Mina Loy in Too Much Too Soon: poetry / celebrity / sexuality / modernity - Essays - Critical Essay - Biography

Sometimes, when you flip for something obscure, and it becomes famous, you feel a sense of loss. Your private obsession isn't just yours any more. You know--Combat Rock Syndrome. But I can't imagine anyone feeling that way about Mina Loy. She loved being famous. And she's even more fun to read now that she's a star again. I can walk into a new friend's room and see Mina Loy on the bookshelf, something I always dreamed of being able to do. I even meet people who know much more about Loy than I do, and as time goes on, I will meet more of them. She keeps getting bigger-by now she's more famous than poor Myrna Loy--and all the different eyes on her just make her work richer. Nowadays, I can read articles about her that begin with the word "interdiscursivity," and I don't even gag. She belongs to that world, too. She belongs to a lot of worlds. She's a personality crisis.

Mina Loy was a star in the punk rock style, someone who crossed the line from fan to performer. The first thing she ever published, "Aphorisms On Futurism," was something she wrote while she was just an understimulated, underexposed, overmarried English painter named Ducie Haweis, bored out of her skull in Florence. (Her birth name had been "Mina Lowy"; by the end of her life, she was signing her name "Mina Lloyd.") She had met the Italian Futurists, Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti and Giovanni Papini, pursued affairs with them, and begun her sexual and literary awakening. The dissatisfied bride Ducie Haweis reinvented herself as the cosmopolitan writer Mina Loy, and wrote a manifesto on Futurism, even though she was already rebelling against Marinetti and Papini the way they had inspired her to rebel against her married life. It was a bluff, but it worked; "Aphorisms On Futurism" got published in Camera Work in January 1914, and suddenly Ducie Haweis was Mina Loy, a writer, with an audience.

Loy was thirty-two before she published for the first time; she'd kept herself a secret for so long that she was ready to explode and make the world listen. She had crossed the fan/performer boundary, left her husband, broken her silence. Now, in classic punk rock style, after fighting her way to the microphone, she suddenly had to figure out on the spot what she wanted to say into it. As Greil Marcus has put it, the originary punk rock gesture is "finding your own voice and making the act of listening to it worth someone else's time." And now that Mina Loy had bluffed her way to an audience, she had to find a voice that could live up to that audience. You gotta have a crowd if you wanna have a show, and Loy wanted to have a show. By the time she finally moved to New York in October 1916, her fame as a poet had preceded her. But it's no stretch at all to say that her fame as a poet preceded her poetry. She was a starfucker who became an even bigger star than Marinetti or Papini ever were, a femme fatale in love with fame, fame, fatal fame. Loy put it another way in one of her unpublished manuscripts, revising the Miltonic trope of "darkness visible": "The rubbish of centuries crashes into words as the volume of all women's silence, become audible, rolls upon us."