The Lost Lunar Baedeker

by Mina Loy

  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.

  39. EPHEMERID, 1944. First published in Accent 6:4 (Summer 1946, pp. 240–41). This text follows the Accent version, which differs very slightly from the MS (YCAL) dated August 1944. The latter indicates no stanza breaks between ll. 16 and 17 and 41 and 42, an upper-case “M” at the beginning of l. 3, and substitutes the word “Elevated” for the more colloquial “El’s” in l. 5.

  Editor’s Note: Accent was considered one of the best of the university-based literary magazines of its era. ML’s poems were sent to its editor, Kerker Quinn (then a faculty member of the University of Illinois English Department), by Gilbert Neiman, the novelist (There Is a Tyrant in Every Country [Harcourt Brace, 1947]). Neiman was a friend of Henry Miller and Frieda Lawrence and a longtime admirer of ML. He was not the first or last reader to express an interest verging on obsession in the poet and her work. Long before he met her, and seemingly out of nowhere, he deluged her with letters, sometimes addressing her as “the love of my youth,” other times as his “preceptress.” ML’s poems seemed to have a talismanic effect on the young writer, operating almost as philters. Following a dinner in New York arranged by Miller, Neiman wrote (November 9, 1945): “I would like to send your poems to Accent. I mentioned you, and they were very interested. If you would send them to me first, I’d be able to copy a few for myself—which I’d far prefer” (GN). Accent accepted all four poems Neiman submitted. “Ephemerid” was the first to appear, marking ML’s return to print after thirteen years.

  Encouraged by his success with Accent, Neiman tried without success to place other poems for ML in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He was turned down by Circle, Poetry, and several other magazines. He also tried to interest his own editor at Harcourt Brace in publishing a collection of her poems, possibly “Compensations of Poverty”, in 1947.

  40. CHIFFON VELOURS, 1944. First published in Accent 7:4 (Winter 1947, p. 112). The present text follows the Accent version, which varies from the draft MS dated May 6, 1944 (YCAL) only in accidentals (comma at the end of l. 16, dashes at end of l. 21 and beginning of l. 22).

  Editor’s Note: These variations could well have been introduced by Neiman, who wrote ML on November 23, 1945: “I’ve promised Accent I would send the poems of yours. I’ll type off a few” (GN).

  41. PROPERTY OF PIGEONS. Composition date unknown. First published in Between Worlds: An International Magazine of Creativity 1:2 (Spring/Summer 1961, pp. 203–4). I have made several emendations to the BW text, based on ML’s hand-corrected MSS at YCAL and GN, which clearly establish her wishes at the time of publication:

  27: frowardly] forwardly

  32: to] of

  33/34: no stanza break

  37: a] A

  44: intestate] interstate

  Editor’s Note: In 1960 Neiman, who had last written to ML in 1945, wrote to her again, this time from his new post at the Inter-American University of Puerto Rico:

  We are starting a magazine that has as its goal the rapprochement of creative writers of the East and the West, on the basis of creative art and not creative physics. It will have no politics whatsoever, no criticisms and no book reviews.… We will print the work of young writers in the so-called growth areas: Puerto Rico, the West Indies, Ghana, India, Japan, all of Central and South America. Alongside these newcomers we want to print famous writers from the great creative movements of our time: Dadaists, Surrealists, Existentialists, and even a few Beatniks.… It would be of inestimable help to us, and especially to me, a great pleasure to be able to print something of yours.”

  ML apparently responded, for on September 8 of the same year GN thanked her for her le
tter: “Even though you don’t seem to remember me … I feel as devoted to your poetry … as I did at a starry-eyed sixteen, when I decided that Sandburg didn’t have all the answers” (GN).

