the figure of the vagrant in mina loy's bowery work - cairn

INCOGNITO ON THIRD AVENUE: THE FIGURE OF THE VAGRANT INMINA LOY’S BOWERY WORK

Yasna Bozhkova

Belin | « Revue française d’études américaines »

2016/4 N° 149 | pages 26 à 38 ISSN 0397-7870ISBN 9782701198774DOI 10.3917/rfea.149.0026

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26 n° 149 4e trimestre 2016

Incognito on Third Avenue: The Figure of the Vagrant in Mina Loy’s Bowery Work

YaSna BozhkoVa

“Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse.”

Walter Benjamin

In Mina Loy’s work as a whole, the notion of wandering is related to the intercultural nomadism of the cosmopolitan avant-garde artist. The figure of the wanderer is introduced in the long semi-autobiographical poem Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923-1925) through “Exodus”—a figure based on Loy’s Hungarian Jewish father who had emigrated to Britain in his youth—weaving a complex “auto-mythology”1 revolving around the notion of exile. Her early work engages with artistic communities in Paris, Florence, and New York, and her poems composed in the 1920s specifically revolve around the notion of avant-garde genius, as in “Joyce’s Ulysses,” “Gertrude Stein,” “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” and “Jules Pascin,” which map a vibrant community of expatriate avant-garde luminaries. In her late work, however, the figure of the artist is supplanted by the figure of the bum, providing a different kind of vagabondage.

While the figure of the bum already emerges in Loy’s novel Insel, set in Paris in the early 1930s, where the eponymous protagonist, a starving artist based on the German Surrealist painter Richard Oelze, is portrayed as a “luminous clochard” (Loy 2014, 145), its full significance unfolds in Loy’s Bowery period. In 1936 Loy left Europe for the last time, fleeing to New York from the menace of World War II, and took up residence in the Manhattan Bowery, where she lived until 1953, in considerable poverty and frequently moving from one communal rooming house to another. From the Great Depression until the mid-1950s, the Bowery’s flophouses, known as “Skid Row,” were a haven for the destitute and homeless.2 The Third Avenue “El”

1. The notion of an “auto-mythology” was first introduced by Loy’s editor Roger Conover (LaLB 326), but has been most extensively explored by Alex Goody in “Autobiography / Auto-mythology: Mina Loy’s Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose.”

2. The Bowery’s history has been documented in Luc Sante’s Low Life.

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The Figure of the Vagrant in Mina Loy’s Bowery Work

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 27

created a twilight space, fostering a community of down-and-outs who found refuge in the flophouses. Loy herself became reclusive in her Bowery years, writing little, publishing even less, and losing contact with all but a few of her artist friends.3 Returning to poetry after a silence of more than ten years, in the 1940s Loy composed an interrelated series of poems, among which “On Third Avenue” (1942), “Chiffon Velours” (1944), and “Hot Cross Bum” (1949), that she planned to publish with the title “Compensations of Poverty.” She also created a series of three-dimensional assemblages—Communal Cot, Christ on a Clothesline, No Parking, and Bums in Paradise4—crafted from the urban detritus she had collected on the Bowery’s streets, experimenting with materials like rags, tin cans, paper cups, broken glass, egg crates and banana peels. In Communal Cot (ca. 1950), the bodies of a group of anonymous tramps, made of cocoon-like bundles of rags, are strewn on the pavement, completely dehumanized, to the extent that it is unclear whether they are dead or have just sunk into a deep intoxicated slumber. In No Parking (early 1950s), anonymous bums with beatific expressions are curled up around a garbage can, whose contents, made of actual refuse glued on the canvas, are spilled onto the street.

This paper focuses on the echoes between these haunting poems and assemblages, which Loy called “Refusees,” a pun conflating “refuse” and “refugees” with an ironic reference to the Paris Salon des Refusés (Burke 420). Loy’s increasing marginality and silence in her later years, largely responsible for the oblivion in which her work sank after her death, are reflected in her interest in the anonymous denizens of the Bowery’s flophouses. The derelicts occupy permanently temporary abodes on the margins of the metropolis, hovering between place and displacement in the liminal space of the street. As the allusion to the Salon des Refusés suggests, what is at stake in these works is a sardonic reflection on the artist’s growing marginalization in consumer society, where the anonymous bum emerges as the spectral double of the avant-garde artist. These works also obliquely reflect Loy’s own refugee status. The materiality of the medium, strikingly brought to the foreground through the use of urban refuse in her three-dimensional assemblages, also illuminates her textual poetics, creating a mirror effect in which the poetic language also emerges as detritus. Through this mirror effect, subject and object, tramp and artist (who is, in this case, both poet and craftsman) converge in the figure of

3. Berenice Abbott, Djuna Barnes, Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp were among the few artists who Loy frequented in her late years.

