English version into the minimal pair word of “Cunard”. The use of the word is not trivial, as Nancy Cunard gave Beckett his first break as a writer, and for whom he wrote a number of articles for publication. He owed a lot to her and stayed friends, if sporadically, throughout his life. She also published works by Louis Aragon, Robert Graves and Ezra Pound, among others.
In 1930 when Beckett was 23, a lecteur d’anglais at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and doing research work on world rivers for friend and fellow-Irishman, James Joyce, Nancy Cunard and her partner Richard Aldington launched an anonymous poetry competition on the subject of Time to promote their fledgling publishing business. First prize around £10 for a poem up to one hundred lines. Despite the deadline having just passed, Beckett’s poem was slipped under the Cunard office door. Beckett’s hastily-written poem, Whoroscope, was based on Adrian Baillet’s seventeenth century Life of Descartes. Nancy declared that the poem was ”mysterious, obscure in parts” (Smyth) and decided that the poem needed notes. Beckett was thrilled as he perhaps imagined that his notes would be like those of T. S. Eliot at the conclusion of his 1922 The Waste Land. From the hundred or so entries, Beckett won, and Nancy produced a hundred signed and two hundred non-signed printed versions of the poem from their own Hours Press. It was Beckett’s first separately-published work and the launch of Beckett’s literary career. Beckett went on the write Endgame, Happy Days, Krapp’s Last Tape, Not I and many others. In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize “for his writing, which – in new forms for the novel and drama – in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation” (Nobel Prize). Beckett praises Nancy’s “spunk and nerve” (Beckett in Black and Red).
Nancy Cunard
Nancy Clara Cunard was born in 1896, the great-granddaughter of Sir Samuel Cunard, the founder of the world-renown transatlantic shipping line. Her father was Sir Bache Cunard, a third baronet, and Maud Alice Burke, an American heiress. There were some forty servants in the country house in Leicestershire. Nancy was brought up with all the privileges of the aristocracy and great wealth, but was a lonely child as her mother was a society hostess with no maternal instinct and frequently absent. She attended Virginia Woolf’s private school in London and remained friends with Woolf and her husband for the rest of her life. She learned to set printing type by the Woolfs. They published Nancy’s free-verse poem Parallax in 1926, which was a challenge to the post WWI world view expressed in T. S. Eliot’s influential 1922 poem The Waste Land and which achieved critical acclaim.Nancy was already a published author with her collection of poems Wheels (1915) edited by the Sitwells, and her books Outlaws (1921) and Sublunary in 1923. Nancy had fallen in love with Eliot after reading his 1917 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The notoriously puritanical Eliot and Nancy had a “brief intimacy” (Gordon) or one-night-fling in 1922 for which Eliot was deeply ashamed. He wrote in 1930 that “it left a taste of ashes which I can never forget” (Hollis).
As befitted a rich lady of her class, Nancy was presented at court as a debutante “coming out” into high society and spent much of her early years dancing, attending house parties and drinking at the most fashionable places in London and Paris. She moved to Paris in 1920 where she became involved with movements such as literary Modernism, Surrealism and Dada. As one commentator put it
Nancy Cunard was famous for her look, tall, thin, almost gaunt, graceful, beautiful, with eyes some never forgot; she had sex appeal and flaunted it to the shock and fascination of her contemporaries…she was fashionable, trendy, intense, and distressingly straightforward (Kay).
Her friend Solita Solano commented that Nancy was “riveting, with eyes as blue as sapphires, a caused of wonder everywhere” (Gordon 117). De Courcy writes that “allied to her extraordinary beauty was a personality mesmeric in its depth, intelligence and passion” (de Courcy 23).The gossip-columnists and society newspapers were extremely interested in Nancy and photographed and wrote about her wherever she went. Her appearance frequently caused outrage, the kohl-ringed eyes, the masculine cropped hair, the leather jackets, turbans, and her trademark multiple thick ivory bracelets she used to wear. These bangles even became weapons to hit her lovers when Nancy became drunk and violent. She ate very little, drank a great deal, possibly occasionally used drugs, and was sexually promiscuous.
