The Lost Lunar Baedeker

by Mina Loy

21: iridescent] irridescent

  40: up-a-loft] up-a-flot

  (While “flot” is an obsolete form of “float” and “up-afloat” could be what ML intended, I have emended to “up-a-loft,” largely on the strength of Jim Powell’s suggestion that “up-a-loft” is a pseudo-archaic, poetical locution for “air, as in theatrical space.”)

  52: lightning] lightening

  26. JOYCE’S ULYSSES. Composition date unknown. NOMS. First published in LB (“1921–1922”). This text follows the first published version, with the exception of two emendations:

  24: satirize] satirise

  44: its] it’s

  Editor’s Note: This poem was probably written shortly after the publication of the first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (February 1922) by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company Bookshop, but possibly earlier. ML closely monitored the events preceding its publication, namely, the confiscation and destruction by the U.S. Post Office of four issues of The Little Review in which serial installments of the novel had appeared between 1918 and 1921. Attorney-collector John Quinn (n. 22, 27) tried unsuccessfully to defend the magazine’s editors in court. Shortly after ML met Joyce in Paris, her portrait of him appeared in Vanity Fair (April 1922, p. 65).

  27. “THE STARRY SKY” OF WYNDHAM LEWIS. Composition date unknown. NOMS. First published in LB (“1921–1922”), but probably written somewhat earlier, following the reproduction of Lewis’s The Starry Sky (pencil, pen, ink, wash, and gouache drawing, 1912) in the November 1917 issue of The Little Review. This edition’s text follows the first published appearance.

  Editor’s Note: Wyndham Lewis (1884–1957), the English painter, writer, and iconoclast, became famous for aiming invective at the Bloomsbury group (“pansy-clan”) in the pages of his polemical puce-colored magazine, Blast, while ML was still in Florence. Like FTM, Lewis was the impresario of an aggressive cultural reform movement, in his case, Vorticism, which assaulted guardians of taste and advocated the overthrow of outmoded institutions and traditions. Vorticism advocated violence against Victorianism and celebrated the vortex as the point of maximum energy, concentration, and power. ML had known Lewis in Paris, had been impressed by his “Timon of Athens” series in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London (1912), and had followed his arguments with FTM. Finally, after seeing his work in a second exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in London (1914), she reintroduced herself as “an old friend of the Montparnasse quarter—Mina Haweis—” then made some polite remarks about the show, before letting go: “Of all the new work which seems to be groping in super-consciousness—yours alone is creating there—masterfully aware.… I am rash—but please tell me what the drawings cost—I must … have one” (WL).

  The name of the drawing celebrated in this poem was keyed to a footnote in LB: “a drawing in the collection of John Quinn.” John Quinn, one of the prime forces behind the 1913 Armory Show, at one time owned Lewis’s The Starry Sky, Brancusi’s Golden Bird, and the manuscript of Joyce’s Ulysses. All three works were featured in The Little Review, and all three were the subjects of poems by ML (see n. 22, 26).

  Scofield Thayer once recommended to his partner, Sibley Watson, that WL’s Starry Heavens be included in the “International Art Portfolio” project of The Dial (see n. 18); in the same letter (March 5, 1922), he suggested that Mr. Quinn’s “vanity should be played upon by the mention that his name as a patron of contemporary art would appear in the preface to this folio.… I myself should write a short preface giving names of the artists … and mentioning the name of my assistant Alfred [Kreymborg] or Mina [Loy]” (Sutton, Pound, Thayer, Watson, & The Dial, p. 234).

  28. MARBLE, 1923. This poem was published in a prospectus announcing the formation of a new journal, the Paris-based transatlantic review (n.d., 1923), edited by FMF (1873–1939). The text of the present edition follows the first and only known published version (ENC), which differs from the HV (CU) only in the deletion of dashes after ll. 13 and 14. Early drafts of this poem are preserved at YCAL.

  Editor’s Note: In planning his new “exile” magazine, transatlantic review, FMF sent a limited number of gratis copies of a “Preliminary Number” to influential friends and prospective subscribers. In it, he listed the writers and previewed the work that his new venture would support: TSE, RM, Mary Butts, James Joyce, E. E. Cummings, EP, and ML were among the writers named. Most of the sample poems printed in the prospectus later appeared in official numbers of the magazine; ML’s was one of only three that did not. “Marble” is thus among the most obscure of Loy’s published poems. Its existence was noted by Bernard J. Poli in Ford Madox Ford and the Transatlantic Review (Syracuse University Press, 1967, p. 42).

