by Mina Loy
Editor’s Note: ML volunteered in a surgical hospital in Florence during World War I; she described the experience to CVV in a letter dated February 13, 1915 (CVVP):
In Italy they will cut through 2 inches wide and deep of a man’s back while he is awake. O dear Carlo men stand pain so much better than women ever so much better.… I’m so wildly happy among the blood & mess for a change.… I stink of iodoform—& all my nails are cut off for operations—& my hands have been washed in iodine—& isn’t this all a change?.… I will write a poem about it—& you should hear what a tramp calls Madonna when he’s having his abdomen cut open without anaesthetic.
In another letter sent to CVV during this period, she made reference to this poem: “I enclose some slight things I thought about some babies I saw in a hospital. Florence is full of soldiers.”
ML is listed among the November 1916 contributors to Rogue as “the writer, and Artist Englishwoman [who] has arrived in New York from Florence. Her first drawing done in this country is in this Rogue.” The drawing, Consider Your Grandmother’s Stays, occupied the page facing her poem and was the first of several she would publish in American periodicals.
8. GIOVANNI FRANCHI, ca. May–July 1915. First published in Rogue 2:1 [n.s. 3:2] (October 1916, p. 4). A single HV of this poem survives in CVVP, signed and dated “Mina Loy Forte-dei-Marmi 23 July 1915.” This text follows the first published version, which differs from the HV only in accidentals. The emendations I have made to the Rogue text are left of the ].
24–25: démodé] demode’
43: cymophanous] symophonous
48: filliping] filliping
53, 115: Paszkowski’s] Paschkowski’s
(Paszkowski’s was and still is a café-bar located on the north side of Piazza Vittorio Emanuelle, Florence; it was a gathering place for artists and intellectuals during ML’s Florence years, as was the more famous Caffè Giubbe. ML frequented both. I thank Carolyn Burke and Marisa Januzzi for this information.)
136: mean] means
154: minarets] minarettes
155: mayonnaise] mayonaise
Editor’s Note: The “Giovanni Bapini” of this satiric work is based on GP (1881–1966), one of ML’s significant lovers and one of Futurism’s philosophical fathers, caricatured more as foolosopher here. Papini began his career as an “anti-philosopher.” His first book, Twilight of the Philosophers (1906), was one of the foundation texts for FTM’s Futurism, just as Lacerba, the journal he founded in 1913, was an important outlet for FTM’s polemical writing. Despite the appearance of solidarity, the two were uneasy colleagues; the charismatic and worldly FTM and the socially insecure and visually impaired GP formed a convenient intellectual alliance that belied a deep personal distrust and competition. This was not helped by GP’s discovery that ML was taking turns with both of them in bed. The exposure of this love triangle put a wedge in the fragile geometry of all three familiars and hastened ML’s divorce and first trip to America. It also exposed the gap between FTM’s practice and teachings, for the “adulterous triangle” was supposedly one of the “four intellectual poisons” that he wanted to abolish (War, the World’s Only Hygiene).
In a letter to CVV written shortly after the triangle broke up, ML rationalized her behavior: “Of course I was in the right having acted entirely in the wrong.” After losing FTM, she was not regretting the past as much as she was dreading the future: “The only thing that troubles me is the fear of not finding someone who appeals to me as much” (CVVP).
The split in Futurist ranks that followed was explained in terms of philosophical differences but was grounded in sexual politics. GP won a number of the movement’s younger disciples to his side, and the biographically unidentified “Giovanni Franchi” of this poem is probably modeled after one of his junior admirers. In an undated letter to CVV, ML wrote of GP: “He’s going to ruin himself—getting narrower & narrower—& when I try to wake him up—he says the medicine’s too strong—decidedly New York I think—don’t you?” Elsewhere she expressed a more disdainful view of GP: “Friends keep me posted as to the errors of his flesh.… He’s really only a fool… & his imagination’s gone to pot.”
Still elsewhere, ML reports to CVV with a touch of sadistic pleasure the play of her ideas on GP’s head: “I had a lovely argument with Papini—I maintained that pederasty was the highest and noblest form of love—& gave the most conclusive reasons—which he couldn’t deny—but [he] ended up by saying it’s morally and physically abhorrent. So you see?”
