Within the context of modernist studies, who could be either a better or a worse subject for auto/biographical dramatization than Mina Loy? It is difficult to dispute that events of Loy’s life invite dramatic treatment. The arc from a Victorian childhood to modernist innovation in Florence, New York, and Paris and the compelling details of Loy’s life story, including near-fatal starvation in Mexico, the unresolved disappearance of her second husband, Arthur Cravan, and Loy’s creative methods of survival – poet, designer, inventor, lampshade entrepreneur – are intrinsically suited to drama. Moreover, the scope of Loy’s acquaintance and exposure, a foundational but later antagonistic relationship with Italian futurism, a suggestive if ultimately non-identical affiliation with New York Dada, a place at the centre of interwar Paris, and associations with Barney, McAlmon, Cunard, Pound, and Stein, to name but a few, suggest tantalizing lines of influence. The diversity of Loy’s own work is impressive and interesting – manifestoes, plays, poems, and unconventional prose. And then there is Loy herself, cosmopolitan and controversial, but perhaps more than this, someone who genuinely pushed the limit of what was acceptable, particularly for women, in both art and life. All of this not only puts Loy at the top of the list for a stage drama but also makes her a good candidate for a biopic.
And yet, most of us who have spent time with Loy’s writing are left with questions about who Mina Loy really was and the ability of conventional forms to adequately convey her intellectual project. The fact that Loy uses her own life in her writing should make the task of biographical investigation easier, but this promise is often chimeric. Loy’s later drafts and fragments, promisingly referred to as her “autobiographical prose,” seem like they would offer answers, but in their spiralling intellectualism, fragmented composition, and roving exploration they are often more like flashes in the night than a steady, illuminating biographical force. As has been well-documented, Loy is chameleonic in her poetry, layering life episodes with discourses of the day – newspapers, dialects, science, street vendors, psychoanalysis, and her signature encyclopedic idiom.1 At times Loy is introspective, genuinely reaching to understand the flickering states of human consciousness as in the more meditative sections of her long poem on the discontents of love and sex, “Songs to Joannes.” Similarly, poetry like “The Widow’s Jazz” and Loy’s autobiographical prose tributes to Cravan seem to offer insight into a finely wrought inner world and Loy’s feelings on love and loss. Other times, particularly in her poetry, Loy adopts a mock seriousness and it can be difficult to differentiate confession from subtle satire. In keeping with Loy’s work as a painter it is tempting to say that Loy uses her life as canvas, but it might be more accurate to say she works a self out of clay, subject to constant formation and remodelling.
It is not new to call Loy’s work and this play of identity employed within it “performative,” but it is interesting to think about how this critical term can be enhanced or entered into differently through stage work. Moreover, a crucial way this performativity is staged, in Loy, is on the body, which is to say that dramatization could also bring her highly cerebral writing into a more profound working tension with its central and most controversial subject. While the performance of performativity and the ability to engage the body were the initial lures in pursuing dramatized exploration, several other advantages presented themselves, notably the ability to draw out the more sensory and understudied aspects of Loy’s work: the aural dimensions of her poetry and Loy’s lesser-known painting and montage practices. A layering of theatre and film also revealed itself to be particularly appropriate for a conceptual engagement with Loy’s ideas of memory. Finally, the complexity of Loy’s archival collection and its bearing on how Loy is interpreted invited a staging of the “scene of the archive,” and, consequently, a probing of the relationship between researcher and subject through the dramatized encounter.
In tracing Loy’s performative traits, the connection is often made with the historical avant-garde for, unlike H.D., Loy’s affiliation was with the more radical – and theatrical – units. Alex Goody, analyzing Loy’s fluctuating, performative self, makes explicit links between Loy’s poetic method and Dadaist performance. For Goody, Loy’s “identities and her poetic articulations issue from an unstable subject position that ultimately embraces the ambivalence of contingency and performativity. This radical attitude has more than a passing affinity with the Dadaist performances and contingencies of Marcel Duchamp” (“Gender, Authority, and the Speaking Subject”). Similarly, in thinking about the influence of futurist performance, Julie Schmid has examined how Loy’s published plays – Two Plays (Collision and Cittabappini) and The Pamperers – incorporate futurist aesthetics, syntax, and kinetics as a result of her 1913–15 affiliation, even while they satirize the movement itself. The kinetic composition Loy experimented with through plays also permeates her autobiographical prose of this period, particularly unpublished drafts of “Brontolivido” in which Marinetti/Brontolivido, leader of the “Flabbergasts,” and Loy/Sophia/Gloria engage in paragraphs of verbal sparring particularly suitable for a staged adaptation. In staging herself in these early writings, Loy at once adopted performance-based models even while she used conventions of satirical drama to separate herself out. Loy continued to adopt and reinvent the performance-based and performative strategies of the avant-garde by keeping the performative basis in her writing while redefining the model. Perhaps most interestingly and pressingly, her insistence on the flesh-and-blood elements of the body exceeds Dadaism’s interest in the body as metaphor and challenges the futurist ideal of mechanized fleshlessness.
