MAGNIFICENT REBEL: Nancy Cunard in Jazz Age Paris

MAGNIFICENT REBEL: Nancy Cunard in Jazz Age Paris
ANNE DE COURCY
St. Martin's Press
$14.99 ebook editions, $29.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Anne de Courcy, the author of Husband Hunters and Chanel's Riviera, examines the controversial life of legendary beauty, writer and rich girl Nancy Cunard during her thirteen years in Jazz-Age Paris.

Paris in the 1920s was bursting with talent in the worlds of art, design and literature. The city was at the forefront of everything new and exciting; there was no censorship; life and love were there for the taking. At its center was the gorgeous, seductive English socialite Nancy Cunard, scion of the famous shipping line. Her lovers were legion, but this book focuses on five of the most significant and a lifelong friendship.

Her affairs with acclaimed writers Ezra Pound, Aldous Huxley, Michael Arlen and Louis Aragon were passionate and tempestuous, as was her romance with black jazz pianist Henry Crowder. Her friendship with the famous Irish novelist George Moore, her mother’s lover and a man falsely rumored to be Nancy’s father, was the longest-lasting of her life. Cunard’s early years were ones of great wealth but also emotional deprivation. Her mother Lady Cunard, the American heiress Maud Alice Burke (who later changed her name to Emerald) became a reigning London hostess; Nancy, from an early age, was given to promiscuity and heavy drinking and preferred a life in the arts to one in the social sphere into which she had been born. Highly intelligent, a gifted poet and widely read, she founded a small press that published Samuel Beckett among others. A muse to many, she was also a courageous crusader against racism and fascism. She left Paris in 1933, at the end of its most glittering years and remained unafraid to live life on the edge until her death in 1965.

Magnificent Rebel is a nuanced portrait of a complex woman, set against the backdrop of the City of Light during one of its most important and fascinating decades.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: How the hell do I rate and review this book? Author de Courcy writes very well, has clearly done research I have no reason to suspect contains careless errors (ie, I as a non-expert possess no knowledge that contradicts anything contained in here), and clearly understands the role of conflict and drama in non-fiction...yet I hated every minute of the read.

Let me explain.

Nancy Cunard knew everyone, went everywhere, did everything adventurous and fun one can dream up to do when there is a giant pot of cash under one's checkbook. She was also a narcissist, and probably a sociopath. She had no moral compass I could discern from any anecdote herein. She was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know," because she could and did turn on people who had given her no cause to dislike them.

And men flocked to her orbit! They wanted sex, of course, but quite a lot of them fell for her! All the mor amazing because of her one reasonably good quality, by modern standards: she never bothered herself to dissemble. As the great majority of people prefer to be told pretty little lies by their lovers, I'd say this shows that the men who fell for her really, truly fell, to accept her honest and usually very scathing opinion of them and keep coming back. Her "honesty" (which, as presented herein, is really just brutal unnecessary unkindness) comes in for a helping of praise I don't feel is warranted. She did many laudable things in pursuit of social justice, which no one should try to minimize. Her addiction issues and mental illness, which the author is careful to make unmistakable for the reader, is obvious in hindsight from the present century's ludicrously low "heights" of enlightenment, do not excuse the abusive and manipulative behaviors she displayed. To Author de Courcy's credit, she makes no excuses for the troubling behviors but goes out of her way to explain how the Cunards were less a family than threesome of selfish, oblivious rich people. How else could Nancy have turned out?

So I liked the book. But I loathed the subject. I am not glad I know more about her than my previous awareness of her name and sterling literary taste and activities. I feel...soiled...by the knowledge that this awful person is a feminist icon to some because she was as free as the male abusers and rotters of her day. Yuck! "But they were worse!" hardly seems like a justification for someone to behave badly.

I've settled on four stars, all for the felicity of Author de Courcy's discourse, and none for this awful, abusive human being.