The Lost Lunar Baedeker (16 page)

5. SKETCH OF A MAN ON A PLATFORM, ca. autumn 1914. NOMS. First published in
Rogue
1:2 (April 1, 1915, p. 12). This text follows the
Rogue
text. Reprinted in
LB,
with no substantive changes.

Editor's Note:
This is the first of five poems and two plays ML published in Louise [Mrs. Edgard Varèse] and Allen Norton's spirited Greenwich Village magazine, which advertised itself as “the Cigarette of Literature,” and was affectionately referred to as “a necessary evil.” Futurist rhetoric is satirically evoked throughout the poem. The pseudo-man on the platform flexing his male fallacies with untroubled superiority bears all the signs of a mock Marinetti. ML pulls the strings; Marinetti is reduced to an amusing spectacle—Marinetti as marionette.

6. VIRGINS PLUS CURTAINS MINUS DOTS, December 1914. First published in
Rogue
2:1 (August 15, 1915, p. 10). The present text follows the
Rogue
copy text except for one variant, following the signed and dated (December 3, 1914) HV (CVVP). Stanza breaks in
Rogue
vary slightly from the HV.

  2: door's] doors

Editor's Note:
The word “dot” (l. 5), from the Latin
dotem,
dowry, was followed by an asterisk and explanatory footnote in
Rogue.
The HV bears a similar annotation; thus the asterisk/footnote in the present version is an authorial gloss.

7. BABIES IN HOSPITAL, May 1915. First published in
Rogue
2:2 [
n.s.,
3:2] (November 1916, p. 6). This text follows the first publication except for the correction of a misspelling in l. 45 (irresistibly] irresistably). Two HVs of this poem (CVVP) indicate a possible stanza break at ll. 45/46.

Editor's Note:
ML volunteered in a surgical hospital in Florence during World War I; she described the experience to CVV in a letter dated February 13, 1915 (CVVP):

In Italy they will cut through 2 inches wide and deep of a man's back while he is awake. O dear Carlo men stand pain so much better than women ever so much better.… I'm so wildly happy among the blood & mess for a change.… I stink of iodoform—& all my nails are cut off for operations—& my hands have been washed in iodine—& isn't this all a change?.… I will write a poem about it—& you should hear what a tramp calls Madonna when he's having his abdomen cut open without anaesthetic.

In another letter sent to CVV during this period, she made reference to this poem: “I enclose some slight things I thought about some babies I saw in a hospital. Florence is full of soldiers.”

ML is listed among the November 1916 contributors to
Rogue
as “the writer, and Artist Englishwoman [who] has arrived in New York from Florence. Her first drawing done in this country is in this
Rogue.
” The drawing,
Consider Your Grandmother's Stays,
occupied the page facing her poem and was the first of several she would publish in American periodicals.

8. GIOVANNI FRANCHI, ca. May–July 1915. First published in
Rogue
2:1 [
n.s.
3:2] (October 1916, p. 4). A single HV of this poem survives in CVVP, signed and dated “Mina Loy Forte-dei-Marmi 23 July 1915.” This text follows the first published version, which differs from the HV only in accidentals. The emendations I have made to the
Rogue
text are left of the ].

24–25: démodé] demode'

43: cymophanous] symophonous

48: filliping] filliping

53, 115: Paszkowski's] Paschkowski's

(Paszkowski's was and still is a café-bar located on the north side of Piazza Vittorio Emanuelle, Florence; it was a gathering place for artists and intellectuals during ML's Florence years, as was the more famous Caffè Giubbe. ML frequented both. I thank Carolyn Burke and Marisa Januzzi for this information.)