There are numerous critical articles on Loy and the body – all of them, of course and by formal necessity, entirely body-less. And so what emerges from thinking about what theatre can do for Loy’s work is an unstable, performative identity on the one hand and, on the other, a physicalization of Loy’s insistence on the body itself. Dramatizing Loy’s poetry, in particular, creates the opportunity to present that which is about the body through the body, notably poems like “Parturition,” where physical presentation and breath patterns heighten labour enacted through the poem’s rhythms, as well as “Songs to Joannes,” where a voiced and embodied expression of Pig Cupid “rooting erotic garbage […] among wild oats sewn in mucous membranes” reinforces the unabashed carnality of the words, causing audiences to confront – and potentially re-evaluate – the visceral dynamics of her work.
Bringing the staged body into an analysis of Loy’s writing has also revealed how implied tone and gesture within the poetry – which is to say the summoned but invisible body – frequently act in tension with the words themselves. An illustrative example of this tension between stated and underlying meaning is the way the comic operates in Loy’s work. As Peter Nicholls notes, there is humour in Loy to “which Pound, with his rather Pre-Raphaelite notion of sexual passion, was not particularly well-attuned” and which even contemporary critics miss in a keenness to “emphasise depressive tendencies at work in Loy’s writing” (142). One reason for the limited commentary on Loy’s comic instincts may be that she tends to tell her jokes with a straight face. As this figure of speech suggests, Loy’s writing is often staged on an imaginary body, brought into being by the disconnect between the words and the delivery that undercuts their meaning – the raised eyebrow, curling smile, or mocking pitch that lets the audience know what is meant by more ambiguous words. In the poetry, this body is invisible yet seemingly perceptible, a vague apprehension there is something, some kind of physical cue, lurking behind the words, an intricate choreography between literal meaning and intention. This often undervalued part of Loy’s writing can be drawn out by the actor, who can use voice and body to illuminate this formal working principle. In poems like “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” for example, Loy’s characterization, irony, and skilful skewering can be inhabited and accentuated by the actor who can take on these elements in a searing combination of vocal delivery and gestural enactment.
My interest in Loy’s performative and embodied selves encouraged the use of Loy’s interviews as a frame for the play, both her print interview with the Evening Sun in 1917 and the tape-recorded interview with Paul Blackburn and Robert Vas Dias in 1965. As John Rodden has argued in Performing the Literary Interview: How Writers Craft Their Public Selves, audiences have become increasingly aware of the literary interview as a performative event and of the interview itself as genre. The Mina Loy Interviews leverages this audience savviness, inserting Loy’s writing about herself into the context of the interview situations. In this sense, the play does not, in an absolute sense, replicate the interviews, but rather uses them as a platform, allowing the interview frame to implicitly draw out the constructed nature of the versions of selfhood explored in the writing. Not immaterially, the time lapse between the interviews also allows for a broader spectrum of understanding through both what changes and what remains the same from the time Loy first arrived in New York, with the full force of her emerging celebrity, to her last interview in Aspen as a woman of eighty-two who had spent some years outside of modernist circles and their associated limelight, which, in Loy’s case, had dimmed particularly abruptly. In addition to the meta-dimensions offered by the interview situation – the performance within the performance – the inclusion of the interviews also allowed the material to press upon the form, which is to say that the performance puts pressure on the drama. This seemed to be particularly suitable in staging Loy, whose work often challenges traditional form, and allowed for a more experimental use of the biographical drama itself.
