Mina Loy - Stories and Essays of Mina Loy

And evidently Mr. Bloom had had to essay other methods — recollect that she soliloquises his tongue is too flat or something!

Still — the Blooms are doubtful — on more propitious days of the month they may have

Let us make the absolute descent from Parnassus and examine the opus par excellence wherein the secret of the sphinx claims to be positively shredded of its veils — —

That little x x x x tuber Frank Harris — CUN-T INKER

How minutely he describes the geographical aspect of the Venusberg — it was not given to him to witness Vesuvius in eruption — the spasimal larva — — –

So he absolves his manhood with the “love juices” of expectation — –

Frank Harris who entered the seventh heaven with a syringe in his pocket—

Oh let him be said Peter on shrugging at his authorship in his record— The Lord is merciful to scrubby-looking men — he has given the compensation phobia.

D.H. Lawrence who has come nearest to defining the psychic experiences of passion has plainly revealed that he is not cognisant of the mechanistic processes by which those psychic experiences can progress into appeasement.

He is checked by the ominous darkness that settles upon the protagonists of his love passages — together with the herculeanization of their spines and thighs.

The pre-orgiastic consciousness replunges into the primeval bog of protoplasmic slime —

Women in Love perhaps is the only book that has invested the flesh with a semblance of the august — or the virile male impetus with grandeur — that buck rabbit!

But the contingence of the immature girl child and the buck rabbit persists in reality throughout the relations of all the men and women in the book — for his women who are in love he returns to the irrational psychology of the female—

Gerald is a normal man — but the ultimate impression of him that exasperates his mistress — is the eternal child crying in the night — she is able to derive no satisfaction in her comforting of this crying child —and at last she — turns him loose in the snow!

All the women in the book are, as is usual in novels, attempting to intellectualize a content for the vacuum of their sensation.

he primary phenomenon of our new “liberated” literature — is the superiority complex of the male as regards his intimate relation with the female,

If the sphinx had spoken a word—

but no—

So Lawrence along with the others—

In Sons and Lovers —

— tumbles a maiden on the bank of a river — she is dressed for out of doors — it is a virgin too — the civilized safeguards of the toilet are not included in the love nest of clay — anxiety is not the best cantharide of nature—

The psychologic depth of —is disgust at the maiden’s lack of passionate response to satisfy Lawrence’s public— That the maiden was not satisfied — has probably even — caused them surprise — — on one side of the channel.

And to turn to the Archangelic D’Annunzio himself — in Il fuoco , the one-sided record of the best advertised love affair of a century—

How do the lovers stagger about in a mist — in a state of débile hysteria — we are to conclude as the result of a series of revivifying galvanizations of the nervous system.

If our erotic, romantic, and realistic literature has presented the gentle reader with an interminable procession — of ladies “possessed” in floods of delight — the instantaneous beatification of the female by the (always) condescending male — where may we ask did those authors live? In some sublime refuge from our daily life? So ill do these records tally with the confidences made, in the hospital, the home and the nunnery — or the sanatorium.

Nor must be omitted another type of man in literature, a rare and an apologetic man — such as for instance the heroes of Aldous Huxley, whose intellect overpowers their virility to their erotic discomfort — but again there is no inference that the surrounding beauties would not be wholly beatified if only they did not think too much — to be able to “let themselves go”.

Strangely enough the only current literature that discourses upon the disappointments of hymen as an accepted fact are the third rate Parisian erotico-comic papers, which appear to be prepared exclusively as popular excitants to lubricity — perhaps they are employed as the villain in the piece to offset the satisfactory heroes or the shadow in contrast to which the libidinous light shines the brighter. Also, in the soggy atmosphere of T. S. Eliot is embedded the typist who fresh from the embraces of a stray acquaintance—

turns on the gramophone

and swallows her hairpins

(I am not quite clear in my recollection of the latter line)

Mr. Eliot has observed the typist and her combinations drying on the roof with the same disrespectfully acute ray of observation that he turns on classicism and pessimism alike.

The lover who was worsted by the gramophone probably had a uniform conception of either.

Practically the whole of our psychological literature written by men might be lumped together as the unwitting analysis of the unsatisfied woman. The episode of marital relations in Evelyn Scott’s narrow house is perhaps the most accurate presentation of the average intercourse under the realist’s microscope. Exceptionally there is no parti pris —it was not written by the dominant male.

Nor is it only the written word that has connived in the deception of the beatific possession; there are also monuments to the purely literary conception, using literature in the sense in which the French use it, as for instance: the Apache has his “literature” meaning, a tradition that has become fictitious. In public he must snatch the choicest morsels of meat from his mistress’s plate — cuffing her on the ear therewith— He must drag her across the floor by her hair — should he omit to do so she would desert him — these “garnitures” of his social status are as fixed in their laws as the order of precedence in a coronation ceremony—

One such a literary monument is the conception of “ La fille de Joie ”. And there is no married woman to whom the beatific possession is so repugnant as to the fille de joie .

She was joyful indeed. Emma Goldman has seen inmates of an American house of prostitution — pushed screaming towards the chambers of “joy” where the more “eccentric” patrons awaited them. In England where everybody that is outside Debrett’s has an inferiority complex, her face is petrified with a complex of such profound inferiority that it is unfathomable by even the most probing imagination. In Germany — the nearest she comes to joy — is when she can wile away an hour of leisure in the, from her inevitable point of view, purifying atmosphere of a pederasts’ café.

The traditional career of the fille de joie was as transitory as is very joy itself — she drank champagne and died in hospital—

Other of her joys were bribing the police — being examined in indescribable circumstances for venereal disease, being threatened into supporting a maquereau and contracting syphilis.

Yet who would suggest that the night life of the metropolis is not entirely joyful — he is too drunk to notice—

When he comes to himself in the morning he will congratulate himself on joy he has erotically administered to a fille de joie.

There is another literary hoax — the hoax of the gros gaillard .

The big strong man as the best lover.