Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation by Mackrell Judith

Author:Mackrell, Judith [Mackrell, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-01-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

NANCY

When Tallulah made her debut in The Green Hat, she was not the only woman in London reputed to be the inspiration for its lovely, errant heroine, Iris. Idina Sackville, with whom Tallulah had lodged at Olga Lynn’s, was mooted as one possibility, but an even more likely candidate was Nancy Cunard. The physical match was compelling—Nancy was tall and blonde like Iris—and both women regarded themselves as fugitives from society.* More compelling still was the fact that Nancy had been romantically involved with Iris’s creator, Michael Arlen.

Nancy had known Arlen slightly during the war, but it was early in 1920 that she began to fall in love with him. He was Armenian by birth, a small, tightly strung man with dark liquid eyes and a very flamboyant, un-English style of dress. To Nancy’s male friends, Arlen appeared gaudy and meretricious. ‘I really can’t see why you like this ghastly Oriental rug merchant,’ griped St John Hutchinson. Yet their contempt only made his foreignness more beguiling to her.1

It was Arlen’s writing that most attracted her, however. Nancy had always fantasized about a life of shared literary endeavour, and the Baron, as she called him then,* had already published several essays, short stories and a play, and was halfway through his first novel. She was awed by his output, believing it would be a spur to her own poetry, and after she had vowed to start a new life in Paris, it was Arlen she took with her on long, exploratory visits to the city.

He was, it seemed, the perfect companion, matching Nancy’s own inquisitiveness and delight: ‘It was always champagne,’ she recalled, ‘and our heads were often swimming.’2 They liked to walk the maze of gravel paths that criss-crossed the Jardins du Luxembourg, or watch the busy river traffic on the Seine. They dined among Pigalle prostitutes at their favourite restaurant La Perle, and after jazzing in the clubs of Montmartre they wandered back to their hotel room in the misty flush of the Paris dawn. Yet Nancy’s romance with the city could not soften the critical, edgy reaction that always set in with any man who wasn’t Peter. By the autumn she was finding fault with every aspect of Arlen. He was proving irksomely proprietorial as a lover: becoming ‘sullen as distant thunder … brooding and brewing’ if another man showed an interest in her.3 He was talking of marriage, enraging Nancy as much by his presumption that she would accept him as by his obliviousness to the fact that marriage to Sydney had made her swear she would never again be anyone’s wife.

Even his role as an outsider was becoming an irritant. Nancy had felt shocked sympathy for what Arlen’s family had suffered when they’d been exiled by the Turks in 1901, but she couldn’t understand the exhaustingly personal grudges he continued to hold against the world. One long, winter evening, when he launched into a litany of the insults he had suffered, the querulousness of his

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