In Act I, the performance that Loy gives in the Evening Sun interview corresponds quite well with a character Rodden describes, in an article that expands on his book’s thesis, as “the provocateur.” Rodden writes: “the provocateur is a playful, bemused interviewee – a special type of raconteur – who enjoys poking fun at the form and treats the interview as a chance to realize other dimensions of himself or herself. The aim is often to co-create a new literary identity” (404). Conducted after the 1915 furor over the publication of “Love Songs,” the Evening Sun interview was the newspaper’s effort to define the “modern woman.” But it was also Loy’s attempt to “co-create” an identity that responded to the scandal and, in some sense, made legible the logic behind what many perceived as her alarming candour. The element of contradiction between Loy’s emphasis on the frank and direct in the interview and her elaborate self-constructions (including those found in the article) is a paradox that gives the interview a particularly interesting dynamic. Similarly, the first act, when the interview “ends,” moves into writing drawn from Loy’s autobiographical prose. In placing this writing outside of the public performance of the interview but still within performance space, the play probes confessional writing, which at once requires the composition of a performed self to narrate events even while its allure lies in the promise of an intimate transparency.
Act II is grounded in the 1965 taped interview with Blackburn and Vas Dias.2 It was an important choice, here, to include Loy’s older voice, not because it mitigates the more radical elements of her youth, but because it provides another perspective on them, a perspective that is sometimes obscured by the emphasis on glamorous accounts of youthful modernists. In the early minutes of the tape, we hear Loy voicing her concern about her new dentures. This attention to the body and its relationship to her poetry brings us back, in new ways, to Loy’s concerns about how bodily processes shape poetic ones. From here, Loy moves into a reminiscence on Cravan, and his loss recurs as a central theme of the tape and of her writing. At the urging of the interviewer, Loy reads from her poems, which causes her to evaluate her career and its reception. Loy still has concerns about the size of her oeuvre – “I don’t think it matters how many poems you wrote, do you?” – even while she harbours surprise and consternation over the reception of some of her work: “somebody, some female poet, said I was the most immoral creature that ever lived” (“Mina Loy Interview with Paul Blackburn and Robert Vas Dias” 214). At this point, in defending herself and her work, Loy says something significant: “I suppose I sounded as though I was rather pugnacious, you know, I wasn’t at all … and I’d only written these things for the sake of the sounds of the words. It was like making jewelry or something” (214, emphasis added).
While Loy’s poetic agenda, in its emphasis on subjectivity and sexuality, undoubtedly exceeded sound, it is nonetheless true that orality is an important aspect of Loy’s work often overshadowed by its more explicit content. To bring the body into this equation, to hear breath and hesitation, to incarnate the flesh that is so vividly discussed, is certainly part of what makes staging Loy worthwhile, but the project also reflects the underemphasized oral aspects of early twentieth-century verse. As Raphael Allison has argued, “oral performance has been largely overlooked in modernist studies” (“Robert Frost, Live” 609), partly due to issues of access, as researchers often have to travel to archives to listen to recordings, and partly because “modernist poets obviously recorded less frequently than the next generation” (610), who not only recorded their work more often but also used sound technologies in the composition of their work.3 Charles Bernstein suggests that, among other consequences, the absence of a history of modernist poetic voicings “has had the effect of eliding the significance of the modernist poetry traditions for postwar performance art” (2). As a result, Bernstein argues for “close listening” as well as close readings of modernist poems, allowing the voices of the poets to shape our impressions of the words.4 While Bernstein professes a prejudice against “acting out” poetry, readings mindful of the tone and timbre of original recordings seem a valuable way of voicing the work. This may be particularly true in Loy’s case, not just because her poems emphasize the body or, as I have mentioned, because the ironic split between words and meaning can perhaps best be delivered through recitation, but also because Loy’s poetry seems to want to be read aloud. Michael Andrew Roberts, who provides a historicized reading of Loy’s recitation of “The Widow’s Jazz” at Natalie Barney’s salon in 1927 (for which Loy trained with a voice coach), has also detailed the formal elements of her work that seem to seek articulation:
A number of aspects of Loy’s poetry, such as her use of space within lines, lines displaced from the left-hand margin and (in poetry and prose), the use of dashes, while they work in one way as visual effects on the page, can also be taken [as] indications of how to “perform” her words. Her sustained irony of tone and diction might also invite an oral delivery […] But Loy’s spaces on the page […] enhance the physicality of the poem, whether through material space on the page or the presence of the breathing body of the poet/performer. (122)
In this sense, a performance of the 1965 interview nets the oral dimensions of Loy’s work (as she reads several poems throughout the recordings) even as it physicalizes the “presence of the breathing body of the poet/performer.” The tensions between text and voice can also be accentuated through projections of the poems that allow audiences to both see and hear what is happening in the work.
