MINA LOY MINA LOY A POLOGY OF GENIUS MARY ANN CAWS reaktion books Published by reaktion books ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2022 Copyright © Mary Ann Caws 2022 The right of Mary Ann Caws to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78914 554 0 For permission to quote from Mina Loy’s published writings, grateful acknowledgement is made to Roger Conover, Mina Loy’s editor and literary executor; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; and the Jargon Press on behalf of the Estate of Mina Loy. For permission to quote from Mina Loy’s unpublished writings in the Mina Loy papers at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the publisher wishes to thank Yale University, Roger Conover and the Estate of Mina Loy. All writings by Mina Loy © 2021 by The Estate of Mina Loy. ‘Notes from Underground: W. H. Auden on the Lexington Avenue irt’ from DAYS OF WONDER: New and Selected Poems by Grace Schulman. Copyright © 2002 by Grace Schulman. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Quotations from the letters of Joseph Cornell © 2021 The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation / Licensed by VaGa at Artists Rights Society (ars), nY. CONTENTS Introduction: Why Mina Loy Now? 7 1 London and Munich, 1882–1900 14 2 ‘Parturition’: Paris, Florence, New York, 1900–1916 21 Interval: Futurism 36 3 Diversions, 1914–53 63 4 New York and the Arensberg Circle 76 Interval: Arthur Cravan 90 5 ‘The Widow’s Jazz’: Paris Again 115 6 Insel, 1933–6 122 Interval: Mina Loy the Artist 131 7 New York Again, 1936–53 166 8 Aspen, 1953–66 180 9 Always Ample Space 195 references 199 select biblioGraphY 209 acknowledGements 211 photo acknowledGements 213 index of works bY mina loY 215 General index 218 Mina Loy, c. 1905, portrait photograph by Stephen Haweis. INTRODUCTION: WHY MINA LOY NOW? M ina Loy the painter and poet was desperately, irre- trievably and movingly modern. She performed in her prose, both theoretical and autobiographical, and her poems, an astonishingly complex mingling of the mental, the physical and the scientific, the most forward-looking feats imaginable. Her various forms of art, from the decorative to the painterly and abstract, spread out over places and genres both expected and unlikely. All through her life and its ventures, Mina Loy knew how to craft a singular and object-filled life. She was in one person a multi-flavourful assortment, a highly colourful modernist being. After attending art school for the first time in London, she moved to another in Munich, and then to Paris, where she and a friend attended the Académie Colarossi at 10, rue de la Grande Chaumière, studying under Whistler. In a night class in drawing, she met the photographer and artist Stephen Haweis, who became her first husband and the father of a child who died very early on. Recovering from that loss, Mina was helped by a kindly and elegant physician, Dr Henri Joël Le Savoureux (delightful name – who was, alas, engaged to another), with whom she had her daughter Joella. Stephen was eager to move to Florence; there, in a grand Mina Loy: apoLogy of genius 8 villa just outside the city in Arcetri, lived the larger-than-life personality Mabel Dodge, an American hostess on a grand scale, then patroness of the Armory Show and columnist for the Hearst organization. Through Mabel Dodge, Mina met the editor Carl Van Vechten, a more than problematic character who was constantly helpful to her writings, and Gertrude Stein, about whom Mina wrote several times. She read a poem about Stein (originally published in the Transatlantic Review in 1924), calling her ‘Curie/ of the laboratory/ of vocabulary’, at Natalie Barney’s famous Temple de l’Amitié at 20 rue Jacob.1 The famous and beautiful lesbian writer presided over this salon in her white dresses with her golden-blonde hair, a ladykiller supreme. There Mina also met the painter Frances Simpson Stevens, with whom she enc oun- tered the Futurists in Florence and Milan. She rapidly became in- volved with both the colourful and stagey Milanese Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the more traditional Florentine Giovanni Papini. After leaving Florence and her Futurist life, Mina Loy left for New York, where her friend Frances Simpson Stevens helped her settle and introduced her to the Arens- berg Circle. In Walter and Louise Arensberg’s duplex apartment at 3 West 67th Street she was to encoun- ter the proto-Dada Arthur Cravan, whom she had seen at the opening of the Society of Independent Arthur Cravan, c. 1913. Introduction: Why Mina Loy Now? 9 Artists Exhibition on 18 April 1917 at Grand Central Palace, where her painting Making Lampshades was exhibited. The next day Cravan was to lecture there on ‘The Independent Artists of France and America’, but arrived drunk, thanks to the ministrations of Picabia and Duchamp preceding the performance. Thereupon he removed his coat, waistcoat, collar and braces, began to shout obscenities and was hauled off to a police station.2 On 25 May Mina and Cravan attended the Blindman’s Ball in Webster Hall, and the next day he gave a lecture and disrobed, as he had done previously. In keeping with his frequent travelling habits, Cravan left New York, deluging Mina with letters from elsewhere, and then jour- neyed to Mexico to teach boxing. He wrote from there in December to beg her to join him, which she did. There they married and wandered around, poverty-stricken; they planned to escape from the port Salina Cruz to Argentina, hoping for better times. Mina was to leave on a passenger ship for Buenos Aires, and Cravan was trying out a small boat heading for Puerto Angel. But he never returned to Salina Cruz.3 There are many stories about his mysterious disappearance, all of which position him as the diametrical opposite of Haweis, Mina’s first husband. One absolute fact is that he was the nephew of Oscar Wilde, as whom he liked posing and about whom he tells a grand and impossible tale of a visit: ‘Oscar Wilde est vivant!’4 Another sure thing is that he was Mina’s passionately adored lover and second husband, her ‘Colossus’, the father of her daughter Fabienne, after his birth name: Fabian Lloyd. He was the editor and author of many parts of the six numbers of the splendidly peculiar literary review Maintenant, and was himself a bizarre compilation of boxer, writer, editor and a number of