The Lost Lunar Baedeker Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Introduction

  I. FUTURISM × FEMINISM: THE CIRCLE SQUARED (POEMS 1914–1920)

  “There is no Life or Death”

  Parturition

  Italian Pictures

  Three Moments in Paris

  Sketch of a Man on a Platform

  Virgin Plus Curtains Minus Dots

  Babies in Hospital

  Giovanni Franchi

  At the Door of the House

  The Effectual Marriage

  Human Cylinders

  The Black Virginity

  Ignoramus

  Lions’ Jaws

  II. SONGS TO JOANNES (1917)

  Songs to Joannes

  III. CORPSES AND GENIUSES (POEMS 1919–1930)

  O Hell

  The Dead

  Mexican Desert

  Perlun

  Poe

  Apology of Genius

  Brancusi’s Golden Bird

  Lunar Baedeker

  Der Blinde Junge

  Crab-Angel

  Joyce’s Ulysses

  “The Starry Sky” OF WYNDHAM LEWIS

  Marble

  Gertrude Stein

  The Widow’s Jazz

  Lady Laura in Bohemia

  The Mediterranean Sea

  Nancy Cunard

  Jules Pascin

  IV. COMPENSATIONS OF POVERTY (POEMS 1942–1949)

  On Third Avenue

  Mass-Production on 14th Street

  Idiot Child on a Fire-Escape

  Aid of the Madonna

  Ephemerid

  Chiffon Velours

  Property of Pigeons

  Photo After Pogrom

  Time-Bomb

  Omen of Victory

  Film-Face

  Faun Fare

  Letters of the Unliving

  Hot Cross Bum

  An Aged Woman

  Moreover, the Moon — — —

  V. EXCAVATIONS & PRECISIONS (PROSE 1914–1925)

  Aphorisms on Futurism

  Feminist Manifesto

  Modern Poetry

  Preceptors of Childhood

  Auto-Facial-Construction

  APPENDICES

  Editorial Guidelines and Considerations

  Notes on the Text

  Three Early Poems

  “Love Songs” (1923)

  Other Writings

  Tables of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  This book is Mina Loy’s to give to Arthur Cravan, Joella Bayer, and Fabienne Benedict. With their blessing, it is also for Case, Strand, and Anna

  Introduction

  For a brief period early in the twentieth century, Mina Loy was the Belle of the American Poetry Ball. But by the end of the century, most had forgotten she was there at all.

  On the evening of May 25, 1917, Mina Loy and Marcel Duchamp made their way to Greenwich Village’s “ultra bohemian, prehistoric, post-alcoholic” Webster Hall, where the twenty-third and final “Pagan Romp” of the season was just getting under way. The run-down community center on East Eleventh Street was known as “the Devil’s Playhouse” by bourgeoisie and bohemians alike. It had earned that moniker not just from the antics of locals but from the stunts that expatriates performed at the freewheeling frolics. To them, Webster Hall was reminiscent of Left Bank reunions before the war. It was a place where exiles and Villagers could mingle as one tribe, and where outlandish behavior was not only tolerated but applauded. The costumes required for admission made it possible for anyone who wished to revel out of character or gender to do so undercover.

  On this particular night, Marcel Duchamp (a.k.a. Rrose Sélavy) was male in habit and Mina Loy was dressed in a costume of her own design. They were the model expatriate couple, in disguise. A little magazine that Duchamp edited and Loy wrote for was celebrating the publication of its second number. Dadaist in spirit, The Blind Man advertised “continuous syncopation” until dawn. The advertisement on the inside front cover threatened to banish to box seats anyone who arrived in conventional clothing. When the ball was over, Duchamp and four companions—Mina Loy among them—breakfasted on scrambled eggs and wine, before stumbling into Duchamp’s bed, where the ménage à cinq spent a chaste night.

  Such scenes are typical of how—until Carolyn Burke’s biography recovered her extraordinary life—Mina Loy has been recalled. As part of a group. As slightly out of focus. As someone’s mistress. As a guest at a ball. Loy’s name is most often found in a string of names, as the emblematic avant-gardist, the bohemian’s bohemian, the nervy “impuritan” making the rounds of Village cafés and European salons. She makes colorful appearances in dozens of biographies: in those of Djuna Barnes, Constantin Brancusi, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Alfred Stieglitz, and William Carlos Williams, for example. In memoir after modernist memoir, she has been granted a forceful personality, a cerebral bearing, a perfect complexion, and a sexual body. But not a voice.

