Surrealism in Loy’s Paris-era Poetry

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Surrealism in Loy’s Paris-era Poetry

Many of the poems Loy wrote in the 1920s and early 1930s while living in Paris reflect her ongoing engagement with modernist and avant-garde poetics, including Surrealist poetics. While the poems of Lunar Baedecker (1923) mapped the constellation of feminist, futurist and modernist artists and ideas important to Loy in the 1910s and early 1920s, the poems that Loy wrote from the mid-1920s through 1936 in Paris have not received attention as a coherent body of work, largely due to the fact that Loy did not publish them as a distinct collection.

Rather, Loy published her poems from this time in magazines and anthologies: several poems from the long sequence Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose appeared in The Little Review (1923-4) and the entire sequence was published in the Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers (1925); “Marble” appeared in a 1923 Prospectus for Ford Madox Ford’s Transatlantic Review (LLB96 202); “Gertrude Stein” was included as an epigraph to Loy’s 1924 essays on Stein in Transatlantic Review (202-3); the essay “Modern Poetry” was published in Charm magazine (April 1925); and “The Widow’s Jazz” and “Lady Laura in Bohemia,” both written in or by 1927, appeared respectively in Pagany 2.2 (Spring 1931) and 2.3 (Summer 1931) (LLB96 203-5).

Other poems Loy wrote at this time were not published until after her death in Roger Conover’s collections The Last Lunar Baedeker (1982) and Lost Lunar Baedeker (1996). Poems that Roger Conover definitively dates to the Paris era include “Jules Pascin” (June 1930), as well as “Nancy Cunard” and “The Mediterranean Sea” (both from the late 1920s) (LLB96 205-207). In addition, the poem “Ceiling at Dawn” was included in Last Lunar Baedeker (1982) and is dated August 26, 1930 in a Beinecke draft. Further poems from the Paris era may exist in draft form in Loy’s archive at the Beinecke Library; since many of Loy’s drafts are undated, pinpointing their likely date and place of creation is an ongoing project.

What conclusions might we draw about Loy’s poetry from this era? If we consider only the number of published poems, compared to the number of poems Loy wrote from the 1910s through the early 20s, and from 1937 through the early 1950s in New York, the Paris era does not appear to be a prolific one. But this focus on poetry publications is misleading. Loy’s duties creating lamps and running her lampshade shop took up a lot of her time and energy from 1926 to 1929 (see “Mina Loy’s lampshade shop”). After selling the shop in 1930, she turned her attention to painting, resulting in a 1933 exhibition at the Levy Gallery. From 1933 to 1938 she worked on her poetic novel Insel. If we widen our lens beyond poetry publications to include Loy’s lamps, her paintings, her novel, her unpublished poems and autobiographical fiction, and her published as well as unpublished essays and stories, the Paris era assumes a far different character — one of experiment, exploration, and self-definition across a number of genres and media, consistent with Surrealist poetics.

Surrealism, Stein, Loy

In her 1924 and 1927 essays on Gertrude Stein, Loy articulated the kinds of poetic experiment that interested her, illuminating her own poetic aims. The first two essays appeared in the September and October 1924 issues of the transatlantic review, as a defense of Stein, possibly in response to Kenneth Burke’s review of Stein’s Geography and Plays in the April 1923 Dial (Januzzi, “Bibliography” 522-23). Loy also delivered an essay on Stein in French in 1927 at Natalie Barney’s salon, and Barney published the essay in L’Aventure de L’Esprit (1929); Martin Crowley translated the 1927 essay for the 2011 publication of Stories and Essays of Mina Loy (SE 380).

photo of Stein, seated
Carl Van Vechten, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1934 (Library of Congress, Van Vechten Collection)

Although Loy and Stein had been friends since they met in 1911 in Florence, Loy mounted a careful study and public defense of Stein’s experiments while living in Paris. As Marissa Januzzi convincingly argues, during the mid-1920s Loy’s aesthetic “resulted from her resistance to the canonization of Dada and the dawning of Surrealism with a theoretical return to Stein” (Women in Dada 602). More pointedly, Loy’s essays on Stein “suggest that Stein was the all-important transatlantic bridge, that she indicated a way by which Loy could bring her avant-garde aesthetics to bear in an idiom Loy tropes […] as feminist and democratic” (Women in Dada 603).

