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Authors: Mina Loy
The Lost Lunar Baedeker
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CONTENTS
I. FUTURISM Ã FEMINISM: THE CIRCLE SQUARED (POEMS 1914â1920)
Virgin Plus Curtains Minus Dots
III. CORPSES AND GENIUSES (POEMS 1919â1930)
“The Starry Sky”
OF
W
YNDHAM
L
EWIS
IV. COMPENSATIONS OF POVERTY (POEMS 1942â1949)
Mass-Production on 14th Street
V. EXCAVATIONS & PRECISIONS (PROSE 1914â1925)
Editorial Guidelines and Considerations
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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
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 companionsâMina Loy among themâbreakfasted 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 howâuntil Carolyn Burke's biography recovered her extraordinary lifeâMina 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 writersâamong them Basil Bunting, Eliot, Pound, Stein, and Williamsâpraised 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 concernâin interviews and conversations, at leastâwith 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 wrinkleâthe only woman who has been decided enough to forego easy successâetc etcâuninterrupted by the potency of beautyâ¦?” 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 wasâpoet.” 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 compassion. 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.
