The Lost Lunar Baedeker (15 page)

I. Futurism x Feminism: The Circle Squared (Poems 1914–1920)

1. Untitled poem, 1914 (“There is No Life or Death”). First published in
Camera Work
46 (April [October] 1914, p.18). The signed, dated HV in ASP is divided into four 4-line stanzas and lacks punctuation except for dashes (after ll. 9–14) and a final period (after l. 16). The text of the present edition follows the poem's first publication.

Editor's Note:
Shortly after MDL offered this poem to AS, editor of
Camera Work,
he accepted it. This acceptance should have resulted in ML's first published poem, but the issue of
CW
in which it was scheduled to appear was delayed by six months, allowing another poem, “Café du Néant” (n. 4), to appear first. ML's “Aphorisms on Futurism” (n. 51) had appeared in an earlier issue of
CW,
marking ML's first publication in any genre.

2. PARTURITION, 1914. First published in
The Trend
8:1 (October 1914, pp. 93–94). A signed, dated HV in CVVP is identical to the first published version in substantives but varies from it in details of punctuation and spacing. In an otherwise friendly letter to her friend (
Trend
editor) CVV dated “2–13–1915—Firenze” (YCAL), ML explicitly objected to the punctuation that had been added in the printed version. The present text therefore follows the HV, with the exception of two ampersands (ll. 62, 63), which I have spelled out. Reprinted in LB without the final three lines.

Editor's Note:
This poem, rather than the act of childbirth itself, was probably the subject of a comment ML made to CVV in a letter dated October 29, 1914 (CVVP): “I am glad to introduce my sex to the inner meaning of childbirth. The last illusion about my poor mis-created sex is gone. I am sad.” Mina Loy gave birth to her first child in 1904, a full decade before she wrote this poem. She also had children in 1907, 1909, and 1919.

As the putative first poem ever written about the physical experience of childbirth from the parturient woman's point of view, and the first poem in English to use collage as a texturing device, “Parturition” is a significant event in the history of modern poetry as well as the literature of modern sexuality. Virginia M. Kouidis was the first critic to observe this. Her monograph,
Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980) was the first book-length study of ML. ML's biographer, Carolyn Burke, also offers a brief but useful discussion of this poem in her essay “The New Poetry and the New Woman: Mina Loy” (Diane Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom, eds.,
Coming to Light: American Woman Poets of the Twentieth Century
[Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985], pp. 37–57).

3. ITALIAN PICTURES, ca. summer 1914. NOMS. First published in
The Trend
8:2 (November 1914), pp. 220–22. This text follows the first publication, with one emendation. In “Costa Magic,” Cesira suffers from “pthisis,” emended here to “phthisis” (ll. 28, 51), an archaic term for tuberculosis and other wasting illnesses. Reprinted in
LB
as “Three Italian Pictures,” with slight modifications, the most significant of which is a stanza break in “Costa Magic” between lines 21 and 22.

Editor's Note:
ML spent the summer of 1914 recovering from a nervous breakdown, psychological illness, or depression of some kind in the Apennine mountain village of Vallombrosa, province of Florence, with MDL and her guests. CVV, the new editor of
Trend,
was among MDL's American visitors. At the same time, ML was having an affair with FTM (see n. 4) and preparing to extricate herself from her marriage to SH (1877–1969). ML spent much of the summer anxiously monitoring reports of the German invasion. Only in the fall of 1914 would ML return to 54, Costa San Giorgio, her hilltop residence in Florence (ca. 1907–16).

In
Sacred and Profane Memories
(London: Cassell and Company, n.d. [1932], p. 116), CVV recalls a conversation with ML at MDL's villa in Vallombrosa in August 1914. Leo Stein had been describing the Futurists' positions as a form of political protest, insisting that FTM glorified war and the machine aesthetic but understood little of music or painting. ML, according to CVV, “gave her sanction to this opinion, adding that the futurists also were violent against women and were determined eventually to bear their own children.” ML then asserted that Italian women existed “only for one purpose.” CVV and ML tried to make a list of Italian women who had made significant contributions outside of the arena of opera. This exercise led CVV to conclude that “Italian women do not appear to have left a deep impression on history.”