  Neiman published seven poems by ML in his new magazine; they were the last poems she published anywhere during her lifetime. With the exception of the Partisan Review appearance in 1952 and the publication of “Aviator’s Eyes” in an obscure article by Larry Krantz (“Three Neglected Poets,” Wagner Literary Magazine [Spring 1959, p. 54]), Neiman was responsible, directly or indirectly, for every periodical appearance ML made after 1931. The last two poems that she would live to see published both appeared in the pages of his magazine. She was eighty. Neiman’s effort is remarkable only because it indicates how different the published record might have been had other editors taken similar initiatives. When Neiman expressed interest in ML’s work, she obliged. It didn’t matter that she had no recollection of meeting him or that he was writing on behalf of an offshore magazine of no standing. In 1961, ML’s name would certainly have been unfamiliar to most readers of BW, but that didn’t keep Neiman from announcing ML’s work in oracular terms on the inside front cover: “poems by the sibyl of the century.”

  Jim Powell has provided a most elegant and inspired elucidation of this poem in “Basil Bunting and Mina Loy,” Chicago Review 37:1 (Winter 1990, pp. 6–25).

  42. PHOTO AFTER POGROM, ca. 1945. First published in Between Worlds 1:2 (Spring/Summer 1961, p. 201). This text follows the BW version, which in turn follows ML’s hand-corrected MS (YCAL) in all substantives.

  Editor’s Note: Readers who consult YCAL will find the MS dated 1960, but the poem was actually written during or shortly after World War II, as its subject suggests. Several copies of Accent 7:4 (Winter 1947) contain the last twelve lines of this poem beneath a pasted-down sheet (p. 112) on which lines 19–23 of “Chiffon Velours” are printed. The editors of Accent apparently received this poem as early as 1946, had it typeset and printed, and then decided, for whatever reason, not to run it. I am grateful to Marisa Januzzi for this observation, which I have independently confirmed by examining two copies of Accent containing the paste-down.

  43. TIME-BOMB, ca. 1945. First published in Between Worlds 1:2 (Spring/Summer 1961, p. 200). This text follows the BW version, which is identical to a signed typescript labeled “Selection to: ‘Between Worlds’ Oct. 1960” (YCAL).

  Editor’s Note: It is possible that Gilbert Neiman influenced the extra spaces between words and punctuation in this poem, for upon receiving the first batch of submissions from ML he wrote: “For my part … you are not allowing yourself the ample spaces you once did” (GN). But these were not the allowances he was referring to.

  44. OMEN OF VICTORY. Composition date unknown, although it can be conjecturally dated ca. 1945, coinciding with the victory of the Allied forces in World War II. This text follows the MS at YCAL. First published in LBT. No prior periodical appearance.

  Editor’s Note: In his foreword to LBT, WCW writes: “Mina Loy was endowed from birth with a first rate intelligence facing a shoddy world. When she puts a word down on paper it is clean; that forces her fellows to shy away from it because they are not clean and will be contaminated by her cleanliness. Therefore she has not been a successful writer and couldn’t care less. But it has hurt her chances of being known.… The essence of her style is its directness in which she is exceeded by no one.” WCW ends his foreword by quoting “Omen of Victory” in full, describing it as “an epigrammatic gem which many of the poets of our own day might follow for its punch and delicate if sardonic humor.”

  45. FILM-FACE. Composition date unknown, although presumably written sometime after Marie Dressler’s death in 1934. This poem has not appeared in any periodical or collection, although it was printed in a limited-edition broadside in 1995. The present text is identical to a signed typescript at YCAL, whereon ML noted that it was submitted to Between Worlds in 1960.

  Editor’s Note: Actress Marie Dressler (Leila Marie Koerber [1869–1934]) made her screen debut in Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914), in which she co-starred with Charlie Chaplin. A homely woman of considerable girth, she was America’s biggest box-office draw in the early 1930s. She won an Oscar for her lead role in Min and Bill (1930), a romantic comedy about a scruffy waterfront couple. In an earlier stage production, Mina and Bill (WCW) played husband and wife in Alfred Kreymborg’s Lima Beans (1916) at the Provincetown Playhouse, a poetic playlet in which romance is punctured by vegetables. Marie Dressler and Myrna Loy were both MGM actresses in the 1930s and worked with some of the same directors. Only coincidence connects these alluring facts.

