The Lost Lunar Baedeker (2 page)

It was probably based on such impressions that Moore wrote “Those Various Scalpels,” a poem which Patricia Willis has suggested (rightly, in my view) is a portrait of Loy. Moore questions the ruthless purpose which Loy's talents served: “Are they weapons or scalpels?” Like virtually every contemporary who wrote about Loy, Moore takes measure of Loy's intelligence, beauty, and diction, then calls these qualities into question, turning observations into accusations. How could one so beautiful, Harriet Monroe wondered—and Monroe considered Loy that, if nothing else (“beauty ever-young which has survived four babies,” she said of Loy after their first encounter)—how could one so beautiful be so unsparing in her revelation of the ugliness in herself, and so sardonic about love?

Many of Loy's early critics objected to the use of intellectual formulations and archaic vocabulary in her verse. They found her diction artificial, decorative. They did not understand that she was building a Trojan verse—deliberately hijacking Victorian vocabulary and conceptual posturing in order to subvert the values and expose the mechanisms such constructions were meant to euphemize. Her poetry divided even the
Others
group, which usually closed ranks around its own. In a 1919 review of
Others,
Conrad Aiken encouraged readers to “pass lightly over the … tentacular quiverings of Mina Loy” in favor of the “manly metres” of Eliot and Stevens. John Collier's review was also typical. He cited Loy's verse as an example of “the need for objective standards related to … tradition,” and accused her of producing work “in which the terminology is so stilted, so consciously artificial,” and so full of “quasi-scientific pomposities” that only by “some monstrous exertion of faith, or self-hypnotism [could] its accumulator … regard the results of her labour as poetry.”

Yet Ezra Pound, in 1921, thought Loy, Moore, and Williams were the only poets in America writing anything of interest in verse. Five years later, Yvor Winters invoked Emily Dickinson as Loy's only forerunner. Like Dickinson, Loy was writing at a time when readers still noticed the absence of pleasures denied them. Loy withheld traditional meter, rhyme, and syntax, and presented sex with the expediency of an invoice. She broke every rule on the page, made up her own grammar, invented her own words—even improvised her own punctuation. She drew her vocabulary from one of the most curio-filled lexical cabinets in twentieth-century poetry, yet she remained unseduced by the melodies of conversation and unreceptive to the conventions of versification. Her readers, like Dickinson's, were wary of the sound of an alien voice. It was Loy's “otherness” that was noticed first and foremost by her contemporaries. “Her poems would have puzzled Grandma,” ran the caption beneath her photograph in the
New York Evening Sun
four months after she arrived in New York, accompanying a profile that depicted her as that rare and exotic species,
la nouvelle femme.
“No natural history contains her habitat … If she isn't the modern woman, who is, pray?” the
Sun
reporter understated. Dickinson was received as poetry's queer aunt when her poems first appeared one hundred years ago; Loy was perceived as poetry's deviant daughter following the appearance of “Love Songs” twenty years later. Fin-de-siècle criticism nearly put Dickinson's work into the closet for a quarter-century. In Loy's case, the door shut sooner and faster.

The first doors to open to Loy were in America, and did so before she arrived. But they closed soon after she got here. Critics who knew her felt that her demeanor was out of line with her verse. Carl Van Vechten, the photographer and music critic, was also her first informal agent. He considered Loy the most beautiful of a beautiful generation of poets. She had great promise as a poet, he thought, if only she would stop writing about sex. Her first husband, Stephen Haweis, warned his wife along similar lines:
Keep writing that way, Mina Haweis, and you'll lose your good name.
Alfred Kreymborg, one of her first editors, summarized the public's prevailing objections: if she could dress like a lady, why couldn't she write like one? But there were other problems as well. When Loy came to America, she made it known that she was here to use her talents. She wrote plays and stories as well as poetry. Not only that; she acted, painted, made lampshades, sculpted, modeled, designed dresses, and patented inventions. This was unacceptable. In a provincial land, it was all right for a woman to express herself as a solitary genius, or to be a beauty, but not to be a beautiful intellectual and a creative person-at-large. Villagers respected artistic exclusiveness. Loy respected no such bounds and addressed her sarcastic “Apology of Genius” to those who

turn on us your smooth fools' faces

like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries…

What she named an apology was no apology at all. She claimed that geniuses were exempt from judgment:

Our wills are formed

by curious disciplines

beyond your laws…

Shortly after her arrival in the States, Loy gave her first public reading. William Rose Benét, Maxwell Bodenheim, Padraic Colum, and William Carlos Williams joined her on the mezzanine of Grand Central Palace on Independents Poets Day. Some came out of curiosity, not only to listen but to ogle. Who was this Mina Loy? Was she the great beauty the gossips described? Were her poems as strange as they were reputed to be by people who were passing around copies of magazines with odd names like
Trend, Rogue,
and
The Blind Man
before her reading?

When Pound first introduced American readers to Mina Loy, he described her verse as authentically American. “These girls,” he said of Loy and Moore, wrote “something which would not have come out of any other country.” Pound was being disingenuous about Loy's origins. Surely he knew that she was English. But he had a point. Loy never belonged to England, and her work was never published there. But what Pound couldn't know was that America, the country Loy adopted, would never adopt her.

