THOROUGHLY MODERN MINA ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ___________________________________ Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy Carolyn Burke New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996 493 pages; $35.00 hardcover The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy Roger L. Conover, Editor New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996 236 pages; $22.00 hardcover ___________________________________ by Susan Gilmore In the Twenties, when rumors circulated in Paris that poet-artist-designer Mina Loy was not a real person but a hoax, Loy reputedly replied, “I assure you I am indeed a live being. But it is necessary to stay very unknown.” Loy’s verbal hide-and-seek offers a tantalizing glimpse of the capricious persona that Loy felt it “necessary” to adopt, yet Loy’s claimed anonymity is belied by her once indisputable notoriety. The list of Loy’s associates and admirers reads like a who’s who of this century’s literary, artistic, and political pioneers and includes Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, William Carlos Williams, the Italian Futurist F. T. Marinetti, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, and Man Ray, whose provocative photograph of Loy features surreal thermometers dangling from her ears. Sadly, Loy, whose career took the measure of her time, grew reclusive in the years following modernism’s heyday; her writings went out of print and her artwork slipped out of sight. Now two books from Farrar Straus Giroux, Carolyn Burke’s biography, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy and The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, selected and edited by Roger L. Conover, restore Loy’s life and work to view. Conover’s title, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, makes sly reference to the Jargon Society’s now out-of-print 1982 collection of Loy’s works, The Last Lunar Baedeker, which Conover also edited, to Jonathan Williams’s Lunar Baedeker & Time-Tables, as well as to Loy’s original, much-abridged Lunar Baedecker, published by Contact in 1923. In his engaging introduction to the current edition, Conover astutely notes that the voice emerging from Loy’s lunar travelogue was otherworldly indeed: “Her readers, like Dickinson’s, were wary of the sound of an alien voice. It was Loy’s Ôotherness’ that was noticed first and foremost by her contemporaries.” For Burke, Lunar Baedeker suggests that Loy “saw herself as a cartographer of the imagination” one who would eschew not only the preconceived itineraries of the popular Baedeker guidebooks but also the Victorian imperatives for which Loy perceived them to stand. Both Burke and Conover (through his lengthy but unobtrusive notes) trace Loy’s avant-garde aesthetics to her efforts to escape and overturn Victorian mores and the lingering psychic repression of a stifling and divisive childhood. Loy, born Lowy in 1882, was the eldest daughter of Sigmund, a Jewish ŽmigrŽ and enterprising tailor, and a Christian English mother, Julia, who was not only domineering and prudish but prone to theatrical swooning. Loy found herself tom between her bitterly feuding parents as well as the diametrically opposed cultures they represented. Perhaps Loy’s greatest work (one that Conover has regrettably omitted), her autobiographical long poem, “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” (1923-25), charts the cultural estrangement of the poem’s “Anglo-Mongrel” heroine, Loy’s alter-ego “Ova.” Burke provides ample quotations from this work, in which “Exodus Lord Israel” and “Ada, the English Rose” engage in a doomed and agonizing courtship: She simpering in her ideological pink He loaded with Mosaic passions that amass like money Loy portrays her mother as a “Rose of arrested impulses / self pruned” who serves, nonetheless, as the key to the Empire into which the assimilative Exodus wishes to gain entry: Early English everlasting quadrate Rose paradox-Imperial trimmed with some travestied flesh tinted with bloodless duties dewed with Lipton’s teas Their “hot-house” union produces the mongrel, Ova, and threatens to abort her journeys toward self-discovery and self-determination. Yet the identity of the “mongrel” affords transgressive freedom, and while Ova’s attempts to run away are thwarted, Loy fled from the Lowy household to art school and shunned both parents’ faiths to take up Christian Science. Conover has identified Loy’s revised nom de plume as an exemplary instance of her “pseudonymania.” Burke reports that the better-known actress