0.1 After "words"  (Page 2/8)

Cunard saw in Brown's work "another new slant" in the ongoing experiments in reshaping writing by the surrealists, Dadaists,and others ( Hours , 177). The design and craft involved in its production make Cunard and her printers more collaboratorsthan simply invisible technicians. Clearly, Cunard embraced the "pristine joie- de-vivre" of the "persistent experimenter" looking for "felicitous discoveries."She and Brown both were "intoxicated by words," yet knew "how to bring them to heel" ( Hours , 178). Both shared passions for ethnography, collecting, and—most of all—work. Their intense productivity,with Brown publishing five of his books and Cunard's press producing ten books in 1930 alone, speaks to an atmosphere of expatriate excitement for writing andpublishing.

The story of Brown's collaboration with Cunard is, to borrow Hugh Ford's phrases, the "story of how books were made, of howideas became the words on a printed page," and of how "author and publisher conferred during each step of the production of the book." The lesson that thisedition of Words should teach us is that small presses "could and did cultivate an intimacy between authors andpublishers as well as a creative atmosphere that large commercial publishing houses, now as well as then, nearly always lack” (Ford, Hours , xv-xvi).

Unfortunately, many literary accounts of the twenties and thirties focus on the personal lives and fashions of artists ratherthan their work, except to dismiss it all as symptomatic of the scene’s decadence. To Hugh Ford, the historian of these expatriate publishers, bookslike Words demonstrate "the solid literary achievements of people who for too long, have been either dismissed orglorified, depending on the classifier, as a ‘Lost Generation’” (Ford, Hours , xv). Brown describes the situation in an untitled poem on page 19 of this volume: "But for years I have / Peered throughvenetian blinds / At poets / Without yet catching a glimpse of / One at work." Indeed, we might know more about what they drank (Brown, for example: beer andwine, not whiskey), and who they had affairs with during the late 1920s and early 1930s than about what they accomplished. Many summaries of Nancy Cunard'slife prominently feature her affairs with the co-founder of surrealism, Louis Aragon, or the co-founder of Dada, Tristan Tzara, or the African-American jazzmusician Henry Crowder. One appendix to a biography includes a lurid tale about George Moore, the influential poet and novelist, who repeatedly asked Cunard tolet him see her naked (Cunard, quoted by Fielding, 188-9).

Biographical summaries recount all these love affairs with important men but few details about the processes and pleasures ofthe work both Brown and Cunard loved: the "love of printed letters" (Cunard, Hours , 183).

In relation to the self-reflexive poetry about the work and pleasures of printing, both Brown and Cunard had intense, evenerotic, connections to their work. Cunard named Hours Press as an allusion to the work and work habits of her friend Virginia Woolf, who, with her husbandLeonard, gave Nancy advice about the endeavor she was about to undertake; the Woolfs knew from their Hogarth Press that "Your hands will always be covered inink." The process of printing and writing are rarely the motif of poetry, but for Cunard, "the smell of printer's ink pleased me greatly, as did the beautifulfreshness of the glistening pigment. There is no other black or red like it. After a rinse in petrol and a good scrub with soap and hot water, my fingersagain became perfectly presentable; the right thumb, however, began to acquire a slight ingrain of gray, due to the leaden composition" ( Hours , 9). They were "looking at possibilities, at possibilities say, of bringing innovations up against some of the consecratedrules of layout" ( Hours , 10), which for them had become a kind of prohibition.