  First and last, this book is an attempt to restore a great poet’s lost voice. I use “great” advisedly, mindful that Loy has never been called great before. But mindful, too, that “great” modern writers—among them Basil Bunting, Eliot, Pound, Stein, and Williams—praised her work. Some even conceded their debt to her.

  Given Loy’s reclusiveness in her later years, the fact that she published only two books during her lifetime, and her seeming lack of concern—in interviews and conversations, at least—with building a reputation, or an oeuvre, it is not surprising that her few rediscoverers have pressed her case with an assiduousness reserved for the most self-effacing of poets. “I was never a poet,” she once proclaimed. But she had her own idea of how to package beauty and talent, and in letters to friends she often seemed hungry for recognition, even as she courted obscurity: “Can’t you write about me as a hidden wrinkle—the only woman who has been decided enough to forego easy success—etc etc—uninterrupted by the potency of beauty…?” she appealed to Carl Van Vechten in 1915. There was a rumor circulating around Paris in the twenties that Mina Loy was in fact not a real person at all but a made-up persona. Upon hearing this, the story goes, Loy turned up at Natalie Barney’s salon in order to make her presence known: “I assure you that I am indeed a live being. But it is necessary to stay very unknown … To maintain my incognito, the hazard I chose was—poet.” Upon finishing her novel, Insel, she professed she hadn’t a clue as to its merit, then offhanded a remark suggesting both perfect indifference and confidence verging on premonition as to its literary fate: “I leave that to my postmortem examination.” The novel languished unread for decades. Finally, in 1991, it was published. As we continue the posthumous examination she predicted, do we take her at her word, and if so, which word?

  If her statements are self-erasing, they are also Duchampian. They belie their nonchalance, as did his. Throughout her career, Loy camouflaged demonstrative and theatrical first persons behind inscrutable aliases. She ventriloquized. She dissembled. She canceled. Whether this was part of a conscious design to elude critical framing or an involuntary strategy for survival is difficult to say; indeed, there may be no distinction. She assumes both self-deprecatory and defiant voices in her poems, sometimes delivering cruelty with such precision that it seems a form of com
passion. Figuratively, then, the rumor in Paris was true: she made herself up. She appeared when she was least expected. She was disruptive. This book is presented in that spirit. Twentieth-century poetry’s lost guidebook surfaces after we thought all the evidence was in.

  Mina Loy’s goal was quite simply to become the most original woman of her generation. To this end, but sometimes to our confusion, she refused identification with many groups and causes that seemed natural for her to adopt. She affiliated herself, instead, with those considered the “enemy” by the more “ideologically correct” of her generation. Rather than allowing herself to be fixed by an identity, she interloped, using her various identities to transform the cultures and social milieus she inhabited. Feminist and Futurist, wife and lover, militant and pacifist, actress and model, Christian Scientist and nurse, she was the binarian’s nightmare. She was a Futurist, Dadaist, Surrealist, feminist, conceptualist, modernist, post-modernist, and none of the above. Her anti-career, if you like, was marked by so many seeming contradictions, counter-allegiances, and inconsistencies that she was often considered unbalanced. She scripted her own political platforms and composed didactic manifestos. She wrote pseudo-scientific theories of facial destiny and composed one of the most radical polemics ever written on feminism. She wore femininity as a mask, sometimes to disguise what she often called her “masculine side,” sometimes to draw the masculine to her side and sometimes to make her feminism less threatening. Loy wore mask upon mask; she was a poet of sophistication, in the word’s true sense. She knew something about constructing myth, and she knew something about violating the rules of heterosexual discourse. Like Duchamp, she was a confusing package for America, the land without myth and the land of gender.

