Mina Loy - Stories and Essays of Mina Loy

[How can war come to an end while there remain within us [a] the egoist]

Speculative Prophecies

The end of War.

“the end of War” was “the abolition”

The blank space between “those” and “—differences” is Loy’s

PAGE 292

“and at a long distance” was “and that from”

“find the same farewells to affection” was “find only sad leavetak ings”

“in deference to duty” was “in the name of deference to duty”

“both youths” was “each y”

“all cruelty” was “cruelty”

“for instance” was “for instanced”

“its effluvia” was “its deadly effluvia”

“Therefore when Christ” was “And so it is”

“would that they” was “would be done by”

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

(7:190)

This short, handwritten commentary about Loy’s friend, the American poet William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), is included in a file entitled “Notes on Literature”. The upper right-hand margin of the page reads, “mailed 5th of June 1948 ,” and the entirety is signed by Loy. The quoted lines are from Williams’s long poem, Paterson (1946–58). Three amendments are made to this otherwise very fair copy: Loy corrects a misspelling of “marriages” (it was “marriges”), and replaces two words: “new” becomes “unexpected” and “beauty” is changed to “individuality”.

MINA LOY was born in London, England in 1882. A key figure in the history of modernism, her writing commanded the attention of Ezra Pound and Yvor Winters in The Little Review and The Dial respectively, era-defining journals that published Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land . Aligning herself with FUTURISM Dada, and Surrealism, Loy influenced pivotal figures such as Marcel Duchamp and Djuna Barnes.

SARA CRANGLE is a Senior Lecturer in English and a director of the Centre for Modernist Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. Her books include Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation and (with Peter Nicholls) On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music.

1 The misspelling of “Baedecker” (it should be “Baedeker”) went uncorrected by the publisher, Robert McAlmon’s Contact Editions

2 Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables . Highlands, North Carolina: Jonathan Williams, 1958

3 Kenneth Rexroth, American Poetry in the Twentieth Century . NY: Herder and Herder, 1971.

4 Loy published “Songs to Joannes” on four different occasions. In 1915, under the title “Love Songs,” the first four poems appeared in the little magazine Others ; in the same journal, in 1917, it appeared as a thirty-four poem sequence called “Songs to Joannes”. In 1923, an abbreviated thirteen-poem version with the original title, “Love Songs,” was included in Loy’s Lunar Baedecker ; this shorter sequence was reissued in Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables in 1958, and is also usefully included in the “Appendices” of Conover’s 1996 Baedeker .

5 Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, “Postmodernist Crossings: Aesthetic Strategies, Historical Moment, or a State of Mind?” Contemporary Literature (42:1) 2001, 155–59.

6 The pieces listed above are located in the 1996 Baedeker along with “Preceptors of Childhood” and “Auto-Facial-Construction”. Conover’s 1982 Baedeker includes the following prose works: “Collision,” “CittàBapini,” “Summer Night in a Florentine Slum,” “O Marcel. . Otherwise I Also Have Been to Louise’s,” “Feminist Manifesto,” “Aphorisms on FUTURISM ” “International Psycho-Democracy,” “Auto-Facial Construction,” “The Artist and the Public,” “Phenomenon in American Art (Joseph Cornell),” “Pas de Commentaires! (Louis M. Eilshemius),” “ Little Review Questionnaire,” “View Questionnaire,” “Aphorisms on Modernism,” “Notes on Existence,” “Notes on Childhood,” “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” “Ladies in an Aviary,” “Arthur Cravan is Alive!” and “Gertrude Stein” (which differs from the lecture of the same title in this book).

7 Carolyn Burke considers the latter three manuscripts a single novel with multiple drafts (BM 375).

8 Insel . Ed. Elizabeth Arnold. Santa Rosa, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1991

9 The years ascribed to Loy’s conversion vary slightly, but consistently predate Loy’s first poem; Carolyn Burke suggests the period 1907–10 (117), while Virginia Kouidis cites 1913 (7). While observing that Loy converted alongside many other artists in her expatriate community in Florence, Burke does not give specific names. Notable modernist adherents to Christian Science include the American writer Hart Crane, and Loy’s close friend in later life, the American artist Joseph Cornell. For recent writings on Loy and Christian Science, see the essays of Richard Cook and Maeera Shreiber in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet , and the work of Tim Armstrong and David Ayers in The Salt Companion to Mina Loy .

10 References to the asterisk and/or the sphinx arise in: “All the laughs in one short story by McAlmon,” “Gloria Gammage,” “Lady Asterisk.,” “The Library of the Sphinx.,” “Pazzarella,” “The Three Wishes,” and more obliquely, in “Tuning in on the Atom Bomb”.

11 Rob Sheffield, “Mina Loy in Much too Much too Soon: Poetry/Celebrity/Sexuality/Modernity.” Literary Review (46:4) 2003.

12 Jerome McGann is perhaps the most celebrated critic who asserted that Dickinson’s work could not be fully understood without recourse to the original holograph manuscripts that preserved variations such as the specific slant of her dashes. McGann is frequently cited in the ongoing debate about the sanctity of Dickinson’s handwritten punctuation, which some critics dismiss as irrelevant, even as others suggest it is key to understanding the fundamentals of her writing, such as her line breaks (see, for instance, Domhnall Mitchell’s “Revising the Script: Emily Dickinson’s Manuscripts.” American Literature (70:4) 1998, 705–37). Loy’s dashwork may well instigate a similar critical debate; most recently, Andrew Michael Roberts argues that Loy’s erratic punctuation and spacing could be central to her writing, as both pivotally “enhance the physicality of [her] poem[s]” (“Rhythm, Self, and Jazz in Mina Loy’s Poetry.” Salt Companion , p. 122)

13 Throughout, short, repeated, broken hyphens are transcribed as en dashes, while longer dashes are transcribed as the more common em dash.

14 Fredson Bowers, Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing . Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975, p. 310.

1 The agonies of life-into-death result from the undeveloped consciousness of other larger dimensions of our animation.

2 Noticeably, so-called “supernatural” manifestations, by virtue of the similarity of their occurrence have always been regulated by laws as defined as those governing this world’s accepted science.

3 law invoked in working miracles

4 (1) of instantaneous healing

(2) multiplication of the loaves and fishes

(3) walking on the sea — calming the storm

(4) raising the dead