The Lost Lunar Baedeker (17 page)

11. HUMAN CYLINDERS, ca. 1915. NOMS. First published in
Others: An Anthology of the New Verse,
pp. 71–72. This text follows the first published version, to which I have made one emendation:

33: antediluvian] antedeluvian

Editor's Note:
For EP, the 1917
Others
anthology contained the first “adequate presentation” of ML's work. For John Rodker (1894–1955), the three poems by ML also enabled one to “estimate her actual significance” for the first time. But he was less taken by the evidence than EP, concluding that “she certainly is a poet, but her work remains only—very interesting. Between that and poetry that matters is still a wide gulf. Her visualization is original, often brilliant, but headwork is cold comfort and her capacity for feeling is rather a cold indignation.” He gave qualified praise to “Human Cylinders,” calling it “a good poem,” but suggesting that if only it were “simplified, it might be great” (
Little Review
5:7 [November 1918, pp. 31–32]). The twenty-four-year-old reviewer probably knew very little, if anything, of the Futurist sources from which its lines were drawn. (John Rodker was the founder of Ovid Press, publisher of EP's
Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,
and first husband of the English novelist Mary Butts).

12. THE BLACK VIRGINITY, ca. 1915. NOMS. First published in
Others: A Magazine of the New Verse
5:1 (December 1918, pp. 6–7). This text follows the first publication. I have made the following emendations to the 1918 text:

10: Truncated] Troncated

11: segregation] segration

17: Anaemic] Aenaemic

38: Subjugated] Subjuguted

13. IGNORAMUS, composed ca. 1915. NOMS. First published in
LB
(section 1: “1921–1922”). Although not published until 1923, ML refers to this poem in a letter to CVV written in 1915: “The best thing I did was ‘Ignoramus'” (CVVP). Thus I have placed the composition date at 1915. This text follows the first publication, except for the following emendations:

28: Mating] Making

53: last”] last

Editor's Note:
The title character of this poem is a purehearted and innnocent-natured tramp—very much in the spirit of Charlie Chaplin's tramp, who first made his screen appearance in the 1910s. This poem reveals a day in the tramp's life—a life of disadvantage, resourcefulness, routine, and chance. Performing, maundering, bargaining, improvising, playing, “breakfasting on rain”—these are among the survival habits and alleviating solutions of the sentient alley dwellers and outcasts on whom ML shined her final gaze of compassion—after abandoning society, satire, and homage. “Ignoramus” represents the first appearance of such a figure in ML's work, prefiguring the lowlife figures featured in several poems written during her Bowery period (Section 4).

14. LIONS' JAWS. Composition date unknown, ca. 1919. NOMS. “Lions' Jaws” appears to be ML's final verse verdict on Futurist affairs—her own, her paramours', their victims', their lovers'. First published in
The Little Review
7: 3 (September–December 1920, pp. 39–43). The present text follows the first published version except for the following emendations:

  5: mise en scène] mis-en-scene

24: rococo] rococco

49: carnivorous] carniverous

53: lightning] lightening

76: on a] an a

81: vermilion] vermillion

89: ménage] menage

Editor's Note:
This was the first of three contributions by ML to
The Little Review,
the influential magazine whose foreign editor, EP, solicited ML's poems. This issue of
LR
also contained a review by John Rodker of the latest
Others
anthology (
Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse
) and a response by ML (see n. 17).

Previous notes have identified some, but not all, of the identities behind the spoof aliases of “Lions' Jaws.” “Danriel Gabrunzio” is Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863–1938), Italian nationalist, poet, adventurer, and adulterer. “Raminetti” is of course FTM; “Bapini” is GP, the homely Futurist scholar and nearsighted philosopher introduced in “Giovanni Franchi” and “The Effectual Marriage.” “Ram” and “Bap” are mock pet names for competitors Marinetti and Bapini, reminiscent of the sounds of boys playing with toy artillery. And they are both “flabbergasts,” in other words, Futurists. “Imna Oly,” “Nima Lyo,” and “Anim Yol” all refer to ML, who sometimes used these acronymic aliases when referring to herself in the third person. “Imna Oly,” incidentally, made another appearance in 1920. In a Provincetown Players playbill announcing Laurence Vail's
What d'You Want?
at the Selwyn Theater on Broadway (December–January, 1919–20), “Imna Oly” played the part of “Esther, a spinster.” Finally, “Mrs. Krar Standing Hail” (l. 124) is a stand-up jab at Mrs. Stan Harding Krayl (a.k.a. Mrs. Gardner Hale), a friend of MDL who had an affair with ML's husband, SH, in Florence. This relationship is described in some detail in the “Stephen Haweis” chapter of MDL's autobiographical narrative,
Intimate Memories: European Encounters
(New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1935).