Performance allows us to at once appreciate the work in a simulation of its time and also engage with issues that have been raised in contemporary criticism. When “The Widow’s Jazz” is performed at the end of Act I against a projected background of a 1920s jazz club and overlaid by a jazz soundtrack, we historicize the relationship between jazz and modernist poetry and also enter into an enacted version of the critical preoccupations of an article like Roberts’s. Moreover, in response to Bernstein’s interest in the ways a vocalized modernist history would help us understand the roots of poetry in the 1950s and ’60s, a performance of this poem – with an attention to its gaps and breath and sound – gives scholars renewed insight into the antecedents of Black Mountain, for example, and ideas about breath and the body as explored in Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse.” Recitations of Loy’s poetry can also be very helpful in teaching Loy – a notoriously difficult thing to do. Students who are ambivalent about Loy’s verbal acrobatics on the page have been noticeably more receptive after seeing filmed excerpts from the play. As one student articulated, hearing an actor recite the Loy poetry and give voice to Loy’s meditations about her work “gave me a place to start.” In addition to whatever formal and theoretical insight the stage may be able to provide modernist writing, giving new readers a way in – however we may want to elaborate on this entry point – is a valuable element of what performance offers.5
Another dimension of the stage is its audio/visual potential, particularly its ability to incorporate and interact with film, something that was quite useful in re-evaluating Loy’s visual interests. Unlike in The Tree, and for different reasons than the documentary imperatives of These Were the Hours, film plays a central role in The Mina Loy Interviews. In its capacity to hold multiple voices and images, film as a medium is responsive to Loy’s archival documents and their surplus of people, influences, and ideas. The form of this integration, however, comes from “Colossus,” in which Loy talks about the “the newsreel of my memory” (“Excerpts” 113). For many of us, the way the historical imagination unfolds has attached itself to film. It is interesting to think about how, for Loy and in Loy’s age, personal memory and historical imagination might have found expression in contemporary visual media: the slightly stilted black and white films interspersed with still photographs, characteristic and still so evocative of that time. In the first act, the films bring in other voices and provide context. In the second act, where Loy is older, they perform a function more specific to memory, allowing flashes and scenes of her youth to bleed through. The effect is a portal into what Loy termed her “subconscious archives” (“O Hell,” Lost Lunar Baedeker 71), a visual illustration of recurring scenes and memories that at once enrich and undercut the interview situations. More playfully, the integration of film is also a route through which Mina Loy can confront her doppelgänger, 1930s film star Myrna Loy, often dubbed “the perfect wife” because of her representations of conformist female characters and with whom Loy is so consistently and ironically confused. Within the play, the situational juxtaposition of Myrna Loy’s films (through the archivist’s obsession) with Mina Loy’s writing animates how radically different Loy’s views were from the dominant cultural narratives of that time. Projections are similarly enriching, permitting us to see the poems where appropriate and also to view Loy’s visual work, including paintings like L’amour dorloté par les belles dames. Computer technologies like VideoMaker can even allow us to reconstruct Loy’s montage process; toward the end of Act II, we see her create one of these montages. In the end, integrating film, projections, and other technologies makes the production “multimedia,” a newer term that, retrospectively applied, is appropriate to Loy, who was herself a multimedia producer of text, watercolours, montage, and objets trouvés.
Building on Loy’s use of the term “subconscious archives,” The Mina Loy Interviews, in a manner quite different from those of the other plays presented here, dramatizes the encounter between author and critic by interspersing the Loy interviews with scenes in the literary archive. This simultaneously allows the play to operate in a realm that is structurally ironic – the archival discoveries shape and undercut the material in the Loy scenes in a manner that is cohesive with Loy’s own ironic conventions – and, along with the marked presentation of archival images and text throughout the play, makes archival work visible. The scenes in the archive are based on stories that I gathered from archival researchers and in this sense are “true stories,” including the fire drill, the found knife, and the stolen documents. As these anecdotes and experiences are undocumented, the drama itself becomes an archive for a particular type of oral history, one that opens up, humanizes, and allows for a questioning of this type of work. The archive presented here is not the Beinecke Library, where Loy’s documents are actually held. Nor are these scenes meant to be representative of archival work: dramatic imperatives privilege stories of intrigue and conflict over the more typical tales of helpful encounters between researchers and archivists. Nonetheless, the presence of an archival plot line within the play sets the Loy material in tension with the site from which much of it is drawn.
