Forging the dusk of chaos: the modernity of Mina Loy

Abstract

On Mina Loy Ellen Keck Stauder Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. Carolyn Burke. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996. Pp. 494. $35.00 The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Ed. Roger Conover. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996. Pp. 236. $22.00 For students of modernism, Mina Loy poses, and always has posed, a dilemma of placement on the cultural map. The dilemma is a little like what Alfred Barr must have faced in the case of Brancusi when he made his now infamous chart of cubism and abstract art for the Museum of Modern Art in 1936. 1 Barr found a place for all of the twentieth century artists under the banners of an “-ism,” all that is, except Brancusi, who alone was represented by his name, apparently inassimilable to any other category. As Barr wrote, “Brancusi stands apart. He is the most original and the most important of the near-abstract sculptors but he has never belonged to any group” (116). The same might be said of Loy’s status and her relationships to artistic movements, though with the one caveat that she seems to have been associated with nearly all of the significant art or literary movements of the modernist period—associated with but not defined by these movements. The similarity between Loy and Brancusi is more than skin deep and more than a matter of critical reception, as her remarkable testimonial poem, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” published in the famous “Waste Land” edition of the Dial in November 1922, demonstrates. However, in contrast to Brancusi, whose works are widely known and around whom a considerable body of scholarship exists, Loy’s visibility on the cultural horizon has been eclipsed. While she once was, as Roger Conover puts it, “the Belle of the American Poetry Ball” (xi), she now is nearly forgotten. In 1917, shortly after she arrived in America, Loy was selected as the archetype of the “modern woman” by the New York Evening Sun (Burke 224), yet Loy’s poetry has been out of print for a number of years, she is almost never anthologized and is rarely mentioned in histories of modernism. In addition, her art [End Page 141] has all but disappeared and what remains is nearly all in private hands. Until now there has been no biography and only the beginnings of a body of criticism. Even Loy’s name is not unambiguously known. In my experience, it is not uncommon for people in conversation to ask if I mean Myrna rather than Mina Loy. One of the wonderful revelations of Carolyn Burke’s biography is to discover that there may in fact be a connection between these two renowned beauties. Contrary to what fame might make one expect, influence in this case ran from poetry to popular culture rather than the reverse. The Hollywood actress reportedly took Loy’s name as her own at the suggestion of a “‘wild Russian writer of free verse,’ who surely knew Mina’s reputation” (Burke vi). With the publication of Carolyn Burke’s Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy and Roger Conover’s edition of her poems, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, this situation of neglect and confusion will change dramatically. These two excellent volumes give us both the life and the work; together they will allow critical attention to be directed not simply at recovery but at evaluation. It has long been possible to construct the basic outlines of Loy’s life. She is frequently mentioned in period memoirs and Conover’s earlier edition of her poetry, The Last Lunar Baedeker (Highland Fields, NJ: Jargon Society, 1982) has extensive biographical notes. From these sources one can muster a thumbnail sketch and many tantalizing details of her remarkable life. She was born Mina Lowy in 1882 in England to an English Protestant mother and a Hungarian Jewish father. Against her mother’s wishes, she was allowed to study art first in England and then in Munich and Paris. Loy married the English painter and photographer, Stephen Haweis, in 1903, living with him first in Paris and later in Florence. Together they were active in avant-garde art circles, especially the Salon d’Automne, to which...