Releve into Maquis.
Cunard, Nancy. Releve Into Maquis. [Derby]: The Grasshopper Press, 1944.
8vo.; red wrappers; essentially fine.
First and only edition of Cunard’s anti-Fascist poem; 250 copies, the entire edition, published in May 1944. After the German invasion of France Cunard became a permanent exile, driven first from England, her natural home, and then from France, her elected one. Disgusted by France’s passive (some might say active) collaboration with German forces, Cunard left for Spain in the early 1940s, where she joined anti-Franco soldiers on the front lines; her dispatches would regularly run in both European and American newspapers.
Releve Into Maquis is a simple and elegant poem in which Cunard protests Europe’s encroaching Fascism. “The mayors put up the Order on the walls:/‘Labour, well-paid, in Germany to-day.’....It’s NO. The Releve, this ‘changing of the guard’/Is planned for dupes, by Vichy’s fear of us;/They want a France unmanned. We shall not go...” Despite the poem’s defiant tone the vision is ultimately pessimistic: “...Meanwhile/A million and a quarter prisoners stay in the Reich,/In France come hunger and threats between nerve and flesh;/In July of ‘42 the first prisoner-train,/The barter of the Releve: three hundred, packed/Like a load of curses, sick and half un-limbed.”
Cunard was one of the earliest Anglo-American intellectuals to vacate France during the occupation. She returned after the war to find that Nazis had desecrated her home in Normandy, destroying her collection of surrealist masterpieces, African icons, and rare books and manuscripts.
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