Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation by Judith Mackrell Page A

wasn’t living well in the Fifties, drinking too much, eating too little and obsessing over the political wrongs of the world. Strangers might fall under Nancy’s spell, but to friends she could be taxing company. Even those who loved her best were nervous of inviting her to stay for extended periods, knowing that they would have to deal with the volatility of her alcohol-drenched mood swings and her inevitable, exhaustive grilling of their views on Spain.
    That country still consumed her, and she visited it as regularly as she could. Yet captivated as she was by the people, the landscape and the culture, she could not give up her personal crusade against its fascist rulers, and anxious friends began to observe the corrosive effect this was having on Nancy’s mental health. During the late 1950s her behaviour grew more aggressive; she insulted the Spanish police, picked political fights with complete strangers and made reckless public statements calling for the release of political prisoners. During one visit in 1960, her actions were so provocative that she was arrested and thrown out of the country.
    In the old days Nancy would have been exhilarated by such a stand-off; now it acted as a destructive catalyst. As she travelled back to London, her always precarious mental state was disintegrating, and by the time she arrived she was emotionally fractured and deeply paranoid. Friends who tried to calm her down were accused of being fascist spies: unable to rest quietly she roamed the streets, insulting policemen and making outrageous sexual approaches to strangers. When she ended up in jail, it was evident to the doctor who was called to examine her that she was in desperate need of psychiatric treatment.
    Nancy spent the summer incarcerated in the Holloway Sanatorium, a few miles outside London. The combination of rest, sedatives and proper nutrition stabilized her condition, but it left her pitifully bereft. In July she wrote to Janet Flanner, mourning how little her life seemed to have amounted to: she was proud of Negro, she said, and of her reporting in Spain, yet she had failed to find love and she had failed as a poet.
    When she was released in September, it was with a regime of anti-depressants and strict orders to avoid alcohol. But while she regained her old responsive alertness, Nancy’s physical health was now failing, and in 1963 she was diagnosed with emphysema. She had always depended on being fit, with a body that was responsive, light and free. As Michelet had observed, she needed to be able to outrun her demons. This new experience of being short of breath and unsteady on her feet was intolerable to her; and numbing her frustration with more and more alcohol, inevitably she took a bad fall in early 1965, when she tripped and broke her thigh. After being told by her doctors that she couldn’t move for three months, she had to allow herself to be taken care of by an old friend, the French painter Jean Guérin.
    Guérin’s Riviera villa was delightful and he was a tender host, but Nancy was beyond taking any pleasure in either. Even before the fall she had been worrying about her independence: the capital she had inherited was fast diminishing and living costs were rising. * Now with her broken thigh she was terrified that she might never be able to travel again or to live on her own. And as she fecklessly mixed her prescribed drugs with consoling doses of alcohol, that fear pitched Nancy back towards madness.
    She became impossible to care for, disobeying her doctors, refusing to eat and being vilely rude to those around her. After she had thrown one particularly distressing scene, Guérin suggested that she leave and Nancy, somehow impelled by the force of her own rage, managed to drag herself and her few belongings onto a train. She ended up on the doorstep of Solita Solano, who was living just outside Paris, but by this point she was raving and urgently in need of medical care. Solita had no room to