Under CVV's editorship,
Trend
was committed to giving “the younger men free rein to experiment with new forms.”
Trend
was the self-described enemy of “stupidity, banality, cant, clap-trap morality, Robert W. Chambersism, sensationalism for its own sake.” But it soon lost its financial backing, if not its disingenuous editorial mission; after three issues under CVV, the magazine folded. Before doing so it had managed to introduce ML, “a painter of international fame … who is in sympathy with the Italian school of Futurists.” It remains one of the most elusive of the many elusive magazines in which ML was published, escaping even Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich's notice in their generally comprehensive survey of little magazines of the (1891–1946) period, viz.,
The Little Magazine: A History and Bibliography
(Princeton University Press, 1946).

4. THREE MOMENTS IN PARIS, 1914. This sequence first appeared as a triptych in
Rogue
1:4 (May 1, 1915), pp.10–11, although “Café du Néant” had already been published out-of-suite in
International: A Review of Two Worlds
8:8 (August 1914, p. 255). “Café du Néant” was therefore ML's first published poem. CVV introduced ML's work to both magazines. The
International
[formerly
Moods
magazine] version of “Café du Néant” differs substantially from the only known MS (HV at CVVP), while the
Rogue
version does not. Therefore I have chosen the latter as my copy-text.

Rogue
's double-column format restricted line lengths, causing many lines to run over; the lineation here preserves the lineation of the HV. I have made three emendations to the
Rogue
text, all in “Magasins du Louvre.” Left of the emblem ] is the text as presented here; right of the ] is the corresponding text as published in
Rogue.
Line numbers correspond to the lineation of the present edition:

20: camellia] camelia

21: iridescent] irridescent

35: Having surprised] Having surprising

“One O'clock at Night” was omitted from
LB;
the other two sections ran as separate poems. One notable variation occurs in the
LB
version of “Café du Néant”:

  1: leaning      lighted] lighted      leaning (
LB
)

Editor's Note:
“Three Moments in Paris” is the first of a series of poetic satires on gender roles and male/female relations which make up the bulk, but not all, of this section. Here, ML warms up her satiric voice to address some of the themes she explored during and immediately after the years she spent in Florence—male posturing, female dependency, marital appearance, sexual repression, romantic love. Here, too, she appropriates Futurist vocabulary in mocking defiance of Futurism's male constabulatory. Informing these satires is her brief but imprinting affair with FTM (1876–1944), Futurism's founding impresario and chief ideologue, to whom “One O'clock at Night” is addressed. For the reader unfamiliar with ML, FTM, or Futurism's significance as a prototype for the historical avant-garde, some further background is necessary.

FTM's charismatic personality and graphic, grammatical, and lexical theories exerted a strong influence on ML long after their uncoupling. His manifestos calling for the revisualization of language, the abolishment of punctuation, and the liberation of words from conventional syntax appealed to ML's already experimentally inclined temperament. His proposed substitution of traditional sentence structure with the “bizarre rhythms of free imagination” struck her as challenging and logical—a revolutionary formula for a revolutionary age. And his summons to oppose the old poetry of nostalgic obligation with a new poetry of intellectual expectation seemed to beckon and encourage her own imagination.