Myrna Loy derived her stage name from Mina not the other way around as one might suppose. Yet Loy’s elision of her paternal name clearly indicates another disappearing act, however incomplete. Burke’s account of Loy’s deep-seated ambivalence toward her father’s faith detects in Loy’s affection for her Jewish-born son-in-law, Julien Levy, a lingering, wistful attraction to Judaism. In art schools, first in London, then in Paris and other continental salons, Loy sought the “prismatic” visions which figure in “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” as her childhood’s gleaming toys, teasingly proffered and withdrawn. Loy’s paintings would come to be widely exhibited in the salons and galleries of Europe and America, but underlying this success was Loy’s struggle to transform herself from artist’s model and mistress to artist. Burke documents the chauvinistic precepts of Loy’s teachers and colleagues such as Bernard Berenson, who conjures a combined art- and sex-object in declaring that “a work of art is like a woman; Ôil faut coucher avec.”’ Loy’s own works satirized such gendered directives. Burke provocatively contrasts Manet’s De’jeuner sur l’herbe with Loy’s “obvious reversal of [its] sexual dynamics” in her L’amour dorlote’ par les belle dames. This 1906 drawing depicts a nude man reclining limply in the center of a circle of fully-clothed, prurient yet vaguely indifferent women. Burke’s biography includes reproductions of Loy’s artwork as well as a number of photographs, including one of a young, exquisitely lithe Loy as a Pre-Raphaelite nude. This photo is the work of Loy’s first husband, Stephen Haweis, whom Loy came to despise and whom she depicts in “Anglo-Mongrels” as a spoiled “Infant Aesthete.” Burke chronicles Loy’s attempts to escape from the artist Haweis’s shadow and to channel her feelings of entrapment and betrayal into art. The shaped poem “Parturition” depicts the dilations and contractions of childbirth in conjunction with spasms of rage. Haweis was reputed to have pursued an adulterous liason while Loy was in labor with their first child, Oda Janet (a namesake for the poetic heroine “Ova”?), who would die of meningitis two days after her first birthday. The speaker of “Parturition” begins: “I am the centre / Of a circle of pain.” Observing wryly that Loy has been “rediscovered and reforgotten for decades,” Burke characterizes Loy’s revival as one that promotes Loy chiefly as a “poet’s poet despite the academy’s dismissal of her as Ôminor,’ a pun she would have enjoyed.” Burke’s own survey rediscovers Loy’s experiments within and across a variety of literary genres. Loy’s play, The Pamperers, a satire of Dada pretenders and their patrons, initiated the 1920 “Modern Forms” section of The Dial; it opens with the “tag ends of overheard conversation” uttered by “somebody,” “somebody else,” and other “picked people melted by a distinguished method among the upholstery.” Loy’s prose reveals a talent for Wildean aphorisms and acute social satire. Living among English and American expatriates in Florence in the years preceding World War I, Loy “watched the Anglo-Florentines rebuild their lives Ôupon the prejudices they had only momentarily mislaid.”’ Loy quipped that, thanks to favorable exchange rates, “Ôthe Anglo-Saxon religion of ancestral halls revived in the bosoms of poor relations among these towering pillars and vaulted ceilings carved with other people’s coats of arms.”’ Loy’s praise was equally pithy. Shortly after her arrival in the United States, Loy told an Evening Sun reporter that “no one who has not lived in New York has lived in the Modern world.” Assigned in 1917 to seek out Mina Loy as the quintessential New Woman, the Evening Sun reporter begins, “who is she, where is she, what is she this Ômodern woman’ that people are always talking about.” The reporter fetes Loy’s modernity by way of a backhanded compliment. “Mina Loy, Painter, Poet and Playwright,” announces the headline, “Doesn’t Try to Express Her Personality by Wearing Odd Looking Draperies Her Clothes Suggest the Smartest Shops, but Her Poems Would Have Puzzled Grandma.” In fact, Loy was determined to be puzzling in print and in person. In addition to playing opposite William Carlos Williams in Alfred Kreymborg’s domestic farce Lima Beans at the Provincetown Playhouse, Loy staged feminine parodies at bohemian balls, trading her chic homemade gowns for outlandish frocks and lampshade hats. Readers will be grateful to Burke for her lively and generous depictions of the Greenwich Village scene. Loy’s whimsy was surpassed