136: mean] means

154: minarets] minarettes

155: mayonnaise] mayonaise

Editor's Note:
The “Giovanni Bapini” of this satiric work is based on GP (1881–1966), one of ML's significant lovers and one of Futurism's philosophical fathers, caricatured more as foolosopher here. Papini began his career as an “anti-philosopher.” His first book,
Twilight of the Philosophers
(1906), was one of the foundation texts for FTM's Futurism, just as
Lacerba,
the journal he founded in 1913, was an important outlet for FTM's polemical writing. Despite the appearance of solidarity, the two were uneasy colleagues; the charismatic and worldly FTM and the socially insecure and visually impaired GP formed a convenient intellectual alliance that belied a deep personal distrust and competition. This was not helped by GP's discovery that ML was taking turns with both of them in bed. The exposure of this love triangle put a wedge in the fragile geometry of all three familiars and hastened ML's divorce and first trip to America. It also exposed the gap between FTM's practice and teachings, for the “adulterous triangle” was supposedly one of the “four intellectual poisons” that he wanted to abolish (
War, the World's Only Hygiene
).

In a letter to CVV written shortly after the triangle broke up, ML rationalized her behavior: “Of course I was in the right having acted entirely in the wrong.” After losing FTM, she was not regretting the past as much as she was dreading the future: “The only thing that troubles me is the fear of not finding someone who appeals to me as much” (CVVP).

The split in Futurist ranks that followed was explained in terms of philosophical differences but was grounded in sexual politics. GP won a number of the movement's younger disciples to his side, and the biographically unidentified “Giovanni Franchi” of this poem is probably modeled after one of his junior admirers. In an undated letter to CVV, ML wrote of GP: “He's going to ruin himself—getting narrower & narrower—& when I try to wake him up—he says the medicine's too strong—decidedly New York I think—don't you?” Elsewhere she expressed a more disdainful view of GP: “Friends keep me posted as to the errors of his flesh.… He's really only a fool… & his imagination's gone to pot.”

Still elsewhere, ML reports to CVV with a touch of sadistic pleasure the play of her ideas on GP's head: “I had a lovely argument with Papini—I maintained that pederasty was the highest and noblest form of love—& gave the most conclusive reasons—which he couldn't deny—but [he] ended up by saying it's morally and physically abhorrent. So you see?”

Describing her guests, MDL sometimes spoke endearingly of her “pederasts.” Discussions on such topics as pederasty, perversion, adultery, pornography, free love, exhibitionism, and homosexuality were common among the reformers, iconoclasts, and artists who visited MDL's Villa Curonia and frequented Paszkowski's; the new thinkers enjoyed expressing their support for such behavior, although their persuasion was often more rhetorical than behavioral. Sex was the most intriguing conversational subject from which taboo and superstition had been lifted in the new permissive culture. And sex was the favorite subject at MDL's gatherings, where tolerance was encouraged and inhibition ridiculed. ML preferred this subject to all others and enjoyed taking extreme positions to challenge and goad her listeners.

CVV was the husband of Fania Marinoff, but did not make a secret of his occasional affairs with men. ML knew he would find the image she presented an amusing one: GP in the awkward spot of having to take a stand on sodomy after listening to his ex-lover extol the virtues of pederasty. The sexually challenged GP had been a jealous lover before she left him and still had not reconciled himself to the separation. He blamed FTM and was avenging his bruised heart by cultivating protégés in an effort to draw followers away from his rival's splintering movement. GP would not have been at all amused by having his sexual preference questioned, nor by ML's cynical depiction of the elder Giovanni's infatuation with the younger Giovanni in “Giovanni Franchi.” It is hard to imagine a greater affront to Futurist sensibilities than the insinuation of homosexual attraction between the mentor and the mentored. The Futurists were steadfast in their masculine pose and saw no humor in their masquerade of manliness; they were hysterical in their defense of virility and even defended rape as the procreative prerogative of victors in war—life must be re-created out of death on the battlefield. ML's poem bites farcically into the pretense of pedantic male posture and twists with subversive wit the nature of Futurist homophilia.

On the surface, “Giovanni Franchi” is an entertaining lampoon of an apprentice philosopher learning the ways of the world at the feet of his pretentious and intellectually vain elder while three females of indiscrete identity patter complaisantly at the edges of male banter. The insidious subtext only emerges when the incriminating portrait of the Futurist as Pederast is in full view. At the same time, it is difficult not to imagine ML as the self-accusing speaker, reproaching herself for what she didn't see until too late—the true nature of the recused man. She alone “never knew what he was / Or how he was himself” (ll. 124/125). Now that she understands, she consoles herself. She could not have won, could not even have competed with the object of the elder philosopher's infatuation: a handsome boy in adolescence with “sensitive down among his freckles” (l.46). She acknowledges with irony and a hint of mock jealousy the qualities she lacked that Giovanni Franchi had, before reducing him to his only advantage. Indeed: “His adolescence was all there was of him” (l.11).

