The Lost Lunar Baedeker (19 page)

18. MEXICAN DESERT, ca. 1919–1920. First published in
The Dial
70: 6 (June 1921, p. 672). There are two MSS of this poem at YCAL. This version follows the first published text, which in turn follows the MSS in all substantives.

Editor's Note:
This poem is a collaged recollection of ML's traverse of the parched Mexican desert in 1918 with her second husband, AC (né Fabian Avenarius Lloyd, 1887–?). It was also her first poem to appear in
The Dial,
although her anti-Futurist play,
The Pamperers,
had inaugurated its “Modern Forms” section the year before (69:1, July 1920, pp. 65–78). Some of ML's artwork was also published in
The Dial
as
Two Watercolours
(70:4, April 1921, n.p.) and
Baby's Head
(72:2, February 1922, n.p.).

The Dial
during this period was nominally edited by Scofield Thayer and Gilbert Seldes, but Scofield's co-owner, Sibley Watson, and his foreign editor, Ezra Pound, were both more editorially influential than Seldes. It is likely that Pound directed ML's first work to
The Dial.
Thayer first met ML in New York. When he encountered her again in Vienna, he recognized how valuable her knowledge of the contemporary European art scene could be to the development of the “International Art Portfolio,” a project that was never fully realized but led to the publication of
Living Art
(1923). In a letter dated March 5, 1922, to Sibley Watson, Thayer referred to ML as his “assistant” in the portfolio project, thereby associating her with one of
The Dial
's most ambitious projects (Walter Sutton, ed.,
Pound, Thayer, Watson & The Dial: A Story in Letters
[Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994], p. 234).

The Dial
was one of the most prominent literary magazines ever published in the United States. Its championing of modern artistic movements was a potent factor in shaping American taste during the 1920s. In its sponsorship of avant-garde work, it was decades ahead of popular taste. It was also one of the few solvent periodicals of its time, and one of the few which paid its contributors.

19. PERLUN, ca. July 1921. NOMS. First published in
The Dial
71: 2 (August 1921, p. 142). This text follows the first publication.

26: I'm] i'm

Editor's Note:
The date of composition is conjectural, but the references to Dempsey and Carpentier suggest that this poem was probably written around the time of the much-publicized first million-dollar prizefight in the history of boxing. On July 21, 1921, Jack Dempsey (1895–1983) of the United States defeated Georges Carpentier (1894–1975) of France for the world heavyweight title. “Perlun” shares a number of qualities with another boxer, the eternal adolescent and heavyweight legend AC, poet-pugilist-provocateur. AC vaporized, drowned, or otherwise disappeared in Mexico in 1918, but his “pert blond spirit” seems to resurface here. Perlun's “immaculate arms,” his traffic with sailors and vamps, his parasitic life-style, his detestation of the idle rich, and his instinctual, rebellious, challenging nature all call to mind AC, who as a teenage runaway worked his way aboard freighters and trains from Europe to Australia to California, where he rode boxcars with hoboes and picked lemons with migrant laborers. In an unpublished prose memoir, ML eulogized AC as “Colossus,” identified in Greek mythology with Helios, brother of Selene, goddess of the moon. Elsewhere she identified him with Mercury, Roman god of eloquence, thievery, and travel. Excerpts of her memoir appear in Roger L. Conover's “Mina Loy's Colossus: Arthur Cravan Undressed,” Rudolf E. Kuenzli, ed.,
New York Dada
([New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1986], pp. 102–19). Selections of AC's writings appear in
Four Dada Suicides
([London: Atlas Press, 1995], pp. 33–88).

Alternatively, the mysteriously named title figure of this poem may come to us
per luna.
Or he may be named for one of his habits; like AC, who boasted that he was a thief, Perlun purloins.

A final note: Francis Picabia printed a doctored portrait of boxer Georges Carpentier on the cover of
391
(October 1924), deliberately passing it off as a portrait of Marcel Duchamp, to whom Carpentier bore a striking resemblance. Thus Carpentier shares with AC the distinction of being the only boxers featured in Dada's most international and adventuresome journal.