Nancy threw herself into causes. She was a reporter in the Spanish Civil War from 1936, giving her money and enthusiasm, actively helping refugees and prisoners by smuggling them into France. Disappointed by what she thought was the apathetic or even hostile reaction of the French to the Spanish refugees, she appealed for money through The Manchester Guardian newspaper and organised a collection of poems in an anthology Poems for France where proceeds were to be donated to this worthy cause. One of the contributors was Edward Thompson, an Oxford professor, who subsequently included thirty of Nancy’s poems in his anthology Augustan Poems in 1947.
A turning point in Nancy’s life was when she met and fell in love with the black musician Henry Crowder in Venice in 1928. It was considered scandalous for a white women to have a relationship with a black man, and she was heavily criticised and put under surveillance by the police who called her an extremist given her association with black activists. Again, Nancy threw herself into the black cause and collected money to help the famous Scottsboro Boys, black boys falsely accused of assaulting two white women in Alabama in 1931. The boys were finally executed.
There had been a fashionable craze in 1920s Paris for “Negrophilia”, appreciating all things black – music, literature, culture, dance, artefacts. Next came her decision to promote the black cause by producing a work which would eventually be called Negro: An Anthology. Nancy contacted writers and black leaders around the world to ask them to contribute to the book. Her aim was to create a book that would help blacks better understand their own culture, and for whites to understand the richness of this culture. Nancy tried to encourage Crowder to “be more African”, to which he replied “but, I ain’t African, I’m American” (Kay). In 1934 the finished book finally weighed in with 150 contributors, 855 pages and 385 illustrations to mixed, if not hostile reviews. It comprised poetry, history, manifestos, confidential military material, rants, ads, comics, folk songs, maps and art reproductions, and could be considered important as the contributors were from writers who would become key figures in the search for black identity. Commercially it was not a success; partially because of its cover price of two guineas [around £200 or Euro 240 in 2025 money] and partially because it was ignored by left-wingers in the UK and USA as it did not conform to the party line. Ironically, original copies now have been known to fetch over twenty-thousand Euros at auction.
It caused controversy wherever Nancy went, some even claimed that it did more harm than good to black causes. Nancy made matters worse in 1931 by publishing an eleven page pamphlet “bomb” criticising her mother’s racism, vanity and snobbishness entitled Black Man and White Ladyship: An Anniversary. It caused a sensation and in the prevailing climate the net result was increasing ostracization for Nancy, and her mother’s influential friends rallying around her against what they thought of as a renegade daughter. This final rupture with her mother and her past meant that her allowances started to dry up, with resulting financial difficulties for Nancy.
Samuel Beckett was a significant contributor to Negro. He wrote over 63,000 words, including nineteen translations – Beckett’s most extensive publication. He did it for Nancy’s friendship but did not really share her racial, political or aesthetic agenda. His translations were just functional. To help Henry Crowder, Beckett also contributed a song to a book being worked on by Crowder. Typically, Beckett entitled his song From the Only Poet to a Shining Whore, the first line of which was “Puttanina mia!” (de Courcy).
Nancy’s Influence
Nancy had been a friend or lover of some of the major figures of twentieth century literature, both male and female. Harold Acton believed that she had “inspired half the poets and novelists of the Twentieth century” (de Courcy 1). She was a lover to Louis Aragon, Michael Arlen, Tristan Tzara, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Pablo Neruda, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, among many others, and research shows that she contributed to some of their most innovative projects. She played tennis with Ernest Hemingway, knew George Orwell, was a muse to James Joyce, Brancusi sculpted her, Oscar Kokoschka and Manuel Ortiz painted her, Cecil Beaton and Man Ray photographed her, Tristan Tzara dedicated a play to her, and William Carlos Williams kept a photo on his desk at all times. She features in various guises as fictional characters in several novels by Huxley, Aldington, Lewis and Evelyn Waugh. Michael Arlen depicted her as the heroine of his highly successful 1924 The Green Hat. T.S. Eliot portrayed Nancy as Fresca in early drafts of The Waste Land but later deleted them.