  Loy came to the United States in 1916 by way of England, Paris, and Florence, but her reputation preceded her. No sooner had she arrived than she was being profiled as the avatar of the New Woman and the last word in modern verse. Like Duchamp’s, Loy’s artistic and intellectual habillement was perceived as impeccably avant-garde and international. Pound saw Marianne Moore and Loy as equals, but when Moore found herself in Loy’s company, she was decidedly uncomfortable. Amy Lowell was so incensed by Alfred Kreymborg’s publication of Loy’s poetic treatise on sexual discontent (“Love Songs”) that she refused to submit any more work to Others magazine. Loy was considered the most dangerous of the radical “Otherists.” If she didn’t like what critics said about her, she shamed them with wit, turning their words against them. Many of her early poems are satirical portraits of her former lovers, or songs of disillusion about sex, childbirth, or romance. She was as likely to turn upon those who praised her as on those who took exception. At times she seemed as bent on excommunication as at other times she was eager for communication. She ridiculed Pound and Eliot, even after they commented favorably on her verse. She genuflected to no one.

  It was probably based on such impressions that Moore wrote “Those Various Scalpels,” a poem which Patricia Willis has suggested (rightly, in my view) is a portrait of Loy. Moore questions the ruthless purpose which Loy’s talents served: “Are they weapons or scalpels?” Like virtually every contemporary who wrote about Loy, Moore takes measure of Loy’s intelligence, beauty, and diction, then calls these qualities into question, turning observations into accusations. How could one so beautiful, Harriet Monroe wondered—and Monroe considered Loy that, if nothing else (“beauty ever-young which has survived four babies,” she said of Loy after their first encounter)—how could one so beautiful be so unsparing in her revelation of the ugliness in herself, and so sardonic about love?

  Many of Loy’s early critics objected to the use of intellectual formulations and archaic vocabulary in her verse. They found her diction artificial, decorative. They did not understand that she was building a Trojan verse—deliberately hijacking Victorian vocabulary and conceptual posturing in order to subvert the values and expose the mechanisms such constructions were meant to euphemize. Her poetry divided even the Others group, which usually closed ranks around its own. In a 1919 review of Others, Conrad Aiken encouraged readers to “pass lightly over the … tentacular quiverings of Mina Loy” in favor of the “manly metres” of Eliot and Stevens. John Collier’s review was also typical. He cited Loy’s verse as an example of “the need for objective standards related to … tradition,” and accused her of producing work “in which the terminology is so stilted, so consciously artificial,” and so full of “quasi-scientific pomposities” that only by “some monstrous exertion of faith, or self-hypnotism [could] its accumulator … regard the results of her labour as poetry.”

  Yet Ezra Pound, in 1921, thought Loy, Moore, and Williams were the only poets in America writing anything of interest in verse. Five years later, Yvor Winters invoked Emily Dickinson as Loy’s only forerunner. Like Dickinson, Loy was writing at a time when readers still noticed the absence of pleasures denied them. Loy withheld traditional meter, rhyme, and syntax, and presented sex with the expediency of an invoice. She broke every rule on the page, made up her own grammar, invented her own words—even improvised her own punctuation. She drew her vocabulary from one of the most curio-filled lexical cabinets in twentieth-century poetry, yet she remained unseduced by the melodies of conversation and unreceptive to the conventions of versification. Her readers, like Dickinson’s, were wary of the sound of an alien voice. It was Loy’s “otherness” that was noticed first and foremost by her contemporaries. “Her poems would have puzzled Grandma,” ran the caption beneath her photograph in the New York Evening Sun four months after she arrived in New York, accompanying a profile that depicted her as that rare and exotic species, la nouvelle femme. “No natural history contains her habitat … If she isn’t the modern woman, who is, pray?” the Sun reporter understated. Dickinson was received as poetry’s queer aunt when her poems first appeared one hundred years ago; Loy was perceived as poetry’s deviant daughter following the appearance of “Love Songs” twenty years later. Fin-de-siècle criticism nearly put Dickinson’s work into the closet for a quarter-century. In Loy’s case, the door shut sooner and faster.