Loy pronounced Stein the “Curie / of the laboratory / of vocabulary,” using analogies to scientific experiment to convey Stein’s linguistic invention: “she crushed/ the tonnage / of consciousness / congealed to phrases / to extract/ a radium of the word” (LLB96 94). For Loy, Stein’s democratic mode of experiment was paramount: “The pragmatic value of modernism lies in its tremendous recognition of the compensation due to the spirit of democracy. […] Gertrude Stein has given us the Word, in and for itself”(LLB82 297-298). Loy was dismayed that Stein’s democratic experiment had not struck a deeper chord, arguing in her 1927 essay that

“She has prodigiously dismantled the raw materials of style, and radically swept clean the literary arena, making new performances possible. Which has given rare courage to countless young people.

In America, many an author has gained renown by following one of the paths opened up by Stein’s experiments. But Gertrude herself has been systematically undervalued in her own country, where for years now people have been crying out for a few properly American pioneers. 

Well, here she is, the All-American pioneer!” (SE 233).

Loy quickly modified this conflation of Stein and America: “our obliging pioneer has reduced the English language to a foreign language even for Anglo-Americans” (SE 234). Isabelle Alfandary suggests that we should approach “Stein as a deterritorialized writer rather than an expat writer” and suggests that Stein’s salon “isn’t only a Parisian location but […] a space in which English, major language par excellence, can become minor and a-grammatical” (Posman and Schultz, “Introduction,” Gertrude Stein in Europe).

Cristanne Miller argues that in Loy’s 1920s poems, she “steps away from the conflicted freedoms of an explicitly sexual politics to map what is problematic in both embodiment and language as modes of intimacy and communication” (119). Stein had provided a provisional map: “”Ordinary language, [Loy] implies through her poems, is inadequate, but the poet’s disjunctions, juxtapositions, multilingual puns, and grammatical wrenching function less to relay information or feeling than to approach the Stein-like crushed consciousness that releases a pure ‘radium of the word'” (Miller 120).

Alongside Stein, Loy would experiment with techniques contemporaneously developed by the Surrealists, and like Stein, Loy would put her own stamp on them. As Loy analyzes and explains Stein’s style and method in her essays, she indirectly engages, and qualifies, Surrealist poetics: in particular Loy comments on the practice of poetic juxtaposition central to the Surrealist image; the blurring of the distinction between subject and object; and the “refutation of logic” as a route to the “subconscious source of associated ideas” (LLB82 297, 298).

The incongruity between dream and reality, the unconscious and conscious states of mind served as the central formal principle of Surrealist work, and was conveyed through the juxtaposition of discordant elements, often meant to shock the reader or viewer. This principle of juxtaposition took concrete form in the Surrealist Image, as initially articulated by Reverdy and adopted by the Surrealists:

The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be – the greater its emotional power and poetic reality…”(Manifestoes 20).

Through the surrealist image Breton sought to further the generation of a surreality: “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak” (Manifestoes 14).

Gertrude Stein’s aim was not to generate a surreality but rather to provoke a new apprehension of language and its relation to the everyday world, an aim that Loy and many subsequent critics would connect to Cubism:

It has become the custom to say of her that she has done with words what Picasso has done with form. There is certainly in her words an interpenetration of dimensions analogous to Cubism. (LLB82  291)

Stein employed a number of techniques to loosen referentiality, creating abstract verbal pieces that like cubist portraits and still lives enabled multiple perspectives on an object and invited the subjective associations of the reader. While Loy acknowledged the importance of Cubism to Stein’s writing, in her discussion of verbal juxtaposition, Loy also suggests connections to the Surrealists.

