Henry-Music.
Inscribed By Nancy Cunard,
Villainess Of British Modernism
[Cunard, Nancy]. Crowder, Henry. Henry-Music. Poems...by Nancy Cunard, Richard Aldington, Walter Lowenfels, Samuel Beckett, Harold Acton... [Paris]: Hours Press, 1930.
Folio; black and white paper-covered photographic boards by Man Ray, decorated with African tribal iconography and surrealist photomontage; an exceptional copy.
First edition; 100 numbered copies signed by Crowder, the entire edition. A presentation copy, inscribed by Nancy Cunard, the publisher of and a contributor to this volume: For Roy Randall. A charming gentleman, happily met. A lovely host. A person teeming with vitality, with the sympathies and taste of a real genuine man. I wish him a long life of usefulness and happiness.
Henry-Music, a revolutionary publication, is equally known for its cutting-edge modernist graphics, which include covers by Man Ray, as for its unconventional literary content. Like many of Cunard’s projects, Henry-Music was a collaborative enterprise: it is dedicated to her black American lover, jazz musician Henry Crowder, who worked with her at her Hours Press, and it is the first book-length work issued under her imprint. It prints an experimental compilation of anti-racist poetry, prose, and sheet music.
In 1927 Cunard entered into a serious love affair with Henry Crowder, whom she met through her gay cousins Edward and Victor Cunard at a Venice speakeasy. The pair fell mutually head over heels, and together they shocked society by openly living together as an unmarried interracial couple. Cunard further infuriated her family—and distanced herself from many of her oldest friends—by putting Crowder on the payroll as co-director of the Hours Press, the publishing house she founded in Reanville in 1928. Crowder’s contributions at the Press were at first primarily technical, and included such tasks as packing and driving. But Cunard soon entrusted Crowder with editorial decisions. The publication of Henry-Music, as well as many of the Press’s most overtly political and Afrocentric works, were the result of Crowder and Cunard’s intense late-night conversations. Cunard later reminisced:
Henry Crowder, as I have said, was a handsome Afro-American of mixed Red Indian and African blood. He had been born in Gainsville, Georgia, in 1895, the youngest of twelve children of a tanner. Almost from the start of my press, he had been associated with the Hours, and had learned to do well many chores connected with printing. Like so many colored American musicians, he had achieved his high level of execution as a pianist through his own innate musicianship rather than by academic study....But he could also read the most difficult scores, which as everyone conversant with jazz will know, is by no means the case with many musicians....
These songs [Henry-Music] were Henry Crowder’s first written and published compositions. Many times as I listened to him improvise on the piano at Reanville it seemed to me that such musical thoughts and original harmonies and progressions should be set down....Henry’s modesty stood in the way of this for a while. But as I continued my pleading, he said he thought he could write the music if the lyrics and poems were found that seemed to his purpose....So we began to look for poems to inspire, and thus I wrote a sort of battle hymn called “Equatorial Way,” in which the Negro says a fierce farewell to the United States, and heads for an Africa that should be his....Samuel Beckett, Richard Aldington, Harold Acton, and Walter Lowenfels all much appreciated Henry as a man and a musician and gladly told him to choose from their poems. Such is Henry-Music, a small collection of six pieces that are quite different from each other in character... (Cunard, These Were The Hours, pp. 148-150).
A lovely copy of an important modernist feminist publication. Scarce in any condition, fine copies of Henry-Music are especially uncommon.
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