Given her troubled marriage and her interest in the language-actions of Marinettism, it is difficult to determine how much of ML's initial flirtation with Futurism had to do with her personal infatuation with FTM, how much with the war propaganda that was sweeping Florence at the time, and how much with curiosity and rebellion. FTM was surrounded by the most intellectual and artistic men in Florence, people who shared an elective affinity for literature and the arts. As Italy was preparing to enter World War I, most of the poets, artists, musicians, and actors in Marinetti's circle were signing up. FTM himself volunteered in a cyclist unit. Futurists Umberto Boccioni (sculptor), Luigi Russolo (composer), and Antonio Sant'Elia (architect) likewise enlisted. ML would soon volunteer as a nurse in a Red Cross Hospital. And while it is doubtful that the thirty-two-year-old English poet would have agreed with the thirty-eight-year-old Italian polemicist's characterization of war as “the world's only hygiene,” she fully embraced his enthusiasm for war and his antipathy toward pacifism. Describing “the effect a pacifist
young
man has on one here now” is impossible, she wrote CVV. “It almost amounts to the physical repulsion some people have for the sexually perverse.” In other letters written to CVV and MDL during this period, she expressed her envy of young male soldiers going to the front, her desire for “some sort of military training [for] the women who want it,” and her sensation of war as an aphrodisiac. “I've got the war fever so badly,” she wrote to CVV in one letter. “My masculine side longs for war,” she confessed in another (CVVP). In “Psycho-Democracy” (1920/
LLB
82), ML would later express a more favorable view of pacifism and renounce her views of militarism.

But that was later. FTM was a magnetic force for many who came into contact with his virile intellect and personality. For ML, it went even beyond that. His energy reignited her creativity and incited her dormant animus. He jump-started her out of depression into a period of intense productivity, as she explained to MDL unapologetically. In fact, she suspected that she was “the only female who has reacted to it [FTM's energy]—exactly the way … men do. Of course being the most female thing extant—I'm somewhat masculine” (MDLP). To MDL again: “I am so interested to find I am a sort of pseudo-Futurist” (1914). But in other letters written at the height of her involvement with FTM, she adopted a more guarded stance. To her estranged husband, SH, she wrote: “Do not fear—I am not intellectual enough to have become a Futurist—but have given up everything else.” And in still other letters to MDL she hedged her convictions: “I am in the throes of conversion to Futurism—but I shall never convince myself.”

ML finally objected to FTM's promotion of misogyny. But did she also thrive under the male caste system over which he presided as patriarch? According to FTM, women embodied the
amore
to which the male gaze was susceptible, luring them away from the technological vision to which they should be devoting their full concentration. Sentiment, lust, and passion were weaknesses in men, brought on by the animal presence of women. While publicly defending the rights of suffragists, FTM found their eagerness for the right to vote “ridiculous,” for “woman finds herself wholly inferior in respect to character and intelligence and can therefore be only a mediocre legislative instrument.” Although he denied that these principles applied to individual women of ML's advanced nature, FTM publicly compared women to animals—“wholly without usefulness”—subbeings.

His misogynism was more editorially than behaviorally conspicuous. The ninth tenet of
The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism
(1909) declared “contempt for women” as one of the movement's sacred principles. The tenth tenet named “feminism” as one of the enemies Futurism would destroy. Although ML was assured by FTM that these were general principles, that she was a special case, this was a slap in the face of an entire gender—and she took offense at this attempt to extort the female race. In “Lions' Jaws” (n. 14), ML frames Marinetti's attempt to wheedle his way into the “‘excepted' woman's heart” in terms of moral choices and gender loyalties.

Like all of ML's affairs, this one ended abruptly. But she was quick to admit that the relationship had also had its benefits and was relatively sanguine about the loss. Soon she was writing to MDL that although FTM's “interest in me lasted only two months of war fever … I am indebted to [FTM] for twenty years added to my life from mere contact with his exuberant personality.” In the same letter, she refers to her “utter defeat in the sex war,” a sense of surrender that is alluded to again in “Lions' Jaws,” qualified by a sense of having won a larger cause. Almost nonchalantly she asked MDL what she was “making of Feminism. I heard you were interested. Have you got any idea in what direction the sex must be shoved?” And to CVV she matter-of-factly mentioned a similar shift in focus: “What I feel now are feminine politics.” While her poems would soon take stern measure of FTM and his sexist gang, her letters speak more about renewal and purpose than rejection and disillusion. In fact, she describes her sense of optimism about the future as an optimism borne of Futurism, and describes FTM not as a devil but as a fallen angel, “sent from heaven to put the finishing touch—& they say he is a brute to women!” (CVVP).