Black Man and White Ladyship.
Inscribed to Norman Douglas
Cunard, Nancy. Black Man and White Ladyship. [Toulon, Imp. A. Bordato], 1931.
Slim 8vo.; paperclip rust stain on the first page; red printed wrappers; sunned along top edge and spine where exposed on shelf; stapled. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First and only edition of Cunard’s infamous self-published tirade against her mother – Lady Emerald Cunard – and in support of racial equality and interracial relationships, specifically referencing her intimate relationship with African-American jazz musician, Henry Crowder. The press-run is unknown, but was certainly small: bibliographers speculate fewer than 200 copies. A presentation copy, inscribed to Norman Douglas on the verso of the upper wrapper: Norman Darling/this all happens/to be trrrue/and I’d like to/see her face/when she reads it./Write to me./Nancy. With Douglas’s stamp, “N.D.” on the first page of the text.
Cunard met Douglas in 1923, when she was twenty-seven and he was fifty-three, and soon developed with him an intimate mentor-mentee relationship. In 1954 she devoted Grand Man to him, and in 1969 gave him a chapter in her memoir, Those Were the Hours, describing him as follows:
Throughout the twenty-nine years we knew each other…to me Norman Douglas was the complete meaning of the “a grand man” – strong in character, lively, generous, creative, witty, honest, a forceful personality as much objective as subjective, an enchanting companion – and a magnificent writer.
Douglas lived in Venice, and Cunard often traveled there both to visit him and to vacation with other friends. During a Venetian sojourn in the summer of 1928, Cunard met Crowder, with whom she soon became inseparable. Cunard and Crowder lived together as lovers in the south of France for the next seven years, and he assisted her in operating her Hours Press. Cunard also credits Crowder with teaching her about racism:
Crowder was a born teacher, and he introduced Nancy to the complex and agonizing situation of blacks in the United States. She was listening with growing indignation to accounts of race riots, lynchings, and widespread segregation. He was eloquent and buoyant, but he was no activist. He tried to shrug off the problem, believing it would not be “mended for a long time.” Nancy’s answer was that everyone is “born to enjoy a happy rather than unhappy nature.” She began writing to all her friends about blacks, encouraging her to visit her and expand their social circles. (Nancy Cunard. Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist, by Lois Gordon, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 154)
Lady Cunard did not find out about Nancy’s “secret” relationship with Crowder until two years after it began, when Margot Asquith, her social rival in London, asked her about Nancy, saying, “What is it now – drink, drugs or niggers?” (Gordon, p. 157). Lady Cunard’s response was vitriolic: threatening to separate Crowder and her daughter, hiring detectives to spy on them, and, eventually, writing her out of her will. Nancy first retaliated verbally, and then in print with the publication of Black Man and White Ladyship, which she printed by the hundreds and distributed exclusively to her mother’s friends and enemies. As predicated in BMWL – “And what has happened since this little dust-up of December last, 1930? We have not met, I trust we will never meet again” (BMWL, p. 2) – Cunard permanently left England and never saw her mother again.
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