perhaps only by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who often appeared at Dada soirees wearing a bird cage or a bustle fully equipped with a taillight. Some of Loy’s most incisive and typographically animated prose can be found in her Futurist and Feminist Manifestos, reprinted in Conover’s Lost Lunar Baedeker. Loy’s affiliation with the Futurist Marinetti led her to formulate her own “Aphorisms on Futurism” (1914). Here is just a brief sampling of Loy’s boisterous pronouncements: DIE in the Past Live in the Future. YOU prefer to observe the past on which your eyes are already opened. BUT the Future is only dark from outside. Leap into it and it EXPLODES with Light. THE Futurist must leap from affirmative to affirmative, ignoring intermittent negations must spring from stepping-stone to stone of creative exploration; without slipping back into the turbid stream of accepted facts. In time, Loy detected a turbid stream of sexism in the Futurist movement. Growing increasingly disenchanted with her mentor-lover Marinetti as well as Giovanni Papini, also Loy’s sometime lover and Marinetti’s Futurist rival, Loy mocked both as “Raminetti” and “Bapini” in her thinly-veiled satire “Lions’ Jaws,” a poem which also announces the debut of the anagrammatic “Nima Lyo, alias Anim Yol, alias / Imna Oly / (secret service buffoon to the Woman’s Cause).” Loy appropriated Futurist forms and invective for her own ends in poems denouncing the fate of “Virgins . . . Minus Dots” (without dowries) and in her “Feminist Manifesto,” which urges women to “Leave off looking to men to find out what you are not seek within yourselves to found out what you are.” Extending the shock tactics of Futurism to combat the commodification of virginity, Loy’s manifesto advocates “the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female population at puberty .” Loy’s poetic tribute, “Gertrude Stein,” salutes Stein as Curie of the laboratory of vocabulary she crushed the tonnage of consciousness congealed to phrases to extract a radium of the word Loy might as easily have been describing her own explosive poetic practices. Conover faults Loy’s early critics for failing to understand that Loy “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.” Conover’s comparisons of Loy with Dickinson make sense when we recall Dickinson’s famous craving for poetry that can make one “feel physically as if the top of [one’s] head were taken off.” According to Conover, Loy “broke every rule on the page, made up her own grammar, invented her own words even improvised her own punctuation.” Burke observes that Loy “had always approached English as if it had to be reinvented. ÔI was trying to make a foreign language,’ [Loy] wrote, Ôbecause English had already been used.”’ Conover includes Loy’s essay, “Modern Poetry,” in which Loy attributes the rejuvenation of poetry to America’s vital linguistic collage: It was inevitable that the renaissance of poetry should proceed out of America, where latterly a thousand languages have been born, and each one, for purposes of communication at least, English English enriched and variegated with the grammatical structure and voice-inflection of many races, in novel alloy with the fundamental time-is-money idiom of the United States, discovered by the newspaper cartoonists. This composite language is a very living language, it grows as you speak. Conover suggests that Loy provoked scandal as much for the sexual taboos she violated as for the grammatical rules she dismissed: “Loy withheld traditional meter, rhyme, and syntax, and presented sex with the expediency of an invoice.” Loy’s “Love Songs” sequence, later entitled “Songs Joannes,” opens with these graphic and humorously grotesque lines: Spawn of Fantasies Silting the appraisable Pig Cupid his rosy snout Rooting erotic garbage “Once upon a time” Pulls a weed white star-topped Among wild oats sown in mucous-membrane When Kreymborg first published portions of Loy’s irreverent “Songs” in Others in 1915, Burke notes that letters to the editor denounced the work as “swill poetry” and “hoggerel” and complained that “to reduce eroticism to the sty was an outrage, and to do so without verbs, sentence structure, punctuation, even more offensive.” Burke informs us that Kreymborg suspected that the outcry came down to the fact that “the author of ÔPig Cupid’ was female.” As Conover indicates, Loy’s “Songs” may have provoked scandal not only for their sly depictions of sexual jousts, as in the following excerpt, Shuttle-cock and battle-door A little pink-love And feathers are strewn