20. POE. Composition date unknown, but in all likelihood this poem postdates AC's disappearance in 1918. NOMS. First published in
The Dial
1:4 (October 1921, p. 406). Reprinted in
LB
(“1921–1922”) without changes. This text follows the first publication.

9: “ilix” is an uncommon but accepted (OED) spelling of “ilex,” the evergreen shrub, or holm oak.

21. APOLOGY OF GENIUS, ca. 1922. First published in
The Dial
73 (July 1922, pp. 73–74). Reprinted in
LB
without changes. No MS has been located, but a fragmentary draft of a sequel, “Apology of Genius II,” dated 1930, is among ML's papers at YCAL. Reprinted in
LB
without substantive changes. The text of this frequently anthologized poem follows the first published version, except for the following emendations:

13: fools'] fool's

37: immortelles] immortels
    (According to the OED, “immortelles” are various composite flowers of papery texture which retain their color and shape after being cut and dried. Immortelles are commonly used to adorn gravestones and tombs. ML wore them in her hats. Here she evokes them in praise of artistic genius.)

Editor's Note:
This was one of two works by ML which YW felt “need, in [his] judgment, yield ground to no one.” The other was “Der Blinde Junge” (see n. 24). YW's essay is one of the first significant attempts to come to terms with ML's work, both on its own terms and in relation to that of her contemporaries; the only significant prior attempt was EP's review of the 1917
Others
anthology in which he first took up ML and MM (n. 9). Winters concluded that ML had more to offer than Moore and Stevens, and is “one of the two living poets who have the most … to offer the younger American writers.” WCW was the other. Of the four poets, YW found ML's achievement “by all odds the most astounding. Using an unexciting method, and writing of the drabbest of material, she has written seven or eight of the most brilliant and unshakably solid satirical poems of our time, and at least two non-satirical pieces that possess … a beauty that is unspeakably moving and profound.” Of all the modernists, he declared WCW and ML the two who “present us with a solid foundation in place of Whitman's badly aligned corner-stones, a foundation which is likely to be employed, I suspect, by a generation or two.… If it materializes, Emily Dickinson will have been its only forerunner.” YW's essay bears reading in its entirety (Yvor Winters, “Mina Loy,”
The Dial
70, June 1926, pp. 496–99). His assessment stands in sharp counterpoint to Harriet Monroe's review of
LB:

Mostly, her utterance is a condescension from a spirit too burdened with experience to relax the ironic tension of her grasp upon it. The load being too heavy to talk about, she carries it as she may … making gay little satiric
moues
as she passes, and giving forth sardonic little cries.

(Poetry
23:2 [November 1923], pp. 100–3)

“Apology of Genius” was ML's first poem translated into French. NCB was so moved by ML's May 6, 1927, reading at her 20, rue Jacob salon that she later translated this poem and published it in her memoirs (
Aventures de l'Esprit
[Paris: Editions Emile-Paul Frères, 1929], pp. 213–16), along with an account of the poet reading it:

Her beauty has withdrawn into itself. She offers us this “apology of genius,” and an entire prismatic poetry which, thanks to some perception of a fourth destiny, she escapes.

(Translation by John Spalding Gatton, ed.,
NCB: Adventures of the Mind
[New York: NYU Press, 1992], pp. 100–3)

22. BRANCUSI'S GOLDEN BIRD, 1922. First published in the
The Dial
73 (November 1922, pp. 507–8), opposite CB's studio photograph of the
Golden Bird.
The same image had previously been reproduced in the “Brancusi” number of
The Little Review
8 (Autumn 1921, pl. 17) accompanying EP's essay on CB. A typescript in WAA appears to be a copy of the
Dial
text transcribed by Arensberg. Reprinted in
LB
(“1921–1922”). This text follows the first published version, to which I have made one correction:

28: aggressive] agressive

Editor's Note:
This is one of two works by ML featuring CB (1876–1957). The other, a pencil portrait of the sculptor's head, is reproduced in
LLB
82 (pl. 18). Although ML and CB would later become friends in Paris, and appear in photographs with Jane Heap, Margaret Anderson, and Tristan Tzara, “when she wrote this poem she had never met the Rumanian genius of sculpture … the poem represents a real intuitional appreciation” (Eugene Jolas,
Paris Tribune,
July 24, 1924). ML's poem is among the first “American” appreciations of CB's work. Along with Henry McBride, she was the first writer to champion Brancusi in
The Dial.