Describing her guests, MDL sometimes spoke endearingly of her “pederasts.” Discussions on such topics as pederasty, perversion, adultery, pornography, free love, exhibitionism, and homosexuality were common among the reformers, iconoclasts, and artists who visited MDL’s Villa Curonia and frequented Paszkowski’s; the new thinkers enjoyed expressing their support for such behavior, although their persuasion was often more rhetorical than behavioral. Sex was the most intriguing conversational subject from which taboo and superstition had been lifted in the new permissive culture. And sex was the favorite subject at MDL’s gatherings, where tolerance was encouraged and inhibition ridiculed. ML preferred this subject to all others and enjoyed taking extreme positions to challenge and goad her listeners.
CVV was the husband of Fania Marinoff, but did not make a secret of his occasional affairs with men. ML knew he would find the image she presented an amusing one: GP in the awkward spot of having to take a stand on sodomy after listening to his ex-lover extol the virtues of pederasty. The sexually challenged GP had been a jealous lover before she left him and still had not reconciled himself to the separation. He blamed FTM and was avenging his bruised heart by cultivating protégés in an effort to draw followers away from his rival’s splintering movement. GP would not have been at all amused by having his sexual preference questioned, nor by ML’s cynical depiction of the elder Giovanni’s infatuation with the younger Giovanni in “Giovanni Franchi.” It is hard to imagine a greater affront to Futurist sensibilities than the insinuation of homosexual attraction between the mentor and the mentored. The Futurists were steadfast in their masculine pose and saw no humor in their masquerade of manliness; they were hysterical in their defense of virility and even defended rape as the procreative prerogative of victors in war—life must be re-created out of death on the battlefield. ML’s poem bites farcically into the pretense of pedantic male posture and twists with subversive wit the nature of Futurist homophilia.
On the surface, “Giovanni Franchi” is an entertaining lampoon of an apprentice philosopher learning the ways of the world at the feet of his pretentious and intellectually vain elder while three females of indiscrete identity patter complaisantly at the edges of male banter. The insidious subtext only emerges when the incriminating portrait of the Futurist as Pederast is in full view. At the same time, it is difficult not to imagine ML as the self-accusing speaker, reproaching herself for what she didn’t see until too late—the true nature of the recused man. She alone “never knew what he was / Or how he was himself” (ll. 124/125). Now that she understands, she consoles herself. She could not have won, could not even have competed with the object of the elder philosopher’s infatuation: a handsome boy in adolescence with “sensitive down among his freckles” (l.46). She acknowledges with irony and a hint of mock jealousy the qualities she lacked that Giovanni Franchi had, before reducing him to his only advantage. Indeed: “His adolescence was all there was of him” (l.11).
“He was so young / That explains so much” (ll. 77–78).
9. AT THE DOOR OF THE HOUSE, ca. 1915. NOMS. First published in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse (New York: Knopf, 1917), pp. 64–66. The present text follows the 1917 version, to which I have made two emendations:
8: inconducive] incondusive
46: aniline] analine
Editor’s Note: MM, Wallace Stevens, WCW, and TSE also appeared in AK’s second Others anthology. EP, in his famous review of this anthology in The Little Review 4:11 (Mar
ch 1918, pp. 56–58), praises AK for “this first adequate presentation of ML and MM”; he takes their work to be a “distinctly national product” and praises AK for “getting his eye in.” In this first attempt at literary classification of ML’s work, EP coined the term “logopoeia or poetry that is akin to nothing but language, which is a dance of intelligence among words and ideas and modification of ideas and characters,” as distinct from melopoeia (“poetry which moves by its music”) or imagism (“poetry wherein the feelings of painting and sculpture are predominant”).