Eighty years later, an editor again finds himself introducing Loy to American readers for the first time, and finds many of the same questions still being asked. Metrically, what effect was she seeking, if any? How knowingly was she mocking the lyric tradition? How deliberately was she distorting diction? Was she consciously skating a fine line of prosodic disaster, only to rescue herself time after time, like a naturally balletic dancer with inebriate tendencies, in order to make us realize that awkwardness itself can be a desired effect, because its solution—recovery—delivers more tension and relief, and commands more attention than grace executed predictably?

Today, some new questions are being asked. Exactly which poets did she read with profit? What is it that makes her unassimilable by the canonists? Did she know how precociously her language assailed the fortresses of gender? How do we distinguish a posture of seduction from a gesture of authority? Did she lead the avant-garde in adopting a guise of transgressive femininity as a masquerade? And the big questions, I suppose: Was she ever really at home in English? Was she an American poet? And how much control did she have over the publication of
Lunar Baedeker?
Some of these questions are addressed in the Notes, which present information on the way her work was originally published and perceived. Other questions are addressed by Loy herself in a newly discovered text “On Modern Poetry.”

The publication of this book at four minutes to the millennium, so to speak, means that Loy has a chance to rise above neglect. But in order to read her, we not only have to get past neglect; we have to get past legend. And this may prove more difficult, for legend has a way of insinuating itself upon neglect. I first edited Loy's work in 1982. At the time, publishing her work felt more like a cause than an editorial occasion.
The Last Lunar Baedeker
circulated like a secret handshake, and has since become part of the Loy myth. That myth takes its shape from many sources, some of Loy's own making: the diaries of a rebellious young woman, raised in a Victorian English household, who defected to French bohemian intellectual life and Italian Futurism; the memories of contemporaries who described an opinionated, intransigent, witty seductress who left two children with a nurse in Florence to come to New York, and who returned, two years later, pregnant by a missing husband, only to leave again; the deaths of two children; the images of her passionate affair with a poet-boxer who later became a patron saint of the Dadaists, and her search for him in Mexican morgues and prisons; the stories of a lonely widow practicing Christian Science and holding séances in a Bowery rooming house; the exhibition organized by her old friend Marcel Duchamp in 1959, featuring beatific visions of bums fashioned from trash. These stories should neither elevate nor diminish Loy's stature as a poet. She should first be apprehended at poem-level.

Mina Loy is not for everyone. It is not by accident that her work has been misplaced. “Difficult” is the word that has been most often used to describe her. Difficult as a poet and difficult as a person. And certainly difficult to place. Her work has never attracted casual readers. It is easiest simply to ignore her. Until now, the determination required to
find
her poems, let alone the perspicacity required to
read
them, has served as a qualifying experience. But her readers, if small in number, have also been large in commitment. Once discovered, if her poems do not immediately repel, they possess. Her work is far more likely to be a toxic or a tonic—quickly sworn off or gradually acquired as a lifelong habit—than a passing interest. In my own experience, and that of many people with whom I have shared her work over the past twenty years, her poems either embed themselves deeply within the imagination or they alienate. With Loy, there is no in between. She is not an academic poet, but her poems are of the intellect. In order to read her with profit, you need at least four things: patience, intelligence, experience, and a dictionary.

One generally takes Loy—or does not—as one takes a vow. She tends to be accepted or avoided. No one considers her “decent.” She is contrary, she is antimetric, and certainly she is
in
decent. Her first readers found her so, and most contemporary readers still do. You become either a sworn believer or a fast enemy. Loy's poetry has gradually fostered community among scholars, but it has also helped to define the sides of a poetry war which is quite real. In recent years her poetry has begun to register with a critical valence for the first time since the 1920s; this is new. But there will always remain those who don't subscribe. She forces us to take sides, and the easiest side to take is the one that looks past her. That is all right, for I believe, finally, that she will establish the reputations of critics more than they will hers, and that a true and good argument about Mina Loy has begun. That argument is needed. There is no version of the twentieth-century canon that includes Mina Loy's work, yet somehow it has survived. Perhaps her absence from such lists is itself a form of status. Perhaps it was her wish to remain unchosen.

It is not given to each of us

To be desired.

Loy once said in
The Blind Man:
“Art is
The Divine Joke,
and any Public … can see a nice easy simple joke such as the sun.” She named her lunar baedeker not for the sun but for its ghost. It is now, just as the sun is setting on the century, that her guide to the moon seems indispensable. How strange her voice still seems. And how disturbing.

I believe there are certain guidebooks we should take with us as we navigate our way toward the next century, and that Mina Loy's is one of them. I think her poems have a relevance to the formation of a new modernity, and that she might yet prove to be the poet of her century, as Duchamp proved to be the artist of his. For some of us, she is already.

R.L.C.

I

FUTURISM × FEMINISM: THE CIRCLE SQUARED
 (POEMS 1914–1920) 

Loy in Florence, ca. 1909, holding her daughter, Joella, and wearing a hat and dress of her own design

 

There is no Life or Death,

Only activity

And in the absolute

Is no declivity.

There is no Love or Lust

Only propensity

Who would possess

Is a nonentity.

There is no First or Last

Only equality

And who would rule

Joins the majority.

There is no Space or Time

Only intensity,

And tame things

Have no immensity.

Parturition

I am the centre

Of a circle of pain

Exceeding its boundaries in every direction

The business of the bland sun