4. Many of Loy’s assemblages have been lost, but some have been preserved in private col-lections. Realizing they were fragile, Loy asked her friend the photographer Berenice Abbott to take pictures of them, so some survive in Abbott’s photographs. For color images of Loy’s artwork, see the website of Francis Naumann’s Art Gallery in New York, who curated an exhi-bition in 2006 titled “Daughters of Dada”: <http://www.francisnaumann.com/daughters%20of%20dada/loy.html>.

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Yasna Bozhkova


the vagrant who, like the Baudelairean figure of the ragpicker, collects refuse on the city’s streets and transforms it into art. The acute tension between, on the one hand, the use of trash as an artistic medium in the assemblages and, on the other hand, the poems’ highly ornate diction, results in an ironic poetics of excess, which in turn transforms poetic language into waste.

Poems in “2 dimensions ½”Although the aesthetics of Loy’s assemblages is unique, they obliquely

revisit and dialogue with her manifold artistic influences. For instance, her interest in trash can be related to her acquaintance with the eccentric Dada artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in the 1910s, who created sculptures and assemblages out of the discarded objects and refuse she collected on the streets of New York, and who would adorn herself with empty tomato cans or the lid of a coal scuttle (Gammel). Nevertheless, Loy’s use of refuse revisits the aesthetics of Baroness Elsa with none of the provocative nonchalance characteristic of Dada’s well-known strategies aiming at épater le bourgeois and, in a much more somber and sardonic vision, showing a growing preoccupation with precariousness and dispossession. Her attempt to bring to the fore the beauty of discarded objects may also be related to her friendship with Joseph Cornell, with whom she shared a fascination for flea market finds: while still in Paris, Loy made lampshades using antique bottles she had salvaged at the marché aux puces, and sent Cornell some antique puzzle boxes and watch parts in old containers she had found there, inspiring him to create “a collection of small objects in glass balls and boxes utilizing these French treasures, which [were] included in his Surrealist show” (Burke 379). This search for beauty in apparently worthless items and for spiritual illumination in a sordid environment is reflected for instance in the butterfly on the trash can in No Parking, made of the same trash that surrounds the bums.5 On the other hand, Loy’s use of rags and various discarded objects to create artworks also ostensibly appropriates the figure of the ragpicker, historically connected not only with Paris, but also with the Bowery: “[The Bowery’s] [r]agpickers worked the city’s ash heaps and garbage dumps […] collecting unwanted, broken, or superannuated articles of every description. A ragman’s den visited in the 1870s yielded ‘bones, broken dishes, rags, bits of furniture, cinders, old tin, useless lamps, decaying vegetables, ribbons, [and] cloths’.” (Sante 65-66)

In 1959 Marcel Duchamp curated an exhibition of Loy’s assemblages at the Bodley Gallery in New York, with the title “Constructions,” and this was

5. Concerning the echoes to Cornell’s work in Loy’s Bowery poems, see Nervaux-Gavoty (who also points out some affinities of the I/eye in these poems with the Baudelairean figures of the flâneur and the ragpicker).

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the last significant tribute paid to her work before her death in 1966. Although the poems were not included in the exhibition, Duchamp’s characterization of the assemblages as “Mina’s poems à 2 dimensions ½: hauts-reliefs et bas-fonds”6 foregrounds the importance of the notion of intermediality. Through the reference to “hauts-reliefs et bas-fonds,” he also wittily alludes to the complex interplay between illumination and squalor, and between empathy and satire which informs these works. Surrealist art dealer, gallery owner, and Loy’s former son-in-law Julien Levy establishes further connections between the assemblages and Loy’s poetry; alluding to oft-quoted lines from her 1922 poem “Apology of Genius,” which reads as a manifesto of the modernist movement:

Lepers of the moon all magically diseased we come among you innocent of our luminous sores (LLB 77)