Loy focuses on verbal juxtaposition in her close reading of “A Sweet Tail, Gypsies” from Stein’s Geography and Plays. For instance, Loy examines the following phrase:

And really all the chance is in deriding cocoanuts real cocoanuts with strawberry tunes and little ice cakes with feeding feathers and peculiar relations of nothing which is more blessed than replies. (LLB82 293)

Loy comments,

In ‘feeding feathers’ the omission of the woman between her feeding and her feathers results in an unaccustomed juxtaposition of words by associating a subject with a verb which does not in fact belong to it, but which visually, is instantaneously connected. This process of disintegration and reintegration, this intercepted cinema of suggestion urges the reactions of the reader until the theme assumes an unparallelled (sic) clarity of aspect. (LLB82 293).

In this example Stein’s “abridged associations” permit a non-referential, associational generation of meaning or what Loy terms “reintegration”: “Gertrude Stein has builded up her gypsies, accent upon accent, colour on colour, bit by bit” (LLB82 293). Through unconventional verbal juxtaposition Stein permits “her associations and your own” (LLB82 298); Loy argues, “Like all modern art, this art of Gertrude Stein makes a demand for a creative audience, by providing a stimulus, which although it proceeds from a complete aesthetic organization, leaves us unlimited latitude for personal response” (LLB82 297). Loy emphasizes that Stein’s juxtapositions invite a personal response that includes the creativity of the subconscious mind:

[…] when Gertude Stein leaves Grammatical lacunae among her depictions […] the mind trips up and falls through into the subconscious source of associated ideas. (LLB82 298)

Stein’s method invites an associational reading practice similar to Freudian free association, a technique he employed to access a patient’s unconscious desires.

Loy also describes how Stein switches subject and object to achieve inversions of perspective and a “refutation of logic” that is “parallel to Alice In the Looking Glass,” a text that Loy would connect in her 1950 essay on Joseph Cornell to the “‘Alicism’ world of topsy-tury logic” in Surrealism (LLB82 301).  Loy demonstrates this inversion of perspective in a prose passage featuring a lizard on a human hand: 

To interpret her description of the lizard you have to place yourself in the position of both Gertrude Stein and the lizard at once, so intimate is the liaison of her observation with the sheer existence of her objective, that she invites you into the concentric vortex of consciousness involved in the most trifling transactions of incident. (LB82 295)

Loy adds:

She has taken on the consciousness or rather the unconsciousness of the lizard in the inexplicable predicament of its transportation […] She is turning the lizard outside in, its specular aspect fuses with its motor impulses and now she represents the palm of the hand to you as a land surveyor might a prospect. (LLB82 295)

Through this shift between the human and lizard perspective, Stein unsettles the relation between “subject” and “object”, an aim shared with Surrealism.  Loy comments “Compare this lizard episode with an example of a dream animated by the projection of the intellect into the intimacy of the inanimate” (LLB82 296), which is an apt description of a technique favored by the Surrealists in their films, paintings, and objects, and deployed by Loy in her poem “Ceiling at Dawn.” This destabilization of the relation between subject and object in turn unsettles the reader’s point of view: “The greatest incertitude while reading Gertrude Stein is the indecision as to whether you are psychoanalyzing her, or she, you” (LLB82 296).

Close Reading: “Ceiling at Dawn”

Close Reading of “Ceiling at Dawn”

Of the poems Loy wrote in Paris, “Ceiling at Dawn” is the most explicitly Surrealist in its themes, techniques, and imagery. The Loy archive at the Beinecke has three handwritten and two typed drafts, indicating that Loy carefully revised this poem. A typed draft states: “MINA LOY / 9 Rue St Romain Paris 6 / August 26 1930,” dating this poem to the year in which Loy painted “Surreal Scene.”

