Mina Loy is being featured at wood s lot, and among the links is a long essay by Marjorie Perloff about her autobiographical poem “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” (first published 1923-25). It’s an informative and interesting piece; what I want to highlight here is a remarkable quote from an essay this English-born poet who was seen as American even when she’d only spent a year in the country wrote about the American language:
It was inevitable that the renaissance of poetry should proceed out of America, where latterly a thousand languages have been born, and each one, for purposes of communication at least, English — English enriched and variegated with the grammatical structure and voice-inflection of many races . . . Out of the welter of this unclassifiable speech, while professors of Harvard and Oxford labored to preserve “God’s English,” the muse of modern literature arose, and her tongue had been loosened in the melting pot.
—Mina Loy, “Modern Poetry,” Charm 3, April 1925
I’m not a big fan of her poetry, which is too unmusical for my ear, but I like the quote a lot. (If you’re curious about her poetry, you can read her 1923 book Lunar Baedecker [sic] here.)
Incidentally, her name was originally the Austro-Hungarian-Jewish Löwy, which I presume was pronounced LOW-ee in Victorian London; she changed it when she moved to Paris at the age of 20 in 1903. Other onomastic oddities: her first husband’s family name, Hawies, is pronounced HAW-iss and is apparently from a Norman female personal name, Haueis (from Germanic Haduwidis: hadu ‘strife, contention’ + widi ‘wide’—I take this information from the entry on Hawes in Patrick Hanks’s Dictionary of American Family Names); her second husband (and the great love of her life) Arthur Cravan, who disappeared off the coast of Mexico in 1918, was born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd (the Lloyd/Loy similarity was important to the poet), and (in the words of Wikipedia) “changed his name to Cravan in 1912 in honour of his fiancée Renée Bouchet, who was born in the small village of Cravans in the department of Charente-Maritime in western France. Why he chose the name Arthur remains unclear.” I have no idea if this invented name was pronounced KRAV-ən or krə-VAN (or some other way) by him and those who knew him; I’m also not sure how to pronounce the poet’s given name. I always said MY-nə, which seemed the obvious Victorian English pronunciation, but Carolyn Burke’s remark (in the introduction to her biography of Loy) that “in some moods she announced contrarily that it was pronounced ‘miner,’ British style” implies that it was normally pronounced MEE-nə. (Burke also says “Rexroth, who knew both women, told me that the actress [Myrna Loy], née Williams, named herself after the poet, but efforts to have this story confirmed went unrewarded.”)
“where latterly a thousand languages have been born, and each one, for purposes of communication at least, English — English enriched and variegated with the grammatical structure and voice-inflection of many races . . . ”
I’m afraid I don’t understand this, what is she trying to say?
Presumably that the influx of immigrants from all over created many (“a thousand,” in her hyperbole) variants—Yiddish-American, German-American, Polish-American, Russian-American, and so on—which coexisted in a rich linguistic stew that provided the conditions for a truly modern poetry, free from the shackles of traditional structure.
I always assumed that Myrna got her stage name because it sounded Oriental. She started out in the chorus line at Grauman’s and was type-cast for a time as an Eastern vamp beginning with Ben Hur. Is it really likely that a young starlet from Montana in Hollywood would be familiar with an avant-garde poet?
MMcM: Are you calling Kenneth Rexroth a liar?
“MMcM: Are you calling Kenneth Rexroth a liar?”
That’s a little harsh. Is Burke implying Rexroth is a liar by making ‘further efforts’ to confirm the story? Of course not. Memories can be unreliable, people may have been misinformed, etc. Even if evidence turns up that Myrna Loy was not named for the poet, that doesn’t make Rexroth a liar, simply mistaken.
I think Allan was saying that jokingly.
A friend who’s working on a biography of Myrna Loy (and has already published bios of Mae West and Rudolph Valentino) confirms that she chose the name, at the suggestion of “a poet friend” (not further identified), based on Mina Loy, and then found herself stuck in stereotyped Asian-Eurasian parts for a while.
I was whooshed! (The term used on another message board when a joke whisks over one’s head).
Sorry, Allan.
I admit that the poet friend does make the connection rather more plausible. And that detail is part of the standard story (e.g., NYT obit) which I certainly could have found with just a little checking.
Here is Myrna Loy’s account from her autobiography:
As Burke says in the margin note to which LH referred originally, “Myrna Loy’s account of her name change is nonetheless compatible with Rexroth’s.” And it does quite explicitly contradict my earlier rash assumption about her environment. It’s remarkable, but hardly conclusive, that an otherwise quite detailed story has no mention of Mina. But, for one thing, the actress was eighty when this was written.
A quick check at the library and online didn’t turn up anything on Peter Rurick, if that is indeed the right spelling, other than the odd, but unsupported, assertion, here, that it was from a Gertrude Stein poem. (Now, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein certainly knew one another. Mina Loy is mentioned in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and even wrote a poem about Gertrude Stein.) Peter Ruric was the pen name of the screenwriter for The Black Cat (where Karloff plays a Bauhaus Aleister Crowley), and a number of places do suggest that is who was responsible. But he wasn’t Russian, and would she have forgotten a Hollywood connection?
With luck, when rootlesscosmo’s friend’s new biography comes out, it will supply the missing details.
I’ve reopened the thread to add a link to Boris Dralyuk’s review article on The Complete Slayers, the complete works (one novel and 14 stories) of Paul Cain, a/k/a “Peter Rurick, a wild Russian writer of free verse,” who was neither Cain, Rurick, nor Russian but “an Iowan named George Carroll Sims, born in 1902” who went to Hollywood, wrote hard-boiled detective fiction and screenplays, and eventually drank himself to death. It’s quite a story, and I thank Boris for sending it to me!
Just fixed the link in my last comment, and I’m drawing attention to this fascinating thread for those who weren’t around when it was fresh.
Francesca Wade’s NYRB review (February 9, 2023 issue) of a new biography of Mina Loy begins:
reputation as a free-verse radical
Or, one might say, a maker of free-radical verse.