All depict her as over-sexed, a “lecherous octopus” as Aldington put it. Huxley called her “a perfumed imitation of a savage or an animal. Nancy got her opportunity to respond when she referred to having sex with Huxley as like “being crawled over by slugs”(Girling). De Courcy writes that, for Nancy, “sex was an itch to be scratched”; her “need for sex had become almost as powerful as her craving for alcohol” (de Courcy 303). These two vices finally accelerated her decline. Raymond Mortimer called her “a heroic figure in dilapidation” (de Courcy 313).
Her house in Reanville in Normandy, France was vandalised not only by the occupying Germans but by local villagers who resented her bohemian lifestyle, so she bought an old farmhouse in Souillac in the Dordogne. In later years – when the inheritance money had all but dried up – she suffered from mental illness, aggravated by alcoholism, poverty, her anorexia, and self-destructive behaviour. She got into fights, at one point, she set fire to papers in her room, was frequently jailed, was expelled from Spain, ate her ticket on a train rather than give it to the controller, had a fight with the London police (she threw her shoes at the magistrate who sent her to jail) and was declared insane and committed to a mental hospital. Upon release, she was found on the streets of Paris, and when admitted to the Hôpital Cochin she was penniless, a mere skeleton and weighed less than 29 kilos. She died a few days later in March 1965 from severe emphysema due to years of heavy smoking. She died alone, having alienated friends and family, a few days later at 69 in March 1965 and was cremated, her ashes buried in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
Conclusion
Her friend Solita Solano wrote that being in the presence of Nancy was “like coming to grips with a force of nature…it was impossible for her to work quietly for the rights of man: Nancy functioned best in a state of fury in which, in order to defend, she attacked every windmill in a landscape of windmills” (Gordon 373).
Despite her colourful, aimless and dissipated life Nancy was a significant cultural figure, publishing her own poems and introducing works of whom were to become important writers, such as Samuel Beckett. Friend and muse to a generation of significant writers and influential in their creative processes, a sort of quixotic, encouraging éminence grise in the literary background.
Works Cited
Beckett, Samuel. 2000. Beckett in Black and Red: The Translations for Nancy Cunard’s ‘Negro’, ed. Alan Warren Friedman. Irish Literature, History and Culture. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Courcy, Anne de. 2023. Five Love Affairs and a Friendship: The Paris Life of Nancy Cunard, Icon of the Jazz Age. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Girling, Anna. 2019. “More than a Muse: Reassessing the Legacy of Nancy Cunard”. Times Literary Supplement, January 11.
Gordon, Lois. 2007. Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hollis, Matthew. 2022. The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem. London: Faber & Faber.
Kay, Phillip. 2015. Nancy Cunard: Quixotic Vagabond, https://www.phillipkay.wordpress.com>2015/01/20>nancy-cunard-quixotic-vagabond.Accessed March 25 2025.
Nobel Prize. httsp://www.nobelprize.org>nobel-prize-in-literature-1969-samuel-beckett. Accessed March 25 2025.
Smyth, Adam. 2024. The Bookmakers: A History of Books in Eighteen Lives. New York: Hachette.
Ian Butcher is an independent scholar with degrees from the Universities of Kent, York and The Open University in the UK. He was a lecteur d’anglais at the Université de Nice, France. He became Senior Vice President in the Brussels office of a US management consultancy. He has published a number of academic articles on T. S. Eliot, Annie Ernaux, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, and on the Titology of working titles of literary works. He lives in Belgium and Denmark with his Danish wife.