Verbal Juxtaposition and the Surrealist Image

In the poems Loy wrote in Paris in the 1920s and early 30s that are not overtly Surrealist in theme, her verbal juxtapositions invite comparison to the Surrealist image (see above) in bringing together “two more or less distant realities,” although her aim is less to generate a surreality than to challenge her readers to reflect on the attempt to traverse or conjoin opposed entities and to contemplate the contradictions, as well as new forms, that result.  

 In her discussion of Arthur Cravan’s use of juxtaposition, Loy emphasized that his practice anticipated the Surrealist image and that he would have resented his co-optation by the Surrealists (see “Surrealist Histories”). Similarly, Cristanne Miller argues that Loy’s interest in verbal juxtaposition preceded Surrealism and her Paris-era poems (Cultures of Modernism 7-8). As Linda Kinnahan argues, “Loy’s poetry moved in directions later identified or compatible with Surrealism, not unlike many avant-garde writers of the 1910s pushing boundaries of rationality and convention” (Loy, Twentieth-Century Photography 75).  

For instance, in “Sketch of a Man on a Platform” (1915), a portrait of Marinetti, Loy explores the paradoxes created by a “Man of absolute physical equilibrium,” whose movements “Plant” his limbs like “roots” to the ground yet also “Savor of the airy-fairy of the ballet” (LLB96 19-20). Similarly, the circus performer that Loy profiles in “Crab-Angel” (1923) is both earth-bound and aerial, masculine and feminine, with “manly legs” and a “rose flecked ruff of gauze,” “Helen of Lilliput / Hercules in a powder puff?” (LLB96 86). The “pig cupid” and “erotic garbage” of Songs to Joannes (1917) bracingly juxtapose different registers of diction to denaturalize romanticized depictions of love and sex. 

If we keep in mind that many of the techniques Loy employs in her poems of the 1920s had been developed prior to the articulation of Surrealism, were influenced by Futurism, Dada, and Cubism, and notably by the example of Stein who skirted these groups, we can nevertheless trace the ways in which the “Surrealist image” abuts and informs Loy’s practice of verbal juxtaposition in the 1920s and 30s. Loy’s use of juxtaposition invites a dialectical action of mind, a new way of knowing resistant to accepted oppositions that resonates with Breton’s understanding of juxtaposition.  As Breton commented in his Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930),

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. Now search as one may one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point. (Pollizzotti, Selections 152-153)

“Lady Laura in Bohemia” (1927) (LLB96 98-100) embodies the contradiction between religious traditions and modern culture, the aristocracy and the underworld, sexual restrictions and sexual freedoms: she is an “abbess-prostitute” who “presides / Jazz-Mass” at Zelli’s, a Montparnasse café, where she “kisses and curses,” her drunken “hiccoughs … preparatory to bowing to the Queen.”  Despite her “somersault descent / into the half-baked underworld,” she pulls class rank to maintain “her vertical caste,” wondering of another patron “how on earth such a bounder / happened to meet my people” (LLB96 98).  Lady Laura’s discussion of a recent lover implies her sexual freedom, but does not free her from “sentimental slobber” about marriage; she is a “divorcee” once “christened by the archbishop of Canterbury.”  Neither fallen woman nor liberated adherent to free love, Lady Laura straddles the social-moral codes of the Anglican Church and of bohemian Zelli’s, and conforms to the expectations of neither group.

Like the contradictions of its subject, the poet’s tone hovers ambivalently between irony and sympathy, and the poem concludes ambiguously, “She is yet like a diamond on a heap of broken glass.” Depicting Lady Laura as a diamond juxtaposed with broken glass, Loy may imply that Lady Laura stands out from the crowd at Zelli’s due to her aristocratic background and manners. Or, Loy may conversely suggest that despite her class pretensions, Lady Laura is indistinguishable from the crowd at Zelli’s, the diamond’s sparkle no different than that of broken glass.1

