Nancy Cunard - Anti-fascism

Anti-fascism

In the mid-1930s she took up the anti-fascist fight as well, writing about Mussolini's annexation of Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War. She predicted, accurately, that the "events in Spain were a prelude to another world war". Her stories about the suffering of Spanish refugees became the basis for a fundraising appeal in the Manchester Guardian. Cunard herself helped deliver supplies and organize the relief effort, but poor health — caused in part by exhaustion and the conditions in the camps — forced her to return to Paris, where she stood on the streets collecting funds for the refugees.

In 1937, she published a series of pamphlets of war poetry, including the work of W. H. Auden, Tristan Tzara and Pablo Neruda. Later the same year, together with Auden and Stephen Spender, she distributed a questionnaire about the war to writers in Europe; the results were published by the Left Review as Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War.

The questionnaire to 200 writers asked the following question: "Are you for, or against, the legal government and people of Republican Spain? Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism? For it is impossible any longer to take no side."

There were elicited 147 answers, of which 126 supported the Republic.

Five writers explicitly responded in favor of Franco: they were Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Blunden, Arthur Machen, Geoffrey Moss and Eleanor Smith.

Among sixteen responses that Cunard, in her eventually published compendium, grouped under the skeptical heading "Neutral?" were H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

The most famous response was not included: it came from George Orwell, and began: "Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish. This is the second or third time I have had it. I am not one of your fashionable pansies like Auden or Spender, I was six months in Spain, most of the time fighting, I have a bullet hole in me at present and I am not going to write blah about defending democracy or gallant little anybody..."

During World War II, Cunard worked, to the point of physical exhaustion, as a translator in London on behalf of the French Resistance.