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In June, 1946 Nancy Cunard wrote an angry, detailed letter to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. In it Cunard described returning to the north of France after the war, discovering her house to have been looted by Nazi soldiers or French collaborators, her African art destroyed, her massive printing press smashed, a copy of Pound’s Cantos propped in a shattered window. Given this testimony, it should not be surprising that the Harry Ransom Center’s rich and various Cunard archive should be especially fragmentary. But what is surprising is the fact that, of the hundreds with whom Cunard corresponded while assembling the landmark Negro anthology (1934), it is the correspondence with Claude McKay that appears uniquely to have survived, seemingly in its entirety. Whether adventitious or the result of Cunard’s special preservation, this unusual survival has been suggestive because of McKay’s famously acrimonious last-minute withdrawal from the Negro anthology project. In his recent Commonwealth of Letters, Peter Kalliney quotes from the correspondence in order to locate the McKay-Cunard dispute among a tenacious system of protocols specific to high literary culture. But the McKay-Cunard correspondence is important, I will argue, for reasons other than the literary feud that terminates it. This importance, located in the intersection of global racial politics and international media, is signaled by the small archive that McKay deposited within his letters, a collection of press clippings that describe Cunard’s controversial travels gathering and soliciting material for the Negro anthology. McKay culled these pieces from a range of French and English-language newspapers that he had received in Tangier, Morocco, where he was then living. It is not only significant that McKay made the archive of clippings and sent them to Cunard, who then kept them; the very fact that McKay could have composed such an archive is equally, if not more, important. As McKay himself indicated, the velocity, the variability, and the transnational distribution of these press accounts all reveal the broad transformations and new relationships that had come to determine the international field of media and information by the early 1930s.