  29. GERTRUDE STEIN, ca. 1924. NOMS. First published in 1924 as an untitled epigraph to a two-part letter in which ML discusses the influences on and maieutic effects of GS’s compositional techniques. ML’s prose statement (reprinted in LLB82) ran in two successive installments of transatlantic review (2:3 [October, pp. 305–9]; 2:4 [November, pp. 427–30]) under the title “Gertrude Stein,” GS’s novel, The Making of Americans, was serialized in tr the same year (1924). This text follows the poem’s first published appearance, with the exception of the title, which I have supplied.

  Editor’s Note: ML’s description of GS also applies to her own literary exercise: “a most dexterous discretion in the placement and replacement of … phrases” by an “uncompromised intellect [who] has scrubbed the meshed messes of traditional associations off them.” At one point in her narrative, ML prospects her own epigraph, describing the “incoherent debris … littered around the radium that [GS] crushes out of phrased conssciousness.”

  On February 4, 1927, GS was the featured speaker at NCB’s salon. ML was asked to introduce her, and in doing so she drew again on her poem. “Je vous présente Gertrude Stein … la madame Curie du langage” (Aventures de L’Esprit, p. 233). Harold Loeb, editor of Broom, recalled in his autobiography that ML once offered him an essay that accounted for the obscurity of GS’s prose by suggesting that “the author was providing merely a framework upon which the reader could erect whatever superstructure was congenial.” He was probably referring to the essay later accepted by FMF, in which ML insisted that the art of GS, “like all modern art … leaves an unlimited latitude for personal response” (The Way It Was [New York: Criterion Books, 1959], p. 129).

  In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933, p. 162) GS paid tribute to ML’s perceptive readings of her unpublished manuscripts, praising in particular her ability “to understand without the commas.” As for Toklas herself, she remembered ML as “beautiful, intelligent, sympathetic and gay” (What Is Remembered [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston], p. 76).

  30. THE WIDOW’S JAZZ, 1927. First published in Pagany: A Native Quarterly, 2:2 (Spring 1931, pp. 18–20). There is an early draft of this poem at YCAL, but no finished MS has been found. The text of the present edition follows the first published version, with the exception of line 29, where “Craven” has been emended to “Cravan.” ML is invoking by name her missing husband, AC, the subject of the poet’s monodic address later in the poem (l. 39–40).

  Editor’s Note: In her memoirs, NCB provides a vivid account of ML’s first public reading of this “just completed” poem at her salon. In preparation for the May 6, 1927, reading, ML worked out with her personal trainer “in the solitude of [NCB’s] second floor.” NCB was quite impressed that a poet should put herself through warm-up exercises before a literary performance, with the support of “a trainer such as boxers have” (NCB, pp. 213–16). Djuna Barnes attended the reading, and later wrote a fictional satire of NCB’s salon in which ML appears as the elusive “Patience Scalpel,” whose ankles “are nibbled by Cherubs” (The Ladies Almanack [Paris: Edward W. TItus, 1928]). In NCB’s autobiographical account, ML is described walking “as though the angels were already nibbling at her heels.”

  On September 25, 1927, ML sent a copy of this poem and “Lady Lau
ra in Bohemia” (n. 31) to her daughter Joella, who had recently married Julien Levy and moved to New York: “Would you take it round to the Dial—with my love to Thayer and Marianne Moore and let them see whether they want one of them.… I don’t know what to write to them—in fact I don’t know which of them it is polite to address—don’t know who’s who in the buyer’s department. Do do that little thing for me. Am I not a bore?” (MLL).

  It is not known whether MM or Thayer ever saw these poems, but in 1930 Julien Levy was asked by Richard Johns if he could supply some photographs by Eugene Atget for publication in his new magazine, Pagany. Levy obliged, then asked a favor of his own. Would Johns consider publishing two of his mother-in-law’s poems? Shortly thereafter (n.d., 1930) Levy wrote to ML victoriously: “A new magazine called Pagany received my permission on behalf of Mina Loy to announce the forthcoming publication of one or two of your poems [“The Widow’s Jazz” and “Lady Laura in Bohemia”]. It isn’t at all a bad magazine, publishing Billy Williams, Gertrude Stein, Mary Butts.… Much more exclusive than Transition, more alive than the recent Dials, and less conceited than the Hound and Horn. Won’t you send me some more recent work than those two that I have?” (JL).

  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 LLB82, 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 LLB82, 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 (LLB82, 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 LLB82; 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 LLB82 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.