  The first doors to open to Loy were in America, and did so before she arrived. But they closed soon after she got here. Critics who knew her felt that her demeanor was out of line with her verse. Carl Van Vechten, the photographer and music critic, was also her first informal agent. He considered Loy the most beautiful of a beautiful generation of poets. She had great promise as a poet, he thought, if only she would stop writing about sex. Her first husband, Stephen Haweis, warned his wife along similar lines: Keep writing that way, Mina Haweis, and you’ll lose your good name. Alfred Kreymborg, one of her first editors, summarized the public’s prevailing objections: if she could dress like a lady, why couldn’t she write like one? But there were other problems as well. When Loy came to America, she made it known that she was here to use her talents. She wrote plays and stories as well as poetry. Not only that; she acted, painted, made lampshades, sculpted, modeled, designed dresses, and patented inventions. This was unacceptable. In a provincial land, it was all right for a woman to express herself as a solitary genius, or to be a beauty, but not to be a beautiful intellectual and a creative person-at-large. Villagers respected artistic exclusiveness. Loy respected no such bounds and addressed her sarcastic “Apology of Genius” to those who

  turn on us your smooth fools’ faces

  like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries…

  What she named an apology was no apology at all. She claimed that geniuses were exempt from judgment:

  Our wills are formed

  by curious disciplines

  beyond your laws…

  Shortly after her arrival in the States, Loy gave her first public reading. William Rose Benét, Maxwell Bodenheim, Padraic Colum, and William Carlos Williams joined her on the mezzanine of Grand Central Palace on Independents Poets Day. Some came out of curiosity, not only to listen but to ogle. Who was this Mina Loy? Was she the great beauty the gossips des
cribed? Were her poems as strange as they were reputed to be by people who were passing around copies of magazines with odd names like Trend, Rogue, and The Blind Man before her reading?

  When Pound first introduced American readers to Mina Loy, he described her verse as authentically American. “These girls,” he said of Loy and Moore, wrote “something which would not have come out of any other country.” Pound was being disingenuous about Loy’s origins. Surely he knew that she was English. But he had a point. Loy never belonged to England, and her work was never published there. But what Pound couldn’t know was that America, the country Loy adopted, would never adopt her.

  Eighty years later, an editor again finds himself introducing Loy to American readers for the first time, and finds many of the same questions still being asked. Metrically, what effect was she seeking, if any? How knowingly was she mocking the lyric tradition? How deliberately was she distorting diction? Was she consciously skating a fine line of prosodic disaster, only to rescue herself time after time, like a naturally balletic dancer with inebriate tendencies, in order to make us realize that awkwardness itself can be a desired effect, because its solution—recovery—delivers more tension and relief, and commands more attention than grace executed predictably?

  Today, some new questions are being asked. Exactly which poets did she read with profit? What is it that makes her unassimilable by the canonists? Did she know how precociously her language assailed the fortresses of gender? How do we distinguish a posture of seduction from a gesture of authority? Did she lead the avant-garde in adopting a guise of transgressive femininity as a masquerade? And the big questions, I suppose: Was she ever really at home in English? Was she an American poet? And how much control did she have over the publication of Lunar Baedeker? Some of these questions are addressed in the Notes, which present information on the way her work was originally published and perceived. Other questions are addressed by Loy herself in a newly discovered text “On Modern Poetry.”

  The publication of this book at four minutes to the millennium, so to speak, means that Loy has a chance to rise above neglect. But in order to read her, we not only have to get past neglect; we have to get past legend. And this may prove more difficult, for legend has a way of insinuating itself upon neglect. I first edited Loy’s work in 1982. At the time, publishing her work felt more like a cause than an editorial occasion. The Last Lunar Baedeker circulated like a secret handshake, and has since become part of the Loy myth. That myth takes its shape from many sources, some of Loy’s own making: the diaries of a rebellious young woman, raised in a Victorian English household, who defected to French bohemian intellectual life and Italian Futurism; the memories of contemporaries who described an opinionated, intransigent, witty seductress who left two children with a nurse in Florence to come to New York, and who returned, two years later, pregnant by a missing husband, only to leave again; the deaths of two children; the images of her passionate affair with a poet-boxer who later became a patron saint of the Dadaists, and her search for him in Mexican morgues and prisons; the stories of a lonely widow practicing Christian Science and holding séances in a Bowery rooming house; the exhibition organized by her old friend Marcel Duchamp in 1959, featuring beatific visions of bums fashioned from trash. These stories should neither elevate nor diminish Loy’s stature as a poet. She should first be apprehended at poem-level.