However problematic certain aspects of Pound’s characterization may appear in retrospect, this was the first significant critical notice of ML’s poetry to appear in print, the first of many comparisons to MM, and the first to invoke the name of Jules Laforgue. More important, EP immediately recognized the cerebral nature of ML’s work and predicted that it would be dismissed for its difficulty: “One wonders what the devil anyone will make of this sort of thing who hasn’t all the clues.… I am aware that the poems before me would drive numerous not wholly unintelligent readers into a fury of rage-out-of-puzzlement.” Two months later, TSE weighed in with his opinion of the Others anthology. Writing in The Egoist V (May 1918, p. 70) under the pseudonym T. S. Apteryx, Eliot praised Loy more reservedly: “It is impossible to tell whether there is a positive oeuvre or only a few successes.” Although TSE never revisited that question, or commented on ML again, the aleatory foundation of this poem may have adumbrated the Tarot imagery in The Waste Land (1922).
Conrad Aiken also reviewed the Others anthology in his Skepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry (New York: Knopf, 1919). He didn’t think much of AK’s enterprise and encouraged readers not to waste their time on the “gelatinous quiverings of Mina Loy.”
10. THE EFFECTUAL MARRIAGE, or THE INSIPID NARRATIVE OF GINA AND MIOVANNI, ca. summer 1915. NOMS. First published in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse, pp. 66–70. The parenthetical postscript is reproduced here as it appeared in the first published version. ML spent the summer of 1915 in the Italian seaside resort of Forte dei Marmi. This version follows the first publication, to which I have made the following emendations:
5: Gina] Gian
23: correlative] correllative
60: idiosyncrasies] idiosyncracies
87: variegate] varigate
Editor’s Note: “Gina” and “Miovanni” stand for ML and GP. This poem drew early and favorable comments from both EP and TSE, and has commanded as much critical attention as any poem from ML’s Florence period. TSE pronounced it “extremely good, and suggestive of Le Bosschère.” EP found it “perhaps better written than anything I have found in Miss Moore.” Later, EP excerpted this poem in two anthologies, under the title “Ineffectual Marriage.” In 1932 he still considered “The Effectual Marriage” one of the most memorable poems of the last thirty years, one which defined its epoch. But in memorializing the poem, he also distorted it. Burke has written persuasively about the effect of Pound’s “framing” of this poem. See Burke’s essays “Getting Spliced: Modernism and Sexual Difference” (American Quarterly 39 [1987, pp. 98–121]) and “Mina Loy,” in Bonnie Scott, ed., The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
11. HUMAN CYLINDERS, ca. 1915. NOMS. First published in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse, pp. 71–72. This text follows the first published version, to which I have made one emendation:
33: antediluvian] antedeluvian
Editor’s Note: For EP, the 1917 Others anthology contained the first “adequate presentation” of ML’s work. For John Rodker (1894–1955), the three poems by ML also enabled one to “estimate her actual significance” for the first time. But he was less taken by the evidence than EP, concluding that “she certainly is a poet, but her work remains only—very interesting. Between that and poetry that matters is still a wide gulf. Her visualization is original, often brilliant, but headwork is cold comfort and her capacity for feeling is rather a cold indignation.” He gave qualified praise to “Human Cylinders,” calling it “a good poem,” but suggesting that if only it were “simplified, it might be great” (Little Review 5:7 [November 1918, pp. 31–32]). The twenty-four-year-old reviewer probably knew very little, if anything, of the Futurist sources from which its lines were drawn. (John Rodker was the founder of Ovid Press, publisher of EP’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, and first husband of the English novelist Mary Butts).
12. THE BLACK VIRGINITY, ca. 1915. NOMS. First published in Others: A Magazine of the New Verse 5:1 (December 1918, pp. 6–7). This text follows the first publication. I have made the following emendations to the 1918 text:
10: Truncated] Troncated
11: segregation] segration
17: Anaemic] Aenaemic
38: Subjugated] Subjuguted
13. IGNORAMUS, composed ca. 1915. NOMS. First published in LB (section 1: “1921–1922”). Although not published until 1923, ML refers to this poem in a letter to CVV written in 1915: “The best thing I did was ‘Ignoramus’” (CVVP). Thus I have placed the composition date at 1915. This text follows the first publication, except for the following emendations:
28: Mating] Making
53: last”] last
Editor’s Note: The title character of this poem is a purehearted and innnocent-natured tramp—very much in the spirit of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, who first made his screen appearance in the 1910s. This poem reveals a day in the tramp’s life—a life of disadvantage, resourcefulness, routine, and chance. Performing, maundering, bargaining, improvising, playing, “breakfasting on rain”—these are among the survival habits and alleviating solutions of the sentient alley dwellers and outcasts on whom ML shined her final gaze of compassion—after abandoning society, satire, and homage. “Ignoramus” represents the first appearance of such a figure in ML’s work, prefiguring the lowlife figures featured in several poems written during her Bowery period (Section 4).