  46. FAUN FARE, 1948. First published in Between Worlds 2:1 (Fall/Winter 1962, pp. 28-30). A typescript dated December 27, 1948, is preserved at YCAL. The present text follows the BW version, which in turn follows the MS in all substantives. I have made the following emendations to the published text:

  19: ocular] acular

  24: tongue] tonque

  38: addict] addicy

  Editor’s Note: This poem’s publication marked the last magazine publication of ML’s work before her death in 1966, and the successful placement of a poem which had earlier been rejected by New Directions (GN). Neiman overreaches in his contributor’s note; his view is not one that many of his own generation would have shared: “Mina Loy is considered by many to be, despite the paucity of her work, the best poetess in English of the century.”

  This poem is reminiscent of ML’s early satires, but its subject—the sexual ambiguity of male guests at a Manhattan cocktail party—is more surprising, its language more terse, and its perspective, if anything, more unusual. I include this poem with thanks to Jim Powell and in memory of Arthur Cravan (ML’s own faun, who had the head of a poet, the body of a boxer).

  65: “Evoe” is an exclamatory utterance associated with Bacchanalian orgies, e.g., “wild evoes and howlings” (OED).

  47. LETTERS OF THE UNLIVING. Composed June 19, 1949. An edited version of this poem appeared in LLB82. No prior periodical appearance. The present text follows the signed and dated typescript at YCAL, with two emendations:

  37: calligraphy] caligraphy

  78: blasé] blase

  Editor’s Note: This poem, concerned with time, memory, loss, and the boundaries of identity, is addressed to AC (see n. 18, 19), whom ML once described as “the one other intelligence” she could converse with and whose unexplained disappearance remained one of her life’s greatest unassimilables. He is the long-eclipsed author of the “authorless” letters whose “creased leaves,” these many years later, still held hostage the poet’s irremediably bruised heart. His past words have been preserved, and their pastness opens onto the present in the “calligraphy of recollection.” But memory is more punishing than amnesia given “death’s erasure/ … of the lover.”

  Well into her seventies, ML was still grieving over her husband’s premature “death,” describing his body, and speaking of his great “potential.” A selection of the letters he had written to her during their brief separation four decades earlier was recently published in Jean-Pierre Begot, ed., Arthur Cravan: Œuvres (Paris: Editions Ivrea, 1992), pp. 155–83. LLB82 contains a superlinear abstraction of AC in the form of ML’s diary entries (pp. 317–22), as well as a description of their superlunar bond (xlvii–lxi).

  48. HOT CROSS BUM, 1949. First published in New Directions 12 (1950, pp. 311–20). A signed and dated (August 30, 1949) typescript at YCAL denotes ML’s address as 5 Stanton Street. This text is based on the ND version, to which I have made several emendations, all following the MS:

  25: delight’s] delight”s

  128: hot-cross] hot-cros

  149: crossroads] cross-roads

  167: ragged] rugged

  183: adamic] academic

  213: anomoly] anomaly

  242: ebon aide] ebonaide

  The 1949 MS. carries several other variations from the first published version which I have not incorporated
into the present text. Some are clearly spelling errors, but others bear reporting, since it is not clear at what stage (or by whom) the changes were made:

  9: to Ecstasia] in Ecstasia

  35: faces] Faces

  50: directions] direction

  177a: {line deleted}] in somehow irresponsive ideals

  221: once patroned] patroned

  222: entice] console

  Editor’s Note: Kenneth Rexroth, in 1944, ended his essay (n. 17) on ML with a strong exhortation to his publisher at New Directions Press: “Mr. Laughlin, the ‘Five Young Poets’ are still Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Moore, Loy—get busy.” Whether at Rexroth’s urging or not, James Laughlin did engage in correspondence with ML; the publication of this poem in ND is the one tangible result. Laughlin also considered publishing her novel Insel, but eventually explained that he could not do so “due to the heavy backlog we have.” He suggested she send it a friend of his at Simon & Schuster, where it was also rejected. The novel was eventually published by Black Sparrow Press in 1991.

  “Communal cot” (l. 270) obviously refers to the space of the modern street within the poem’s context; it is also the title of one of ML’s cloth and cardboard constructions of street scenes exhibited at the Bodley Gallery in 1959 (see pl. 29, LLB82), now in the collection of William Copley.

  49. AN AGED WOMAN. Composition date unknown, but certainly a late poem. An edited draft version of this poem first appeared posthumously in LLB82, 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.