Compositionally this poem belongs with ML's post-Florence poems. Its attenuating opening line (“Peninsular” is allowed to stand as a pun) and telescopic perspective throughout place the personalities and events described on memory's horizon. ML was probably living in New York when she wrote this poem, but because “Lions' Jaws” is set in Italy and represents ML's last balance sheet of Futurist business, I am including it in this section. The poem could not have been written before 1919, since the last stanza makes reference to Gabriele d'Annunzio's famous storm on the contested Adriatic port of Fiume, which took place in September of that year. D'Annunzio's unauthorized siege was designed to prevent Fiume's incorporation into the then newly formed Yugoslav nation.

Much of the private and public history of ML and the Futurists can be traced in this poem, not to mention the personality traits, ideological tendencies, and character flaws of the protagonists, from FTM's fantasy of self-propagation (“agamogenesis”), to GP's sense of inferiority, to D'Annunzio's insatiable lust for military and sexual trophies. ML is finally capable, at this remove, of viewing her first battle in the sex war as both a personal defeat and a moral victory, and can concede that the complicity, if not duplicity, of her status as an “excepted” woman was a trap which left her with only one choice. I do not wish to transpose too much biography onto this poem, but there is also the suggestion that she may have fantasized—if not actually petitioned—her lovers to father (another) illegitimate child, just as there are hints elsewhere that she may have miscarried or aborted a child by SH.

It seems just to give ML the last word in this particular chapter of her literary struggles on the hom(m)e front:

“Now dear Carlo—If you like you can say that Marinetti influenced me—merely by waking me up—I am in no way
considered
a Futurist by futurists—& as for Papini he has in no way influenced——
my work!
! so don't say a word about it—he's very passatist—really” (ML to CVV, 1914; CVVP).

II. Songs to Joannes (1917)

15. SONGS TO JOANNES. By early 1917 ML had completed this sequence. She had drafted most of it by August 1915, and made frequent references to the work-in-progress in letters she wrote to CVV that year. Initially, she expressed hesitation about the work (“… no interest to the public … for your eyes only”) and concern about circulating it at all: “I feel my family on top of me—they want to read some of my pretty poems!.… one friend … has dubbed my work pure pornography—”. When SH warned her that she was ruining her reputation by writing as she did, she was annoyed and discouraged. But as the year and sequence matured, it was clear that the poem had introjected itself deeply within her psyche: “If this book of mine is no good it settles me—I am the book and I have that esoteric sensation of
creating!
” By the time she had completed the project, she could hardly contain her eagerness to make it public: “I send herewith—the second part of Songs to Joannes—
the
best since Sappho—they are interesting.… If you wanted me to be a happy woman for five minutes or more, you would get [them] published.… My book is wonderful—it frightens me.”

In July 1915, the first four sections of what was eventually to become a thirty-four-song cycle appeared under the title “Love Songs” in the inaugural issue of
Others: A Magazine of the New Verse
(1:1, July 1915, pp. 6–8). The scandal created by the debut of
Others
quickly earned the magazine “a reputation bordering on infamy,” AK recalled two decades later in
Troubadour: An Autobiography
(New York: Liveright, 1925). He proudly described the “small-sized riot” that broke out when
Others
first hit the stands. ML's “Love Songs” were the favorite victim of the attacks: “Detractors shuddered at Mina Loy's subject-matter and derided her elimination of punctuation marks and the audacious spacing of her lines,” not to mention her explicit examination of intercourse, orgasm, bodily function, and sexual desire. Although she was yet to make her first trip to America, ML had already secured her reputation in the New York avant-garde literary community. In his famous survey of American poetry,
Our Singing Strength
(New York: Coward-McCann, 1929), AK again described the “violent sensation” that ML's “Love Songs” created: her “clinical frankness [and] sardonic conclusions, wedded to a madly elliptical style scornful of the regulation grammar, syntax and punctuation … drove our critics into furious despair.… The utter nonchalance in revealing the secrets of sex was denounced as nothing less than lewd. It took a strong digestive apparatus to read Mina Loy.… To reduce eroticism to the sty was an outrage, and to do so without verbs, sentence structure … [was] even more offensive.” AK was referring to the sty of the limicolous “Pig Cupid” in ML's all-business opening stanza to “Love Songs,” the most famous of all her lines.