ML's sixth and final contribution to
The Dial
appeared in the magazine's famous
Waste Land
issue. The magazine quickly sold out its sixteen thousand copies and prompted a vituperative exchange between Scofield Thayer and his managing editor, Gilbert Seldes. Thayer objected to the reproduction of CB's photograph on the grounds that it had “no aesthetic value whatever” and was “commercially suicidal.” Seldes shot back that it was ML's poem, not CB's photograph, that caused “the only row … in that connection.” These events preceded by several years the legal dispute over whether CB's
Bird in Space
should be allowed to pass through customs duty-free (as art) or should be considered a piece of metalwork and therefore be subject to import tax as an object of manufacture. This controversy (decided by the Customs Court in CB's favor) preceded by only one year the dispute over whether ML's first book (
LB
) should be able to pass through customs at all, and may partially explain the radical revisions she made to “Songs to Joannes” between its first periodical appearance and its reconstitution in book form as “Love Songs” (n. 15).

Many CB scholars have cited this poem, and it has been reprinted in several books and catalogues on CB, including the historically significant catalogue for his first major one-person show in New York (Brummer Gallery, 1926). All CB literature to date has identified the
Golden Bird
of ML's title as the celebrated 1919 bronze sculpture purchased by lawyer, patron, and collector John Quinn (1870–1924), now owned by the Art Institute of Chicago. This claim was most recently made by Margherita Androeotti in her essay “Brancusi's
Golden Bird:
A New Species of Modern Sculpture” (Art Institute of Chicago,
Museum Studies,
19:3, pp. 134–52). Androeotti is correct in speculating that ML could easily have seen the sculpture in either the home of Quinn or at the exhibition “Contemporary French Art” (Sculptors' Gallery, New York, 1922). These circumstances, coupled with the photograph of the canonical
Golden Bird
which accompanied the first appearance of the poem, make a convenient case to support this theory. But they do not take into account another fact: that there was a second
Golden Bird
produced at roughly the same time (1919–20), which was nearly identical to the first in size, form, and materials. Both are listed in Friedrich Teja Bach's definitive catalogue raisonné,
Constantin Brancusi
(Dumont: Cologne, 1987) under the French heading
l'Oiseau d'Or
(cf. entries 155 and 156, pp. 456–57).

The less known of the two (now in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts) was originally purchased on December 16, 1921 (for 5,000 francs), by Mariette Mills, the expatriate American sculptor and former student of French sculptor Antoine [Emile] Bourdelle. In the summer of 1921, ML visited her close friends Mariette and Heyworth Mills in their home on rue Boissonnade, where she had an epiphanic encounter with the bronze sculpture. ML recorded her first reaction to the
Golden Bird
in her 1950 essay “Phenomenon in American Art” (YCAL/
LLB
82): “Years ago at wonderful Mariette Mills' I came face to face, or rather face to flight with Brancusi's Bird.” She then described the “long aesthetic itinerary from Brancusi's Golden Bird to [Joseph] Cornell's Aviary,” calling CB's sculpture “the purest abstraction I have ever seen.” Given the resemblance of the two sculptures, ML could have been responding to either “aesthetic archetype.” But her written recollection strongly suggests that she was writing not about Quinn's
Golden Bird
but rather about the less celebrated
Golden Bird
that she saw at the Millses' (Bach 156).

23. LUNAR BAEDEKER. Date of composition unknown;
LB
“1921–1922” opens with this poem, marking its first appearance. NOMS. The present text follows the first published version.

title: Lunar Baedeker] Lunar Baedecker

  8: In Persian mythology “peris” are fairies or elves descended from evil angels and barred from Paradise until they have served penance for their forebears' sins.

10: In Greek and Roman mythology, Lethe is the river of forgetfulness, flowing through Hades, whose water produced memory loss in those who drank it.