He thus reinforces the parallel between the artists and “the beatific and intoxicated, bums; those who are, together with poets, ‘lepers of the moon, all magically diseased,’ the aristocrats of the dispossessed.”7 Like Duchamp, he pinpoints the unresolved tension between identification and (self-)irony, illumination and squalor at the heart of Loy’s “contrary pictures”: “Contrary pictures, these constructions are lyric in their drabness, whole in their fragmentation. . . . The increment of ‘pulverous pastures of poverty’ . . . what jewels to have been discovered in the almost extinct ashcans of the Bowery.”8 Another allusion to “Apology of Genius” firmly establishes the Bowery bums as the doubles of Loy’s “lepers of the moon”:

We . . . feed upon the wind and stars and pulverous pastures of poverty . . .

We forge the dusk of Chaos to that imperious jewellery of the Universe —the Beautiful— (LLB 77)

Indeed, in these works Loy remains faithful to the “opposed aesthetics” (LaLB 142) which emerges in Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, bringing together high and low, sordid and beautiful, and “[making] moon-flowers out of muck”

6. Bodley Gallery Invitation, Carolyn Burke collection on Mina Loy and Lee Miller, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. A scan of the invitation, featuring a reproduction of Loy’s No Parking is available at: <http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3549087>.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

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(LaLB 142). We shall trace how this “opposed aesthetics” unravels in a close reading of three of Loy’s Bowery poems, making some connections between her use of refuse in the assemblages and her use of poetic language.

“On Third Avenue”: The Restless Eye Roaming IncognitoUnlike her earlier poetry, Loy’s Bowery works have a documentary

dimension, and their quasi-photographic intensity recalls, to a certain extent, Berenice Abbott’s photographs of the Bowery.9 However, Loy departs from this documentary aesthetics in important ways, not only in her focus on refuse and in the spectrality of the dehumanized faces, but also through her extremely complex diction, replete with elaborate ironic wordplay and sound effects. For instance, the twilight atmosphere of the Third Avenue “El” captured in Abbott’s photographs resurfaces in Loy’s “On Third Avenue” as a spectral, haunting urban space:

“You should have disappeared years ago” —

so disappear on Third Avenue to share the heedless incognito

of shuffling shadow-bodies animate with frustration

whose silence’ only potence is respiration preceding the eroded bronze contours of their aromas

through the monstrous air of this red-lit thoroughfare. (LLB 109)

Similar spectral visions also appear in other contemporaneous poems, such as “Ephemerid”: “Low in shadow / of the El’s / arboreal iron” (LLB 116). In this crepuscular space, the poetic I is deliberately positioned as “[sharing] the heedless incognito / of shuffling shadow-bodies.” “Incognito” is a term that also has a special significance in Loy’s poetic idiom and often resurfaces in her poetry, related to her poetic strategies of silence and elusiveness. According to Conover, Loy’s increasing elusiveness and eccentricity in the late 1920s gave rise to a rumor that she was not a real person, but a made-up persona. Upon hearing this she reportedly appeared at Natalie Barney’s salon and said: “I assure you I am indeed a live being. But it is necessary to stay very unknown . . . To

9. See the collection Berenice Abbott: Changing New York, and particularly “ ‘El’, Second and Third Avenue Lines, Bowery and Division St.” (1935) and “Bowery Bum” (1932), which Loy would have been familiar with.

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maintain my incognito, the hazard I chose was—poet” (LLB xii). This may be related to what Benjamin writes about Baudelaire: “Behind the masks which he used to their fullest extent, the poet in Baudelaire preserved his incognito […]. The incognito was the law of his poetry. His prosody is like the map of a big city in which one can move about inconspicuously” (Benjamin 2006, 126). As Sandeep Parmar notes, “The word incognito appears in Loy’s later poems attached to the spectral figure of the vagrant.” (100) In Loy’s Bowery poems there are two interrelated kinds of vagrancy—the vagabondage of the bums themselves, a precarious rootless drift on the margins of society, but also the vagrancy of the poet’s I/eye, restlessly roaming the streets of the Bowery, both as part of the community of derelicts and as a detached observer. The idea of poetry as a “hazard,” and of the notion of “incognito” as the necessary stance of the poet, is reflected in the twofold figure of the bum-artist: this explains the sudden shifts in perspective in the poems, from a “he” or a “she” which focuses on an anonymous figure, to a “they” which suggests a community of outcasts, and to a “you” which may refer both to a nameless tramp and to the speaker herself. For instance, in the line “You should have disappeared years ago,” “you” may be an apostrophe to the bums who litter the margins of the metropolis, but it could also be understood as interior monologue—the imperative form “disappear” is “I disappear” in earlier drafts of the poem.10 Through the repeated alliterations on hushing sounds and through the use of negative prefixes “dis” and “un” (“undress,” “unwound”), the imperative “so disappear […] to share” acquires a performative dimension: the poem enacts the irrevocable plunge into the anonymity of the Bowery’s unrecognizable “shadow-bodies.”