“He was so young / That explains so much” (ll. 77–78).

9. AT THE DOOR OF THE HOUSE, ca. 1915. NOMS. First published in
Others: An Anthology of the New Verse
(New York: Knopf, 1917), pp. 64–66. The present text follows the 1917 version, to which I have made two emendations:

  8: inconducive] incondusive

46: aniline] analine

Editor's Note:
MM, Wallace Stevens, WCW, and TSE also appeared in AK's second
Others
anthology. EP, in his famous review of this anthology in
The Little Review
4:11 (March 1918, pp. 56–58), praises AK for “this first adequate presentation of ML and MM”; he takes their work to be a “distinctly national product” and praises AK for “getting his eye in.” In this first attempt at literary classification of ML's work, EP coined the term “
logopoeia
or poetry that is akin to nothing but language, which is a dance of intelligence among words and ideas and modification of ideas and characters,” as distinct from
melopoeia
(“poetry which moves by its music”) or
imagism
(“poetry wherein the feelings of painting and sculpture are predominant”).

However problematic certain aspects of Pound's characterization may appear in retrospect, this was the first significant critical notice of ML's poetry to appear in print, the first of many comparisons to MM, and the first to invoke the name of Jules Laforgue. More important, EP immediately recognized the cerebral nature of ML's work and predicted that it would be dismissed for its difficulty: “One wonders what the devil anyone will make of this sort of thing who hasn't all the clues.… I am aware that the poems before me would drive numerous not wholly unintelligent readers into a fury of rage-out-of-puzzlement.” Two months later, TSE weighed in with his opinion of the
Others
anthology. Writing in
The Egoist
V (May 1918, p. 70) under the pseudonym T. S. Apteryx, Eliot praised Loy more reservedly: “It is impossible to tell whether there is a positive
oeuvre
or only a few successes.” Although TSE never revisited that question, or commented on ML again, the aleatory foundation of this poem may have adumbrated the Tarot imagery in
The Waste Land
(1922).

Conrad Aiken also reviewed the
Others
anthology in his
Skepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry
(New York: Knopf, 1919). He didn't think much of AK's enterprise and encouraged readers not to waste their time on the “gelatinous quiverings of Mina Loy.”

10. THE EFFECTUAL MARRIAGE,
or T
HE
I
NSIPID
N
ARRATIVE OF
G
INA AND
M
IOVANNI
,
ca. summer 1915. NOMS. First published in
Others: An Anthology of the New Verse,
pp. 66–70. The parenthetical postscript is reproduced here as it appeared in the first published version. ML spent the summer of 1915 in the Italian seaside resort of Forte dei Marmi. This version follows the first publication, to which I have made the following emendations:

  5: Gina] Gian

23: correlative] correllative

60: idiosyncrasies] idiosyncracies

87: variegate] varigate

Editor's Note:
“Gina” and “Miovanni” stand for ML and GP. This poem drew early and favorable comments from both EP and TSE, and has commanded as much critical attention as any poem from ML's Florence period. TSE pronounced it “extremely good, and suggestive of Le Bosschère.” EP found it “perhaps better written than anything I have found in Miss Moore.” Later, EP excerpted this poem in two anthologies, under the title “Ineffectual Marriage.” In 1932 he still considered “The Effectual Marriage” one of the most memorable poems of the last thirty years, one which defined its epoch. But in memorializing the poem, he also distorted it. Burke has written persuasively about the effect of Pound's “framing” of this poem. See Burke's essays “Getting Spliced: Modernism and Sexual Difference” (
American Quarterly
39 [1987, pp. 98–121]) and “Mina Loy,” in Bonnie Scott, ed.,
The Gender of Modernism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).