14. LIONS’ JAWS. Composition date unknown, ca. 1919. NOMS. “Lions’ Jaws” appears to be ML’s final verse verdict on Futurist affairs—her own, her paramours’, their victims’, their lovers’. First published in The Little Review 7: 3 (September–December 1920, pp. 39–43). The present text follows the first published version except for the following emendations:
5: mise en scène] mis-en-scene
24: rococo] rococco
49: carnivorous] carniverous
53: lightning] lightening
76: on a] an a
81: vermilion] vermillion
89: ménage] menage
Editor’s Note: This was the first of three contributions by ML to The Little Review, the influential magazine whose foreign editor, EP, solicited ML’s poems. This issue of LR also contained a review by John Rodker of the latest Others anthology (Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse) and a response by ML (see n. 17).
Previous notes have identified some, but not all, of the identities behind the spoof aliases of “Lions’ Jaws.” “Danriel Gabrunzio” is Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), Italian nationalist, poet, adventurer, and adulterer. “Raminetti” is of course FTM; “Bapini” is GP, the homely Futurist scholar and nearsighted philosopher introduced in “Giovanni Franchi” and “The Effectual Marriage.” “Ram” and “Bap” are mock pet names for competitors Marinetti and Bapini, reminiscent of the sounds of boys playing with toy artillery. And they are both “flabbergasts,” in other words, Futurists. “Imna Oly,” “Nima Lyo,” and “Anim Yol” all refer to ML, who sometimes used these acronymic aliases when referring to herself in the third person. “Imna Oly,” incidentally, made another appearance in 1920. In a Provincetown Players playbill announcing Laurence Vail’s What d’You Want? at the Selwyn Theater on Broadway (December–January, 1919–20), “Imna Oly” played the part of “Esther, a spinster.” Finally, “Mrs. Krar Standing Hail” (l. 124) is a stand-up jab at Mrs. Stan Harding Krayl (a.k.a. Mrs. Gardner Hale), a friend of MDL who had an affair with ML’s husband, SH, in Florence. This relationship is described
in some detail in the “Stephen Haweis” chapter of MDL’s autobiographical narrative, Intimate Memories: European Encounters (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1935).
Compositionally this poem belongs with ML’s post-Florence poems. Its attenuating opening line (“Peninsular” is allowed to stand as a pun) and telescopic perspective throughout place the personalities and events described on memory’s horizon. ML was probably living in New York when she wrote this poem, but because “Lions’ Jaws” is set in Italy and represents ML’s last balance sheet of Futurist business, I am including it in this section. The poem could not have been written before 1919, since the last stanza makes reference to Gabriele d’Annunzio’s famous storm on the contested Adriatic port of Fiume, which took place in September of that year. D’Annunzio’s unauthorized siege was designed to prevent Fiume’s incorporation into the then newly formed Yugoslav nation.
Much of the private and public history of ML and the Futurists can be traced in this poem, not to mention the personality traits, ideological tendencies, and character flaws of the protagonists, from FTM’s fantasy of self-propagation (“agamogenesis”), to GP’s sense of inferiority, to D’Annunzio’s insatiable lust for military and sexual trophies. ML is finally capable, at this remove, of viewing her first battle in the sex war as both a personal defeat and a moral victory, and can concede that the complicity, if not duplicity, of her status as an “excepted” woman was a trap which left her with only one choice. I do not wish to transpose too much biography onto this poem, but there is also the suggestion that she may have fantasized—if not actually petitioned—her lovers to father (another) illegitimate child, just as there are hints elsewhere that she may have miscarried or aborted a child by SH.