The poem’s spectral imagery is reinforced by such alliterative links—“share,” “shuffling,” “shadow-bodies,” “silence,” “saturnine,” “neon-signs,” “set afire,” “sweat-sculptured,” “Time”/“tailor,” “contortive”/“clowned”/“cloth.” Likewise, the rhymes convey a ghostly echo, especially in “press”/“undress,” and “dummies”/“mummies”:

For their ornateness Time, the contortive tailor, on and off, clowned with sweat-sculptured cloth to press upon these irreparable dummies an eerie undress of mummies half unwound. (LLB 109-110)

10. In the handwritten drafts for “On Third Avenue” (Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library), the poem exists in several different versions, all of which contain the lines “You should have disappeared years ago” and “I disappear.”

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Yasna Bozhkova


The last stanza of Part 1 is dominated by the personification of Time as a “contortive tailor,” a rich nexus bringing together various motifs of Loy’s imagery: on the one hand, “sweat-sculptured cloth” ostensibly recalls the bundles of rags which represent the bums’ bodies in Communal Cot, whose cocoon-like shapes suggest the “eerie undress / of mummies / half unwound.” On the other hand, the ornateness of this “sweat-sculptured cloth” is mirrored by the ornateness of the poetic language itself. The poem also introduces the symbolic significance of sartorial imagery, which is also deployed in “Chiffon Velours” and in “Mass Production on 14th Street.” In this respect, it is significant to note that in Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, “Exodus” is a “tailor’s cutter” (LaLB 115), which was also Loy’s father’s occupation. Here the implicit fusion of the figures of “Time” and “Exodus” suggests that the body of the I has also been irrevocably lacerated, disfigured, transformed into an anonymous cocoon-like bundle of tatters, like those of the derelicts. Thus, the position of the speaker hovers ambivalently between the figure of the artist and the figure of the bum, suggesting at once the “contortive” shriveling of the derelict’s body, the craft of the artist who fashions the bums’ bodies out of rags, and the acute vision of the poet, who re-collects the poem out of the tatters of experience.

Although Loy’s poems are rich in geographical references (“Beyond a hell-vermilion / curtain of neon / lies the Bowery,” LLB 133), as well as intense visual (“bronze,” “red-lit”), aural (“shuffling,” “respiration”) and olfactory (“aromas”) effects, they are also replete with echoes to her earlier writing, creating a peculiar kind of temporal and spatial disorientation. For instance, through suggestive echoes the spectral twilight of the “red-lit thoroughfare” of “On Third Avenue” is superimposed with the “Delirious Avenues” of the decadent, surreal moonscape of “Lunar Baedeker” (1923):

Peris in livery prepare Lethe for posthumous parvenues

Delirious Avenues lit with the chandelier souls of infusoria

(LLB 81)

Likewise, “saturnine / neon-signs / set afire” (LLB 109) echoes “Stellectric signs / ‘Wing shows on Starway’” (LLB 81) in “Lunar Baedeker.” In this double exposure, the uncanny cityscape charted by “On Third Avenue” is superimposed with Loy’s earlier work, emerging as, among others, a shadow double of the New York of Loy’s youth, when, during her first stay in New York in 1917, Loy frequented the exuberant artistic salon of

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art collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg, and took part in the subversive activities of New York Dada. The title “On Third Avenue” also potentially echoes the opening lines of “From Third Avenue On” from Djuna Barnes’ The Book of Repulsive Women: “And now she walks on turned feet / Beside the litter in the street / Or rolls beneath a dirty sheet / Within the town” (15). In other words, although Loy’s “Bowery Baedeker” (Burke 420) maps a very specific location, on another level it also maps a spectral mindscape, saturated with haunting echoes, which revisit obliquely Loy’s own earlier work and her manifold artistic influences. As the I/eye of the poet roams restlessly through the Bowery’s streets, memory projects delirious visions on the anonymous silhouettes and invests the cityscape with spectral shades.

