The Lost Lunar Baedeker (21 page)

The contributor's note in
Pagany
announced: “Mina Loy, of the Others group, is writing poetry again after several years' silence.” Indeed, with the exception of “Gertrude Stein”, which was superscribed to an essay, ML had not published anywhere for nine years.

Pagany
was launched by Richard Johns in 1930, with the editorial support of WCW. It announced itself as “a speculative venture, filling in the middle scene between the excellent conventional magazines and those which are entirely experimental in content.” It folded in 1933.

31. LADY LAURA IN BOHEMIA. Composition date unknown, but by reference to the letter quoted in the previous note it is clear that this poem was completed by 1927. NOMS. First published in
Pagany
2:3 (Summer 1931, pp. 125–27). The present text follows the first published appearance, where page breaks occur between lines 12 and 13 and 44 and 45; in the present edition, these are also stanza breaks.

Editor's Note:
“Zelli's” (l. 27) was a well-known bar in Montparnasse frequented by ML and her fellow expatriates in the 1920s. Llike “Ignoramus” (n. 13), this poem anticipates the later destitution poems of ML's Bowery period (Section 4). After the publication of this poem, ML did not publish again until 1946—the longest silence of her career.

32. THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA, ca. 1928. First published in
LLB
82, p. 250. There is a signed, undated typescript at YCAL, which serves as the basis for the present text; I have made several emendations to it:

22: Lacrimae] Lacrimi

23: imperceptibly] imperceptably

25: Apuane] Appuane
    (Carrara, a region of Italy famous for its marble, sits in the Apuane Alps.)

33. NANCY CUNARD. Composition date unknown, probably late 1920s. First published in
LLB
82, p. 259. The present text follows the signed typescript at YCAL, to which I have made three emendations:

  3: helmeted] helmetted

  6: vermilion] vermillion

  7: receding] receeding

Editor's Note:
NC (1896–1965), rebel-heiress-seductress-poet, was one of the stormiest and most colorful figures of 1920s Paris. Her temperamental extremes and controversial stands were often limned—unflatteringly—in the fiction of her ex-lovers. Three of them—Aldous Huxley, Michael Arlen and Louis Aragon—featured characters based on her in novels. She also made cameo appearances in the fiction of Evelyn Waugh and Richard Aldington. It has long been hypothesized, although inconclusively, that she was the inspiration for Lady Brett Ashley in Ernest Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises,
and it has also been suggested that she modelled for Fresca in TSE's drafts for “The Fire Sermon” section of
The Waste Land,
a speculation which does not serve either TSE's or NC's reputation well. TSE's portrait of a spoiled society girl with literary ambitions reveals a “powerful disgust for Fresca's sexuality and contempt for her poetic dabblings. Intellectual women, he states, are even less interesting than ordinary sluts. Beneath their pretensions, there is the same basic lust” (Anne Chisholm,
Nancy Cunard: A Biography
[New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979], p. 339).

As the founder and editor of the Hours Press, NC was Samuel Beckett's first publisher. As an avid supporter of the French Resistance, she was high on Hitler's blacklist. As an outspoken defender of the rights of American blacks, she was once banned from entering the United States. And as the debutante daughter of English shipping magnates Lady Emerald and Sir Bache Cunard, she used her money to support people and causes that made her an outcast in her own family. But it was her bewitching appearance and seductive countenance that drew so many writers' and artists' attentions to her. CB, Wyndham Lewis, Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, Oskar Kokoschka, and John Banting were among those who painted, sculpted, or photographed her.

It has been suggested that ML may have been making an ironic comment on NC's involvement with “race issues” in this poem, but this surmise strikes me as doubtful. Not only were both women sympathetic to some of the same causes, they admired many of the same artists and shared several important friends in common. Because of its careful attention to visual details and physical features, and its markedly iconographic approach to its subject throughout, I think it is far more likely that this poem was written not as a social portrait of NC but as a depiction of an actual portrait. ML was certainly aware of the extent to which NC was an artistically desirable model. This poem may well be based on a specific portrait of NC that she saw alongside portraits of George Moore and Princess Murat in NC's home on rue le Regrattier, Paris. For example, the poem follows the English Surrealist painter John Banting's likeness of NC in certain details.

Moore, the Irish novelist, was a lifelong friend of NC, who privately wondered whether she might be his daughter. It was no secret that he had had an affair with her mother, or that he took a paternal interest in the activities of NC, who late in life published a memoir about him (
G.M. : Memories of George Moore
[London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1956]). The subject of the other portrait, Princess Murat (l. 23), raises identity questions of another sort. She could easily be the Surrealist cult figure and eccentric French princess Violette Murat, with whom René Crevel smoked opium in an abandoned submarine, just before his death in Toulon in 1930. She would have known NC. She could also be Princess Lucien Murat, friend of the Dadaists. It is more in keeping with NC's taste and ML's eye for detail to imagine a likeness of one of these figures occupying space within the frame of the painting and the poem than it is to imagine her as Princess Caroline [Bonaparte] Murat, Napoleon's sister. But that remains a
haute bourgeoise
possibility. Finally, an “American princess called Murat” turns up in Peggy Guggenheim's memoirs. This sketchily described princess rented Guggenheim's house in Pramousquier (ca. 1927–28), where ML had also been an early guest and painted a fresco on the wall of her bedroom (
Out of this Century: Confessions of an Art Addict
[New York: Universe Books, 1979], p. 93).

34. JULES PASCIN. Composed ca. June 1930. First published in
LBT.
This text follows the typescript at YCAL.

Editor's Note:
This is one of two portraits that ML composed of Jules Pascin (1885–1930), the Bulgarian-born Jewish artist whose suicide sent a tremor through the Paris art world. The other is a line drawing dating from the 1920s (
LLB
82, pl. 17). ML wrote this poem following Pascin's “Portuguese” suicide (he belted his neck to a doorknob before slashing his wrists). In a letter to the Levys following Pascin's death, ML boasted: “Pascin's last words to me were that I was the only one whose poetry was equal to Valéry's—yes!” (MLL, September 10, 1930).

Later in 1930, ML wrote to the Levys again:

“I sent Bernie Bandler [
Hound and Horn
editor Bernard Bandler II] my poem about Pascin—because he had begged me to show him something—and he didn't accept it on the spot as I expected—and at lunch I asked him surprised—apropos of something—but you do
take
things for the H&H … when he answered me [that] he did—I stared and gasped with amazement—then why don't you take mine? He said—I've sent it on to (someone or other)—we
both
decide—& I exclaimed—nonsense. Can't you make up your mind for yourself? And I've heard no more of him—I'm going to send some [poems] to Djuna [Barnes].… Djuna wrote to me to send some as she would like to try & place some for me. These high brow magazines are dangerous trifles—of the Dial—Scofield Thayer is hopelessly mad—another of their editors is going mad—& a third is just coming out of madness. And this erstwhile contributor may be mad!” (MLL)

IV. Compensations of Poverty (Poems 1942–1949)

35. ON THIRD AVENUE, 1942. Parts 1 and 2 were first published together in
LLB
82; part 2 made an earlier appearance in
LBT.
Neither appeared previously in a periodical. This text follows a signed, dated MS at YCAL, with the exception of two emendations:

  9: preceding] preceeding

32: its] it's

Editor's Note:
“On Third Avenue” is the first in a series of poems which ML grouped in a folder (YCAL) under the working title “Compensations of Poverty.” ML probably hoped to publish them as a book. In addition to “On Third Avenue” the folder contains “Ephemerid,” “Chiffon Velours,” “Mass-Production on 14th Street,” “Child Chanting,” “Property of Pigeons,” “Idiot Child on a Fire-Escape,” and “Aid of the Madonna,” as well as several other poems which appeared in
LLB
82 but are not present here.

As early as 1915, one can detect in ML's letters and poems a sympathy for and identification with tramps, addicts, and derelicts. Late in life, she wrote with as much animation about her encounters with them as she once had about her meetings with great artists and poets. In 1936 ML left Europe for the last time; she spent much of the next seventeen years moving from one communal rooming house to another in lower Manhattan and the Bowery. During this last artistically productive period of her career, she became increasingly reclusive and isolated, gradually losing touch with all but a few of her old friends. Dispossessed of the furniture and friendships of the art world, she replaced them with the castoffs and human refuse of her daily rounds. She had once enjoyed cerebral exchanges in the parlors of geniuses; now she was more comfortable exchanging cigarettes with strangers she met on the street.

By the early 1950s, Berenice Abbott, Djuna Barnes, Joseph Cornell, and Marcel Duchamp were among the few “official” visitors whose knock Loy would still acknowledge at the drab door of her shared apartment on Stanton Street. She was a kind of sidewalk saint to the loafers and indigents of her Bowery neighborhood, an ethereal white-haired figure floating past doorways with shopping bags full of cardboard and cans, offering cures for the hungover and wine for the thirsty. “Mama Mina,” some called her. To others she was “the Duchess.” Like a modern Saint Gilles, the legendary protector of lepers and cripples, she was generous with change, favors, and had an unlimited inventory of stories. No one knew or cared if her recollections were delusional. She was part of pedestrian ecology, part of the communal street. She held séances, worked crossword puzzles, and patented designs for curtain rods and other household inventions out of what others threw away. Her attraction to trash began in the 1900s; it preceded Dada.

She once drew portraits of the great modernist icons of her generation and trafficked in surrealist paintings; now she drew figures of shoeless demimondaines huddled in doorways and stuffed her closets with egg crates. She had once been a model and a modiste; now she wore her nightgown in the street, part of the human shuffle known as the Bowery sidewalk. She existed in the margins of the formal economy and outside the notice of official culture. She had always been an outsider, but now, as an insider in a world of outsiders, she was creating identity for a people and place as far beneath the dignity of museums as her “Love Songs” of the 1910s had been beneath the dignity of critics. When she scavenged the back alleys for flattened cans and abandoned mopheads, it was not to fashion a shelter but to create a poignant vision of shelterless existence. We will never know how many of these raw collages of homeless, angelic bums watching over the street or curled next to parking meters in innocent sleep were lost, but a number of them have been preserved as a result of a show curated by Marcel Duchamp at the Bodley Gallery in 1959. This was the last public event focused on ML until her funeral. ML did not attend the opening.

During this period, she was also writing her last poems, drawing on the same unheroic figures and streets to depict the underside of an urban environment which was now her own—a zone where panhandlers and unknown poets saw their broken dreams reflected in each other's eyes, and were constantly having to adjust themselves to the ever-shrinking boundaries of their social space. When she wrote about marginalized, discarded people precariously living their anonymous lives between pigeons and curbstones, she was not doing so with pity or disgust. She was describing the spiritual compensations of penury, perched as she was in
dishabille
at dignity's last doorway. Some of these poems feature scenes, figures, and phrases also found in her three-dimensional assemblages.

36. MASS-PRODUCTION ON 14th STREET, 1942. This text is based on the signed, dated (July 27, 1942), hand-corrected MS at YCAL. First published in
LBT;
no periodical publication.

28: Carnevale] Carneval
    (I assume that ML was aiming for the Italian spelling, but “Carnaval” [French] is also possible here.)

43: simulacra's] simulacres'

37. IDIOT CHILD ON A FIRE-ESCAPE, 1943. First published in
Partisan Review
19:5 (September–October 1952, p. 561). This text follows the first published version, with the exception of two changes in punctuation: the substitution of a comma for a period after line 5 and the addition of a comma after line 6. These emendations follow ML's dated typescript (MLA), which bears a notation in her hand recording the publication in
PR.

Editor's Note:
This poem was submitted to
PR
by Levy and accepted by Philip Rahv.

38. AID OF THE MADONNA, 1943. The first three stanzas were published in
Accent
7:4 (Winter 1947, p. 111). The
Accent
text corresponds to the first page of a signed and dated MS at YCAL, the second page of which contains three additional stanzas.

Editor's Note:
In a variation from the stated editorial policy of this edition, I am following the text of the MS, on the assumption that this represents the version prepared by the author for publication. In all likelihood the second half of the poem was cut by
Accent,
or possibly by Gilbert Neiman (see n. 39). I base this assumption on the fact that ML circulated the longer version to Joseph Cornell (JC) and other friends shortly after the poem's publication, and that all six stanzas were completed prior to its first publication in 1943.