Big spenders
FRANCES DONALDSON
In the 1920s rich American women often settled in England because they found high society, which in New York was impregnable, a pushover in London. Mrs Fielding tells us that Mrs Corrigan, meeting some difficulty at first, soon won an entry by the simple means of offering prizes at her cotillions—coroneted gold sock suspenders to the dukes and initialled braces with solid gold tabs to lesser fry. One cannot help wondering why the dukes wanted gold sock suspenders—was it to wear, or for their break-up value? In any case, Mrs Corrigan should not be compared, as she is in , the blurb and again in the book, to Lady Cunard. - Lady Cunard was also rich and American, but she was highly cultivated and genuinely talented. She had a real knowledge and appre- ciation of literature, painting and music—we owe her a debt for what she did for opera in London—and she was a wayward and witty conversationalist who made an art out of a aatural inconsequence. No one can become a -hostess on the grand scale without money, and -Probably no one ever has without the small Amman weakness of believing that the smartest -people are the best people. The upper classes in the early, part of this century believed in the 'existence of a race known as 'bores,' easily to be detected and naturally to be shunned, -although 'bores' sometimes turned out to have unexpected merits if they took the trouble to learn their way about the esoteric conversation of this interrelated society.
Harold Acton is quoted as saying that Lady Cunard acted 'like a spiritual dowser in a desert,' conjuring qualities from the dullest and shyest individuals. This may be true, but she was extremely barbed and to the dull and shy she could sometimes be annihilating. It is more likely that she conjured intelligent conversa- tion from people whose natural intelligence she had the wit to discern and the gaiety, original- ity and talent to attract. What is certain is that, like an art dealer who, owning one picture by a certain painter, sets a fashion by buying several more, she often made her own lions by asking people constantly to her house.
In most of the photographs in this book she and her daughter appear so classically of the 1920s that they might have strayed out of a ballet of the period by Nijinska or Ashton; but this reflects the artists' styles, since neither of them followed fashion as closely as this. The essence of Lady Cunard is caught by the draw- ing by Lady Anglesey and in the photograph with Duff Cooper and Hore-Belisha. In her youth she seems to have been a remarkably pretty girl but in her maturity in London she combined canary-coloured hair with rouge heavily applied high on the cheek-bones, in the fashion of the day, on a prematurely aged face.
She would have looked like a china doll grown old in the service of countless generations but for the beaky little nose and the thin lips, avid for life. As it was, she had the air of a small, overpainted bird who in its eagerness had fallen headlong into the rouge pot.
Her daughter Nancy was an eccentric. The familiar of the Eiffel Tower in Stulik's day, the inspiration for The Green Hat, the poet and friend of Norman Douglas, she founded a printing press and published some very distinguished works, including Whoroscope, Samuel Beckett's first work published in book form. Totally free of feeling for class or for race, she confounded her poor mother by taking a negro lover. She was famous for her work for the Republicans in the Spanish war, for her support of all the enemies of fascism and also for her interest in negro art. She covered her arms with a collection of African bracelets which she took off to throw at her lover in the mornings. For she was born with a pathological anger which caused her to lampoon her mother, kick at policemen or anyone else in her way, wound her best friends and land up occasionally at the police station, once in a mental asylum.
Violent in life, she marches violently through this book and saves it from the fatal blandness that results from one member of a self- admiring circle writing about the others. Mrs Fielding set herself a difficult task, since both mother and daughter were marginal figures and, apart from the mine of George Moore's letters and writings used to such good effect in the early pages of the book, provide not very much material. But, with only an occasional lapse into the tone of the gossip column, Mrs Fielding's account is consistently interesting and throws particular and fascinating lights on the period. She succeeds best with Nancy Cunard, whom she says she never knew, and with George Moore (whom she could not have known well), the passionate and ridiculous lover, who so adored the mother and so longed to see the naked body of the daughter. Lady Cunard, whose friendship was the inspiration for the book, remains a shadowy figure through- out—probably because she was too lightly and too genuinely original to be easily captured on paper.
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