Laceration, “Memorial Scraps,” and Artistic Vision in “Chiffon Velours”

Such shifts of perspective are also implicitly present in the poem “Chiffon Velours.” While on one level this poem is a portrait of an anonymous woman living in the Bowery, on another it also reads as a self-portrait, since its imagery echoes the one which appears in another late poem called “An Aged Woman,” a self-portrait as an old woman who looks at herself in the mirror and sees the “excessive incognito / of a Bulbous stranger” (LLB 145). The focus on fabric in “Chiffon Velours” harks back to the idea of Time as a “contortive tailor” (LLB 109) who violently lacerates and re-designs the bodies of the derelicts. Here this idea reappears through the parallel between the woman’s withered face and the rich folds of the fabric:

Her features verging on a shriek reviling age,

flee from death in odd directions somehow retained by a web of wrinkles.

The site of vanished breasts is marked by a safety pin.

(LLB 119)

The eccentricity of the fabric itself, out of place in a destitute environment, reads as an autobiographical reference: Loy designed her own clothes, and the highly original designs of her youth, which influenced the French stylist Poiret, gave way to increasingly eccentric clothes in her late years—she used to roam around the streets of the Bowery in her nightgown or design eccentric free-flowing dresses using rich fabrics like the velours (the French word for velvet) in the poem. The Bowery bums called her “the Duchess” due to her extravagant clothes, which resurfaces here through the sarcastic idea of the “original design / of destitution”: “Hers alone

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Yasna Bozhkova


to model / the last creation, / original design / of destitution” (LLB 119). “[M] emorial scraps” (LLB 119) puns on “immemorial,” ironically pointing to the woman as an obsolete vestige of another era, but also reads literally as “scraps of memory,” harking back to the metaphor of memory as a “cloth,” “half unwound.”

The ambivalent use of sartorial imagery has an implicit political dimension, and ultimately becomes the vehicle of Loy’s criticism of consumer society. One may compare the sardonic idea of the “original design / of destitution” to the imagery of mass-produced clothing and commodity fetishism in “Mass-Production on 14th Street”:

The consumer, the statue of a daisy in her hair jostles her auxiliary creator the sempstress . . .

idols of style project a chic paralysis . . .

of their mobile simulacra’s tidal passing (LLB 112)

If Paris was the capital of capitalism in the 19th century, by the 1940s New York had taken its place as the capital of the 20th. In Manhattan, the symbol of the zenith of high capitalism and commodity fetishism, the Bowery appears as a refuge from the “rosy scissors of hosiery / [which] snip space / to a triangular racing lace / in an iris circus of Industry” (LLB 111). The subject is lacerated not only by Time, but also by the “scissors” of Capitalism. The vagrant woman’s marginal position, “[r]igid / at rest against the corner-stone / of a department store” (LLB 119) is what endows her with her acute vision: “Such are the compensations of poverty, / to see———” (LLB 110). Through a multilingual pun, Loy conflates the English word chiffon, a translucent silk fabric used for making evening gowns, and the French chiffon (rag). This female avatar of the vagrant figure, clothed in “immemorial scraps” of “chiffon velours” comes closest to the figure of the ragpicker (chiffonnier) as it has been theorized by Benjamin, which is also a figure for the poet: “The bearing of the modern hero, as modeled on the ragpicker: his ‘jerky gait;’ the necessary isolation in which he goes about his business, the interest he takes in the refuse and detritus of the great city” (Benjamin 1999, 368). Although the woman is not only “sere” (LLB 119), but also implicitly a “seer,” an incarnation of the poet-seer, the possibility of artistic vision here is more problematic than in “On Third Avenue,” since her creation ultimately “reflects the gutter”: “half her black skirt / glows as a soiled mirror; / reflects the gutter— / a yard of chiffon velours” (LLB 119).

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“Human Rubble” and Language as Waste in “Hot Cross Bum”“Hot Cross Bum” brings to a climax the tension between the poems’

documentary snapshots of the Bowery’s anonymous winos, and the linguistic excess created by the highly complex, Latinate diction, oversaturated with sound effects and elaborate punning. Its imagery is not only spectral but also grotesque, and the possibility of spiritual illumination and artistic vision is deflated through an irony which is more biting than in the other two poems. Here again, the speaking voice strategically oscillates between the one of a detached observer, suggesting the documentary aesthetics of Abbott’s Bowery Bum (1932), and the one of an insider: the poem abounds with insider slang, such as “beef,” which means “hard liquor” (LLB 134), and “creepy Pete,” which means “wine” (LLB 138), suggesting that the speaker is an initiate to the community of bums rather than a mere observer.11 The speaker passes abruptly from a detached observation of the bum in the third person (“he” / “they”) to a description of his drunken delirium, which is in the second person and could be understood as interior monologue: “a Brilliance all of bottles / pouring a benison / of internal rain / leaving a rainbow in your brain” (LLB 135, italics mine). The fact that the typescript of the poem is marked with Loy’s own addresses in the neighborhood explicitly positions her as one of the Bowery’s anonymous denizens.12

This poem also hinges on a mirror effect between the figure of the artist and the figure of the bum; the group of nameless “Hoary rovers” (LLB 135) who inhabit the Bowery’s streets is also a community of “shrunken illuminati / sunken / rather than arisen” (LLB 139). Here once again one finds the intrusive alliterations and ghostly echoes, as in “shrunken” / “sunken.” The whole poem is oversaturated with such ironic wordplay: suggesting a parody of communion, the poem’s title conflates a “hot cross bun,” a sweet bun marked with a cross on the top, traditionally eaten on Good Friday, that the bums eat to cure their hangovers, and the cross they are branded with when they die:13 “branding / indirigible bums / with the hot-cross / of ovenly buns” (LLB 141-142). An explicit reference to the assemblage Communal Cot reinforces the connections between Loy’s poems and assemblages:

11. On the typescript of the poem, Loy helpfully provides glosses for those terms, which have been reproduced in the published versions.

12. See the typescript for “Hot Cross Bum,” Mina Loy Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

13. One need see no opposition between the references to Judaism and Christianity in Loy’s work. Born of a Jewish father and an English Protestant mother, Loy was, like Cornell, a lifelong practitioner of Christian Science, and was open to numerous other spiritual doctrines, but was somewhat skeptical towards official religion. In “Hot Cross Bum,” all of the religious symbolism converges in the depiction of the bum as a visionary or even a “prophet” (LLB 135), although this idea of spiritual illumination is ironically deflated by Loy’s satire.

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And always on the trodden street —the communal cot—

embalmed in rum under an unseen baldachin of dream blinking his inverted sky of flagstone

prone lies the body of the flop where’er he drop. (LLB 143)

Thus, it becomes clear that the “communal cot” is the space of the street strewn with anonymous “refusees,” and that the “remains” that the poem refers to are these dehumanized bodies, the human rubble littering the Bowery’s streets:

Collecting refuse more profuse than man the City’s circulatory sanitary apostles a-leap to ash-cans apply their profane ritual to offal . . .

Scrapped are remains empty cans remain (LLB 142-143)

However, Loy’s language is so satirically overcharged with alliteration, rhymes and paronomasia that the reader is eventually left with the impression that the poem’s words themselves are also among the “remains” that pile up on the scrap heaps of the Bowery. It is hardly accidental that this deliberately verbose poem is in stark contrast with Loy’s elsewhere highly concise, epigrammatic style.

Throughout the poem, Loy’s biting sarcasm makes abrupt and problematic shifts between the registers of tragedy and parody. The description of the bodies as debris recalls the opening lines of “Photo After Pogrom” (1945), one of her few poems which explicitly address the Holocaust:

Arrangement by rage of human rubble the false-eternal statues of the slain . . .

[attain] the absolute smile of dispossession (LLB 122)

In “Hot Cross Bum,” Loy’s refugee status is addressed only obliquely, but an explicit reference to “holocaust” is incongruously drowned among alliterations and paronomasia, lost among the heap of linguistic refuse: “hushed by the hiccough holocaust / of otiose / hoboes hob-nobbing / with obtund oafs” (LLB 138).

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The speaker gradually passes from the position of an observer in the beginning (“faces of Inferno / peering from shock-absorbent torsos,” LLB 134) to the one of a drunken bum, whose increasingly delirious visions are suggested by the intrusive, stilted alliterations and complex Latinate terms which conjure up obscure images like:

Aptest attainer to apex of Chimera

Inamorato of incognito ignis fatuus fatuitous possessor of thoroughfare (LLB 143-144)

The poem reads as the inebriated ruminations of “a vagabond in delirium” (LLB 144), a “prophet of Babble-on / [who] shouts and mutters / to earless gutters” (LLB 135). As the pun between “Babble-on” and “Babylon” suggests, it ironically imitates the accumulation of language as nonsensical babble, deflating the possibility of poetic vision and voice. The term “incognito” resurfaces in “incognito ignis fatuus,” which is another satiric pun, since “ignis fatuus” is the Latin term for a will-o’-the-wisp, and refers to the spark of artistic vision left in these “shrunken illuminati” (LLB 139), but also inscribes the word “fatuous,” which evokes the increasing dimness of their consciousness (“fatuitous / possessor[s] of thoroughfare”). As in the assemblage No Parking, the poem’s imagery problematically oscillates between satire and empathy: while the bums’ smiles are somewhat “fatuitous,” they are also “the absolute smile[s] / of dispossession” (LLB 122).

ConclusionThe haunting visions informing Loy’s Bowery work offer an ironic

reflection on the artist’s growing marginalization in consumer society. While to a certain extent her identification with the Bowery bums foreshadows the Beat poets’ fascination with the figure of the vagabond as a double of the poet, a symbolic figure of freedom and of rejection of consumer culture,14 the romantic idealization of the bum in Loy’s work is rendered more problematic. This problematic vision reflects the existential dilemma of the artist herself and the collapse of a project of cosmopolitan avant-garde artisthood: the twilight cityscape of the Bowery, with its anonymous flops, is in a certain sense the

14. For instance, Loy’s description of the artist Insel as a “luminous clochard” and her depiction of the beatific expressions of the intoxicated Bowery bums, particularly in No Parking and “Hot Cross Bum,” may be connected to the Beat aesthetics (recalling the origin of the term “Beat” in “beatific”) and particularly to Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, translated into French as Les Clochards célestes.

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Yasna Bozhkova


spectral double of the spectacular artistic life of New York that Loy had known in her youth, pointing to an artistic bohemia which is becoming increasingly marginalized. Roaming “incognito” around the Bowery reflects the ambivalent stance of the lyric subject, creating a mirror effect between the bums and the poet herself, but allowing her sufficient detachment as to comment on them with acerbic irony, which ultimately becomes a form of self-irony. Loy’s highly ornate poetics, oversaturated with elaborate wordplay, is as deliberately out of place as the refined fabric in “Chiffon Velours,” which only “reflects the gutter” (LLB 119).

WORKS CITED

Abbott, Berenice, and Bonnie Yochelson. Berenice Abbott: Changing New York. New York: New Press, 1997.

Barnes, Djuna. The Book of Repulsive Women and Other Poems. Rebecca Loncraine, ed. Manchester: Carcanet, 2003.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Rolf Tiedemann, ed., trans. Howard Eiland et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999.

––. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Michael Jennings, ed., trans. Howard Eiland et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006.

Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.

Gammel, Irene. Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

Goody, Alex. “Autobiography / Auto-mythology: Mina Loy’s Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose.” Representing Lives: Women and Autobiography. Alison Donnell and Pauline Polkey, eds. London: Macmillan, 2000. 270-279.

Loy, Mina. The Last Lunar Baedeker. Roger Conover, ed. Highlands, NC: Jargon Society, 1982. (LaLB)

––. The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Roger Conover, ed. Manchester: Carcanet, 1997. (LLB)

––. Insel. Elizabeth Arnold, ed. New York: Melville House, 2014.

Nervaux-Gavoty, Laure (de). “‘Compensations of poverty’: la féerie urbaine ou la modernité en question dans ‘On Third Avenue’ et ‘Ephemerid’ de Mina Loy.” Caliban 25 (2009): 153-167.

Parmar, Sandeep. Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

Sante, Luc. Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York. London: Granta, 1998.

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the figure of the vagrant in mina loy's bowery work - cairn

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