but also for their ability to flatten sex to an “invoice.” When Pound praises Loy along with Marianne Moore as the two exceptional “girls” who had avoided “the stupidity beloved of the Ôlyric’ enthusiast,” he reveals the sexism that can lurk within modernist conflations of gender and genre. Yet, despite his condescension, Pound essentially gets it right in describing Loy’s voice as issuing “a mind cry, more than a heart cry” and in adopting the term “logopoeia” to capture “the dance of the intellect among words” that he witnessed in Loy’s poetry. Loy’s poetry may often shock readers not because it is sensual but because it is chillingly cerebral. Yet Loy’s tributes to her second husband, Arthur Craven, are far from dispassionate. Whereas Haweis surfaces in Loy’s accounts as that “odious dwarf,” Cravan is Loy’s “Colossus.” Cravan was known as a “poet-pugilist” for pursuing dual if erratic careers as a writer and a boxer. For a full account of Cravan’s life, readers will have to wait for the biography that Conover is currently writing. When Cravan vanished mysteriously off the Mexican coast in 1918, Loy was plunged into perpetual mourning and doubt over Cravan’s uncertain fate. There is great pathos in Burke’s portrait of Loy, alone and pregnant with Cravan’s daughter, “Fabienne,” desperately seeking the support of her distant mother-in-law. Years later, the Little Review asked Loy to answer a questionnaire which included the following query: “5. What has been the happiest moment of your life? The unhappiest? (if you care to tell).” Loy’s response is devastatingly terse: “5. Every moment I spent with Arthur Cravan. The rest of the time.” In her defiant eulogy, “Arthur Cravan is Alive!” Loy resurrects and exalts her dead husband: “Light passed through the poet Cravan became brilliance.” Among the poems included in Conover’s edition, Loy’s “Letters of the Unliving” reveals a widow anguished and annihilated by her husband’s death: No longer any you as addresser there is no addressee to dally with defunct reality É O leave me my final illiteracy of memory’s languour my preference to drift in lenient coma an older Ophelia on Lethe Loy recovered something of her fancifulness and drive in her efforts to design and market celestial globe and calla lily lamps in Paris in the Twenties and a “Build Your Own Alphabet” toy to New York’s Schwarz toy merchants in the Ô40s (the toy was never manufactured, but designs for it survive in the Loy archive at Yale University’s Beinecke Library). Loy’s compassion for the Bowery “bums” she lived among in her later years surfaces in poems such as “Hot Cross Bum,” which witnesses “always on the troddenstreet / the communal cot ,” and in the troubling yet transcendent assemblages “Communal Cot,” “No Parking,” and “Christ on a Clothesline.” Loy gathered materials for these works from Bowery dumpsters and back alleys. Like Loy’s exquisite lamps, her fragile assemblages have vanished. The photographs of these works that Burke provides prove Loy a stirring visual artist whose work we must no sooner discover than miss. Burke’s and Conover’s texts offer dedicated, meticulously researched, and clear- sighted assessments of Loy’s career. Burke makes no excuses for Loy’s years-long absences from her children. Conover recognizes that Loy is a “difficult” poet whose work “has never attracted casual readers.” “Mina Loy is not for everyone,” Conover acknowledges. “It is not by accident that her work has been misplaced.” Loy exempted no one, not even herself, from her unflinching gaze. “Does your mirror Bedevil you” the speaker in “An Aged Woman” taunts, or is the impossible possible to senility enabling the erstwhile agile narrow silhouette of self to hold in huge reserve this excessive incognito of a Bulbous stranger only to be exorcised by death Loy’s piercing visions reflect within despair reserves of grace. They make sacred the abject the aging, the Bowery bums, the pigeons who baptize whole cities “whitened with avalanches / of the innocent excrements / as if an angel had been sick.” Loy’s “mongrelgirl” heroine, Ova, triumphs when she learns to “coerce the shy / Spirit of beauty / from excrements and physic” learns to make “moonflowers out of muck.” Loy’s Baedeker guides us through a modernist moonscape to the redemptive ground beneath our feet. _______________ Susan Gilmore is a visiting assistant professor of English at Ithaca College. Her article on Mina Loy’s poetry and alphabet toy designs will appear in the forthcoming critical anthology from the National Poetry Foundation, Mina Loy, Woman and Poet.