Loy’s portrait of Lady Laura echoes her Futurist plays that reveal the irony and contradictions of the aristocracy’s courting of the avant-garde (see Suzanne Churchill’s discussion of “The Pamperers”), while her verbal juxtapositions concentrate this commentary and capture the challenge posed by Lady Laura’s scaling of extremes, a challenge to entrenched social roles and antagonisms. This challenge resonates with Loy’s 1914 “Feminist Manifesto” in which she argues that “As conditions are at present constituted — you have the choice between Parasitism, & Prostitution — or Negation”  (LLB96 154). Sexually active women could choose “parasitism” i.e. the dependent relations of marriage, or “prostitution,” the inevitable label for unmarried sexually active women. In “Lady Laura,” Loy returns to this sexual divide and the double standards that generate them, suggesting that the abbess and the prostitute are flip sides of the same coin: society deems a woman either a virgin or whore, a mother or a mistress, a pure ideal or its debased double, with no middle ground.

While Loy calls for demolishing such divides in her “Feminist Manifesto,” in “Lady Laura” Loy creates a portrait of a woman who lives out and indeed embodies (in her awkward physicality) the contradictions of such an attempt.   “Trained in a circus of swans,” Lady Laura “proceeds recedingly,” her “towering reticence” at odds with her drunken “hiccoughs,” just as “her velvet larynx,” which Loy describes as “A tempered tool / of an exclusive finishing-school,” does not deliver eloquence but rather “slushes / ‘Glup'” (LLB96 98-9).2

Loy’s verbal juxtapositions not only draw attention to entrenched social, economic, and sexual polarities, then, but also conjoin or amalgamate them, suggesting that new cultural hybrids can emerge. Lady Laura’s awkward amalgamation of high and low dramatizes the kind of hybrid form that interested Loy, and in “Crab-Angel,” “Lady Laura” and “The Widow’s Jazz,” Loy looks to jazz as the cultural form that most clearly manifests this mixture.  The “gin-fizz eucharist,” “abbess-prostitute,” and “jazz mass” of “Lady Laura” (LLB96 98); the circus dwarf who “lifts  / to the elated symmetry of Flight — — –” and falls as the “jeering jangling / jazz / crashes to silence” in “Crab Angel” (LLB96 87); and the “black brute-angels” of “The Widow’s Jazz” (LLB96 96), generate verbal amalgams that move beyond the Surrealist image in coupling not just distant but opposed entities. 

Loy’s juxtapositions do not simply create grotesque or unreal beings, then, but make visible the oppositions that Lady Laura, the circus performer, and the jazz musicians conjoin, demonstrating the flexible dance required of those willing to challenge the status quo.  Loy places words that connote the limits of the physical body, unlicensed sexuality, and bohemian culture next to words that connote the soul, organized religion, and the angelic or divine, to create a friction that invites awkward movement between poles: in this way the effort to overcome the opposition and the impediment to doing so both remain visible, a strategy she explored in “The Sacred Prostitute” and would continue to explore in late Bowery poems such as “Hot Cross Bum.”

Loy’s use of verbal juxtaposition is related to her practice of word coinage, as in “Parturition”‘s “The sensitized area / Is identical       with the extensity / Of intension” (LB96 4) and Lunar Baedeker’s “Stellectric signs / ‘Wing shows on Starway’ / ‘Zodiac carrousel'” (LB96 81). In these coinages Loy combines two words in a manner that draws on their connotations to generate new meanings and imagery, as in “Stellectric” as a combination of “Stellar” (star) and “electric,” a coinage that suggests a lunar-lit equivalent of the signs on Broadway (Starway). “Extensity” and “intension” reverse the prefixes “ex-” and “in-” to create new combinations of “intensity” and “extension” while punning on “intention” and “in tension.”  This complex word coinage works to break down the barriers between “within” and “without,” and invites readers to reconceive the boundaries of the self and the foundations of knowing. Loy’s word coinages resemble Duchamp’s altered readymades, whose verbal titles generate verbal-visual punning  (Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp), but Loy’s choice to combine and alter two existing or “readymade” words differs in the generation of an entirely new word-form. Whereas her verbal juxtapositions such as “brute-angel” emphasize connection and division, and are often joined by a dash, Loy’s coinages emphasize a new synthesis.