The site of the archive is a particularly important one in Loy studies, as Loy’s archival documents are, on the whole, a fairly disordered collection of drafts, fragments, sketches for inventions, fashion designs, doodles, and letters, all of which have been meticulously organized by later hands. As Sandeep Parmar writes of Yale’s Mina Loy Papers: “On the surface, her archive is an idiosyncratic collection of typescripts, handwritten drafts, address books, letterhead and graph paper that illustrates the fantasy of a modern writer at work, outpacing the swiftness of inspiration with whatever comes to hand. And yet, the archive’s carefully ordered folders are at odds with their, at times, chaotic contents: drafts that appear to be missing pages have been reassembled, and pages that have no designated place are ordered by theme” (5). In the play, materializing the researcher – who by profession mostly appears as a disembodied voice in the pages of academic books and articles – highlights the physical dimensions,6 as well as the subjective decisions, involved in writing the author. Quite literally, staging the researcher puts the critic inside the scene rather than outside of it. The actors’ double roles – the researcher as Mina, the archivist as an older Loy, the guard and archival assistant as Cravan – also probe the imaginative identifications and displacements that take place within the research context.
Of course, to work at the intersection of archive and stage is also to engage with questions about the movement between them. The archive stands in marked contrast with the theatre; it holds “the dead” while the theatre houses “the live”; archival work is mostly solitary while the theatre is marked by a series of communal encounters; and yet, in working with these archival materials, there is always the possibility of some historical flash, some jolt of recognition in a handwritten line or sketch that jars us into a more immediate relationship with the author and her work.7 And, in the end, it is this historical voltage that can be transmitted onstage, connecting audiences to archival sources and the writer’s published work: aurally, visually, viscerally.
1See, for example, Marjorie Perloff’s “English as a ‘Second’ Language: Mina Loy’s ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose.’”
2Unlike the Evening Sun interviewer, who was mostly interested in Loy’s turn as the modern woman, Blackburn and Vas Dias were deeply invested in the poetry itself. The fact that the interview was tape-recorded (the only known recording of Loy) rather than transcribed is also significant. Blackburn, as a leading translator of Provençal verse, was keenly aware of the oral dimensions of the troubadour tradition, but this awareness was also central to his interest in contemporary poetry, as witnessed by his role in organizing readings by Beat poets as well as his (unsuccessful) attempt to get poetry recordings into jukeboxes across the United States. Vas Dias was similarly interested in the importance of sound to contemporary poetry – both its creation and its reception – as illustrated by his own collections, notably Speech Acts & Happenings (1972).
3Books by Allison, Derek Furr, Adalaide Morris, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Laura Severin, among others, have done much, in recent years, to redress the scholarship gap around modern poetry and performance. The Morris book even includes an audio recording. But the corporeal body, though privileged in these accounts, is still absent; staged readings of modernist poetry and stagings that incorporate modernist verse could make an important contribution to modernism’s vocalized performance history.
4Bernstein catalogues several ways in which hearing poets read alters our reception of the poetry: “the unanticipatably slow tempo of Wallace Stevens’s performance tells us much about his sense of the poem’s rhythms and philosophical sensuousness, just as John Ashbery’s near monotone suggests a dreamier dimension than the text sometimes reveals. The intense emotional impact of Robert Creeley’s pauses at line breaks gives an affective interpretation of what otherwise reads as a highly formal sense of fragmented line breaks – the breaks suggest emotional pitch and distress in a way audible in the recordings but not necessarily on the page. The recordings of Gertrude Stein make clear both the bell-like resonance of her voice and her sense of shifting rhythms against modulating repetitions and the shapeliness of her sound-sense; while, hearing Langston Hughes, one immediately picks up not only on the specific blues echoes in the work but how he modulated shifts into and out of these rhythms” (6). Once we have heard these poets read, Bernstein suggests, we will also change our own “hearing and readings of their works on the page.” This experience, for Bernstein, transforms the poem from a “textual entity” into a “performative event,” which also invites a plurality of read and performed realizations (9).
5Script-reading in class and classes in writing literary drama have also proved to be useful and immersive forms of pedagogy. I elaborate on this in the conclusion.
6See, for example, Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, which talks about the physical effects of archival work.
7In the case of Loy’s archive, the jolt for me came from an encounter with a sketch of Loy’s husband, Stephen Haweis, juxtaposed with a sketch for one of her inventions, a particularly functional-looking window-washing squeegee. I have written about this encounter and the movement from archive to stage in “Live from the Archive: Film, Folders and Mina Loy,” in Performance Matters 1–2, no. 1. (2015). The issue, edited by Peter Dickinson, is dedicated to performance and the archive.