In recalling the outrage of “the average critic … here in enlightened Manhattan” toward “Love Songs” in general and its first stanza in particular, AK also made reference to lineal qualities of another nature. He described the poet as the “exotic and beautiful … English Jewess, Mina Loy, an artist as well as a poet,” then described her avant-garde credentials: “She imbibed the precepts of Apollinaire and Marinetti and became a Futurist with all the earnestness and irony of a woman possessed and obsessed with the sense of human experience and disillusion.” AK was the first writer to explicitly acknowledge ML's debt to FTM's Futurist manifestos, or to comment directly on her syntax and subject matter in terms of Futurist technique. Her replacement of “the foolish pauses made by commas and periods” with the more intuitional blank spaces and dashes, her mixing of upper- and lower-case letters, her early use of collage and disjunction, and the charged sexual energy of her poems reflect the influence of FTM and are consistent with the principles he advocated in his manifesto “The Destruction of Syntax” (1913). That ML used these techniques in service of aims directly anathematical to FTM's makes the cultural impact of her appropriation all the more significant. When her lover became the “other,” she turned his tools into her weapons.

“Had a man written these poems,” AK recalled of “Love Songs,” they might have been tolerated. “But a woman wrote them, a woman who dressed like a lady and painted charming lamp-shades.” Her title promised romance. But her songs delivered unmelodic sex.
Chansons sans chanson.

AK's comment was the first to acknowledge a deeply gendered, largely unspoken bias on the part of the critical establishment's initial reaction to these transgressive lyrics. AK recalled that the early reviews of “Love Songs” puzzled ML as much as they injured her. This was also true of the early rejections, which ML referred to in a letter addressed to CVV (n.d., 1915). CVV had been encouraging her to write “something without a sexual undercurrent.” Her response: “I know nothing but life—and that is generally reducible to sex.… Apro-po of Joannes Songs—why won't the pubs publish [?]. This is very sad. And why did Amy Lowell
hate
my things?… Dear Carlo, I'm trying to think of a subject that's not sexy to write about … & I can't in life.”

By 1920, free love was the toast of free verse; E. E. Cummings and Edna St. Vincent Millay were considered the ultra-sexual poets of the hour. ML's experiments had helped clear a path for both, but she was already being trimmed out of modern poetry's body as if she was a premature growth.

If critics reacted quickly to the publication of “Love Songs,” ML did, too. Within weeks, she wrote to CVV that she liked “the tendency of
‘Others'
and the way it look[ed but was] rather sorry that some words were misprinted such as … ‘Sitting the appraisable' [l. I.2] instead of silting the appraisable—and ‘there are' instead of ‘these are suspect places' [l. I.13].” Comparing the 1915
Others
text to the only known MS of this poem (a signed and dated [1915] HV of I–IV), it is evident that the errors she referred to were not present in the handwritten text (CVVP). But it is also possible to see how the words in question could be misread by less than astute surveyors of her casual cursive script. Fragmentary drafts of other “Love Songs” exist at YCAL, but not in sufficiently whole or finished states to serve as copy-texts.

Two years later the complete sequence appeared, taking up an entire issue of
Others
(3:6, April 1917, pp. 3–20). The above-mentioned errors had been corrected, but certain other changes inconsistent with the HV and the 1915 printing were introduced. Some of them clearly bore ML's signature. For example, the last four lines of IV in 1915: