The Lost Lunar Baedeker (23 page)

49. AN AGED WOMAN. Composition date unknown, but certainly a late poem. An edited draft version of this poem first appeared posthumously in
LLB
82, under the title “An Old Woman”, following the title of an earlier HV (YCAL). No prior periodical appearance. The present text is identical to ML's revised HV at YCAL.

Editor's Note:
The HV is unmistakably signed and dated prospectively at the bottom of the page in ML's hand: “Mina Loy. July 12, 1984.” I have to assume this postdating is deliberate, given the question (“is the impossible / possible to senility[?])” addressed to the prosopoeia in possession of the old woman's body and the issue raised in the first stanza about the future's (in)exploitability. The “Bulbous stranger” in the mirror, the bloated beldam who has invaded the erstwhile slim and athletic self, is an alien self, an “excessive incognito / … only to be exorcised by death.” The use of the present perfect tense in the poem's first, third, and final stanzas describes the speaker's knowledge at the time of speaking, but if we take the “future” date of composition into account, this knowledge is still premonitional. At the time of composition, the poem's very existence was called into question by its date, making the spectral encounter between the self and its reflected image theoretical. The mind's incubus was thus as subject to elimination by senility as its body's was by death. An attempt, perhaps, to blur the lines between spatial, temporal, and psychological modalities; and a teleology, if not a demonstration, of dementia's tricky logic.

50. MOREOVER, THE MOON— — —. Composition date unknown. First published in
LLB
82. No prior periodical appearance. This text is based on the MS at YCAL, to which I have made one emendation:

13: innuendoes] inuendos

V. Excavations & Precisions (Prose 1914–1925)

51. APHORISMS ON FUTURISM, January 1914. First published in Alfred Stieglitz's epochal quarterly,
Camera Work
45 (January [June] 1914, pp. 13–15). A single signed, dated HV of this work survives (ASP); it varies from the first published version only in accidentals. In the HV, ampersands replace “and” throughout, and line 9
EXPLODES
with
LIGHT
with more calligraphic flourish than can be expressed typographically. I have made two emendations to the published version, the first based on standard orthography and the second following the HV. Each paragraph is counted as a line. Thus:

  7: dilapidated] delapidated

34: ambiente] ambient

Editor's Note:
This composition dates from ML's Futurist period and marks her first recorded appearance in print. A printed leaf of the
CW
text at YCAL bears ML's penciled substitution of the word “modern” for “future” and “Modernism” for “Futurism” throughout. ML probably made these notes after abandoning her Futurist allegiance; although she might have retrospectively preferred to call this piece “Aphorisms on Modernism,” I have retained the original title. In form, its debt to Futurism is clear; its content also reflects Marinetti's influence. Among publications by Futurist-inspired women, “Aphorisms on Futurism” was preceded only by the writings of parodist Flora Bonheur (
Diary of a Futurist Woman,
1914) and manifesto writer Valentine de Saint-Point (see n. 52).

52. FEMINIST MANIFESTO, November 1914. First published (inaccurately) in
LLB
82. For this edition, I have followed ML's signed and dated HV (MDLP), with the exception of the emendations noted below. Since the manifesto was written as prose, I have not preserved the lineation of the HV, except where a pronounced break signals a new paragraph or transition.

  3: psychological] pschycological

  4: centuries] centuaries

21: are] is

46: character] charactar

56: ridiculously] rediculously

68: psychic] pschycic

80: desire] disire

Editor's Note:
The only known copy of this text was sent to MDL in 1914. The text was still in a provisional state, uncorrected and unfinished, as indicated by ML's apostil to MDL on the first page of the MS: “This is a rough draught beginning of an absolute resubstantiation of the feminist question      give me your opinion—of course it's easily to be proved fallacious—There is no truth———anywhere.” In a subsequent letter to MDL, ML wrote: “By the way—that fragment of Feminist tirade I sent you—flat? I find the destruction of virginity—
so
daring don't you think—had been suggested by some other woman years ago—see Havelock Ellis—I feel rather hopeless of devotion to the Woman-cause—Slaves will believe that chains are protectors … they are the more efficient for the coward—.” Later in the same letter, ML refers to Frances Simpson Stevens (1894–1976), the American Futurist painter who had rented ML's studio at 54, Costa San Giorgio, Florence, in 1913. “My dear, I hear that you see Frances Stevens in New York. What do you think of her? I have got the impression from her letter that America is the home of middle class hypocrisy. Is it, outside the charmed circle you preside? Do tell me” (MDLP). When she referred disapprovingly to Stevens's “virginal hysterics” over Margaret Sanger's “idiotic book of preventive propaganda,” ML knew that she was directing her comments to interested ears. MDL had arranged Stevens's introduction to ML, and was the
grande dame
of Manhattan's most important avant-garde salon, where Sanger, Ellis, and many other sexual reformers were guests.

This manifesto was probably written in part in negation to FTM's “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909). It may also have been conceived to counterbalance feminist
manqué
and French poet Valentine de Saint-Point's [pseud. of Desglans de Cessiat-Vercell, 1875–1953] “Manifesto of the Futurist Woman” (1912) and “Futurist Manifesto of Lust” (1913). Saint-Point's manifestos announced the birth of a strong and instinctive superwoman and affirmed the rights of female sexual desire. Loy's conception of a superior female race is further developed in “Psycho-Democracy,” where she diagrams a vision of “compound existence” between advanced human beings of both sexes.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis has written convincingly of this work's problematic relationship to the feminine ideology of “Love Songs” in Ralph Cohen, ed.,
Studies in Historical Change
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992, pp. 264–91). The notes to her essay “‘Seismic Orgasm': Sexual Intercourse, Gender Narratives, and Lyric Ideology in Mina Loy” point out regrettable editorial errors and mistranscriptions introduced in the
LLB
82 rendering of this text, which I have tried to correct in the present edition.

53. MODERN POETRY. Composition date unknown, ca. 1925. First published in
Charm
3:3 (April 1925, pp. 16–17, 71). NOMS. The present edition follows verbatim the first and only published version.

Editor's Note:
This text represents ML's only known critical discussion of modern poetry. As such, it offers a valuable insight into her views of her contemporaries, and an original, personal, and mature glimpse of her taste in contemporary poetry. Along with her essays on GS and Joseph Cornell, it is one of the very few examples we have of ML's attempt to establish a critical voice. It is also the only published text that I know of in which she discusses her own diction and what it means to write in the American-immigrant idiom. I discovered this text well after the publication of
LLB
82, which raises the possibility of other unknown Loy publications being found in similarly obscure or non-literary periodicals.
Charm
was an eclectic magazine published in the 1920s, devoted to women's fashion and clothing. Djuna Barnes contributed several articles to it, some under the pseudonym Lady Lydia Steptoe. Given that its content was for the most part of a non-literary nature, it is not surprising that its existence was not recorded in Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich, eds.,
The Little Magazine
(Princeton University Press, 1947). Copies of
Charm
are extremely rare. The New York Public Library has a run; I am interested in learning of copies catalogued elsewhere.

54. PRECEPTORS OF CHILDHOOD,
OR
T
HE
N
URSES OF
M
ARAQUITA
. Composition date unknown, ca. 1922. First published in
Playboy: A Portfolio of Art and Satire
2:1 (first quarter, 1923, p. 12). Signed, undated MS at YCAL. I have made one emendation to the published version:

III.4: tassel] tassle

Editor's Note:
The original
Playboy,
edited by Egmont Arens, was a quarterly review devoted to “informal, spontaneous, uncensored and frankly experimental material by “those who are trying to blaze new paths of artistic expression … against the dullness, ugliness and backwardlookingness of our own day.”
Playboy
had earlier published a reproduction of a watercolor by ML in its May 1921 issue (p. 22). This autobiographical sketch has remained uncollected until now. In it, ML recalls her own childhood governesses by their actual names, but fictionalizes herself as Maraquita. I thank Marisa Januzzi for bringing this text to my attention.

55. AUTO-FACIAL-CONSTRUCTION. Composition date unknown. NOMS. First published as a promotional pamphlet for private distribution (Florence: Tipografia Giuntina, 1919). The present text is a verbatim transcription of the first published text.

Editor's Note:
The 1919 brochure was signed “Mina Loy, Sociétaire du Salon d'Automne, Paris,” raising the possibility that this bizarre scheme may have been conceived as early as 1906, when ML was elected a member of the Salon d'Automne. More likely, she was trading on an earlier credential and conceived the idea of offering her services as a prosopologist following her return to Italy after the disappearance of AC, when she was desperate for income. This was the first of many entrepreneurial attempts ML made to pitch business ideas to clients. In a letter to MDL (n.d., 1920?) she wrote: “Am enclosing a prospectus of a new method I shall teach when not drawing or writing about art. It came as a most unexpected revelation. And it works. I think the life-force inspired me with it to solve the problem of keeping bodies alive without prostituting art.” In a later letter to MDL, ML lamented, “I have been too ill to make my facial discovery convincing” (MDLP).

GP may have influenced ML's thinking about facial destiny; as the self-described ugliest man in Italy, he was preoccupied with the effect of his appearance on the formation of his character, and was given to speculating on the relationship between visage and destiny.

I include this text not for its literary value but because it represents an important aspect of ML's creative imagination not evident in her other writings. Throughout her life ML was preoccupied with income-producing schemes and brought to bear her considerable esoteric knowledge of art, technology, and human nature to advance practical experiments, test entrepreneurial ideas, and promote business strategies in order to pay the rent and support her children. This text documents one of her many ideas which failed, but she was indefatigable in her attempts to file the next patent or launch another business that might succeed. Her design and manufacture of lamps and lampshades in Paris in the 1920s attained a certain amount of commercial success and earned her notice in the design world of her own time as well as a place in the subsequent history of industrial design (e.g., Mel Byars,
The Design Encyclopedia
[London: Laurence King, 1994], pp. 340–41). Surprisingly, not a single example of her work as a
lampiste
is known to survive. I am still in search of examples.

Three Early Poems

These three poems are published here for the first time. They were composed in 1914; signed and dated HVs of all three poems are preserved in MDLP. ML wrote them in Florence and sent them to MDL in New York, hoping that she would get them published in
The Masses,
whose editors and finances MDL backed. In terms of composition they barely predate ML's so-called Futurist poems, but in normative terms they clearly belong to a less mature stage of authorship. We know from her autobiographical writings that ML produced poems before 1914, but these are apparently the earliest examples to have survived. Given the archival situation, it is unlikely that any earlier poems will surface.

Although these “first fruits” are clearly the work of apprenticeship, I include them here because they reveal certain tendencies in ML's work that were soon to ripen and establish a baseline from which to measure her later achievement. As control texts, they provide a perspective on the development of her later work which has not been available before. I have followed ML's lineation in my transcriptions, although “The Prototype” is closer to prose than verse; a prose diagram of an incipient poem, it verges toward verse only in its final lines. Notes on specific poems follow:

I have made no emendations to the HV of “The Beneficent Garland,” signed and dated January 1914 (therefore ML's earliest known poem).

I have made two emendations to the HV of “The Prototype,” signed February 28, 1914:

  9: tinsel] tinsil

36: inebriating] enebriating

The text of “Involutions” is reproduced here with no emendations to the 1914 HV.

The Beneficent Garland

To hang about the knees of the gods,

The first-fruits of the awful odds

‘Gainst which man till'd the soil.

What are then these first fruits, I pray

Swelling at night, to ripen by day

Such sorrows of their toil?

Fruits of this mystery are they born

The baby & the ear of corn,