The circus — where Lady Laura was “trained” and the crab-angel soars and falls — emerges as a privileged metaphor for and site of the en dehors garde, where these unlikely mixed forms coalesce in “jazz” performance (see “Courting an Audience: Loy’s Plays”).  Loy’s hybrid forms allude to both sexual and racial mixture, a motif she also explored in her novel Insel, her 1930s paintings, and surrealist object “Lobster Boy.”3  Loy’s verbal juxtapositions are “grotesque” in the narrow sense of the term, which refers to art that combines the human and the bestial (e.g. Loy describes Lady Laura as a mixture of human and swan). Loy also combines the divine and the bestial, as in the crab and angel, the pig and cupid, with the potential for a new definition of the human emerging through their mixture.  

For instance, in “The Widow’s Jazz” Loy writes:

The black brute-angels
in their human gloves
bellow through a monstrous growth of metal trunks (LLB96 96)

The juxtaposition “brute-angels” separates and unites through a dash the brute and the angel, and is open to many possible interpretations; it may imply that jazz musicians attempt to join the soul and body, or to access the divine through the carnal body.  The musicians wear “human gloves,” the human suggesting a synthesis of the bestial and the divine, as signified by Gloves, which connote the divine hand and the creation of art, but also connote the boxing glove and physical struggle for survival. The third line comes closest to Breton’s Surrealist image in its mixture of the human and animal, the organic and mechanical, as the musicians “bellow through a monstrous growth of metal trunks.” Metal instruments — likely saxophones or trumpets — are likened to facial growths or appendages akin to elephant trunks, and the adjective “monstrous” emphasizes the grotesque synthesis of the “brute” and the “angel.”

Even as Loy sought to generate new, hybrid forms through her juxtapositions, and in this example sought to reveal the humanity of the musicians and to challenge an understanding of jazz as “primitive” by suggesting that it bridges the heights and depths of culture, she nevertheless did so in ways that drew on racist stereotypes of the primitive other as a sexualized “brute,” echoing the negrophilia of the largely white Parisian avant-garde (See “Loy, Surrealism, Jazz & Race”).4 

 

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  1. Tara Prescott argues that the final lines position Lady Laura as part of the bohemian world of Zelli’s even as she “sits on top” (145), and reveal Loy’s “interest in that which is neglected,” anticipating her late Bowery poems (145).
  2. Tara Prescott points out that “Laura’s contradictory circumstances” are dramatized through “Loy’s penchant for wrenching words into strange forms: she turns verbs into adverbs (‘recedingly’) and verbs into adjectives (‘eliminate flesh’),” “[throwing] the reader off guard […] in the same way that Lady Laura might surprise her unsuspecting audience” (141).
  3. Cristanne Miller summarizes well the discussion of what critics including Marjorie Perloff, Elistabeth Frost, and Marisa Januzzi have termed Loy’s “mongrel” aesthetic, involving mixtures of “linguistic registers” and national idioms (163). Miller points out that Loy’s mixture of “the idioms of jazz, popular song, modern slang, and various dialects” figured the “vitality of modern and American life” (as Loy articulated in her 1925 essay “Modern Poetry”), and would also have connoted racial and ethnic mixing, as discussed by Michael North in The Dialect of Modernism (163). Thus Loy’s attention to her Jewish inheritance in “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” begun while living in Berlin (168), corresponds to “artistic and intellectual values in conflict with the repressive poetics of bourgeois British Protestantism and conventional art–hence functioning analogously to orientalism” (168).
  4. Tara Prescott argues that “The Widow’s Jazz” “betrays a certain amount of naive condescension and stereotyping that was common among Loy’s peers,” and mentions Loy’s friends Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten as other writers who “offer problematic portrayals of black Americans” (150).