The Lost Lunar Baedeker (20 page)

15: Infusoria are microscopic organisms found in decayed organic matter.

38: oxidized] oxidised

Editor's Note:
All collected and selected editions of ML's poems to date have been named after this corner-poem, the first by her choice, the rest in memory of her ill-starred first book,
Lunar Baedecker
[
sic
]. Whatever pleasure ML experienced upon seeing her first book published must have been immediately compromised when she realized that the title was misspelled, not only on the cover, but on the half-title page, title page, and first page of the book. Notwithstanding this lapse, publication by RM's Contact Press placed ML in select expatriate company. Appearing under the same imprint were first or early books by Ernest Hemingway, WCW, GS, Marsden Hartley, Mary Butts, H.D., and Emanuel Carnevali.

This poem was recently adapted by composer Sebastian Anthony Birch for a musical work entitled “Argentum” (Cleveland Museum of Art, 1994); it is also the first of ML's poems to be released in CD-ROM format (Fiorella Terenzi, ed.,
The Invisible Universe
[New York: Voyager Press, 1995]).

24. DER BLINDE JUNGE, ca. 1922. NOMS. First published in
LB
(“1921–1922” section), immediately preceding “Ignoramus.” This text follows the
LB
version.

title: “Der Blinde Junge” translates from German to “The Blind Youth.”

  1: In Roman mythology, “Bellona” is the goddess of war, sister of Mars.

  4: “Kreigsopfer” is a German compound noun meaning “war victim.”

12: its] it's

18: lightning] lightening

28: “Illuminati,” plural of “illuminato,” originally referred to certain religious sects, but in modern usage it refers to any persons claiming special knowledge or enlightenment. In its later sense, it is often used ironically (OED), as is the case here.

Editor's Note:
This poem made an immediate and lasting impression on YW, who considered it among ML's best poems when he first discussed her work in 1926 (n. 21). Some forty years later, he reaffirmed his early estimation of this poem. By this time ML's work was all but forgotten, but YW was still convinced of its lasting value (
Forms of Discovery
[Chicago: Alan Swallow, 1967], n.d., n.p.). Between these first and last impressions, YW had issued a mid-career advisory that was less approving: “Mina Loy's verse is usually so simplified, so denuded of secondary accent, as to be indistinguishable from prose” (
Primitivism and Decadence
[Arrow Editions, 1937]), a description surprisingly close to Monroe's characterization of ML's work as “descriptive, explanatory, philosophic—in short, prose, which no amount of radical empiricism, in the sound and exclamatory arrangement of words and lines, can transform, with prestidigitatorial magic, into the stuff of poetry” (
Poetry,
November 1923).

Thom Gunn's consideration of this poem, from which I quote only a brief passage, deserves to be read in its entirety:

Loy is a tough writer, and sentiment in the usual sense is seldom present in her work. Her overt feeling in [“Der Blinde Junge”] is of contempt, turned upon the rest of us, the illuminati reading her poem, complacently assuming that we are heirs to culture.… She is hard, pure, unrelenting. The controlled anger and indignation of the poem make it the equal, to my mind, of the best of Pope or Swift.

(“Three Hard Women: HD, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy,” in Vereen Bell and Laurence Lerner, eds.,
On Modern Poetry
[Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1988])

25. CRAB-ANGEL. Composition date unknown. NOMS. First published in
LB
(“1921–1922”). This text follows the
LB
version, except for the following emendations:

  8, 19: its] it's

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
W
YNDHAM
L
EWIS
. 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
LLB
82) 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 Laura 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).