![]() ![]() Mina Loy describes herself during these years as a reclusive hermit crab. ![]() The Haweises were friends with the Anglo-American community in Florence, including Muriel and Paul Draper, Leo Stein, and Mabel Dodge (Luhan), who took up residence at the Villa Curonia in 1910. Joella's affliction by polio in 1909 led Loy to a lifelong commitment to a personal version of Christian Science. She also suffered from neurasthenia, which probably originated in her unpreparedness for motherhood, financial worries, and marital unhappiness that ended in Haweis's departure for the South Seas in 1913 and divorce in 1917. Loy continued to paint and exhibit her work in England and Italy, but she was frequently ill. Two more children were born-Joella (1907-) and Giles (1909-1923). The Florence years (1906-1916) brought personal problems as well as Loy's emergence as a modern poet. When Loy was twenty-three, they moved to Florence, Italy. Loy and Haweis exhibited in the Autumn Salon for 1906 (a critic for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts said her painting combined the styles of Constantin Guys, Felicien Rops, and Aubrey Beardsley while his resembled James McNeill Whistler's). The death of the Haweises' first child, Oda Janet (1904-1905), began the series of tragedies that stalked Loy for the next twenty years. Loy and Haweis met many of the emerging modernist artists and writers of Paris, including Gertrude and Leo Stein in whose salon they were introduced to Guillaume Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso. She moved to Paris in 1903 to continue her study of art, changed her name to Loy, and married Haweis on 31 December 1903. ![]() In 1901-1902 she returned to London, where she studied with Augustus John and exhibited in student shows she also met her first husband, art student Hugh Oscar William Haweis, who called himself Stephen Haweis ("Esau" in Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose). Loy's family did not believe in formal education for women, but Lowy, an indulgent father, sent Mina at seventeen to study art in Munich. She treats "Exodus," the father in the poem, more sympathetically an immigrant buffered by British proprieties and prejudices, Exodus seems a composite of Loy's father, a tailor, and her paternal grandfather, a Hungarian Jew. The long autobiographical poem Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (published in installments in 1923-1925) focuses her resentment on her mother, "Alice" in the poem, whom she depicts as both victim and executrix of English mores. Oldest of the three daughters of Sigmund and Julia Bryan Lowy, Mina Gertrude Lowy early rebelled against the conventional expectations for women held by her prosperous middle-class family. ![]() Then in the 1940s and 1950s began the rediscovery of Mina Loy by the radical current of modernism (running from Stein, Pound, and Williams to Kenneth Rexroth and the Black Mountain poets), and in the succeeding decades feminist poets and critics recognized in Loy a very contemporary ancestor.Īlthough numbered among the Americans, Mina Loy was born in London, England, and educated in the art capitals of Europe. In their memoirs Loy's contemporaries made a legend of her beauty and personal tragedy literary historians occasionally remembered her as an exotic fringe figure of the American and Dada avant-gardes. Most such recognition came to Mina Loy in the decade 1914-1925 thereafter she gave less attention to poetry and withdrew from the literary scene except for infrequent little magazine publications. Ezra Pound, writing to Moore in 1921, placed Mina Loy among the most promising insurgents: "Entre nooz: is there anyone in America except you, Bill and Mina Loy who can write anything of interest in verse?" Alfred Kreymborg remembered in his autobiography, Troubadour (1925), that for the first issue of Others (July 1915), a raffish "yellow dog" journal more tolerant of innovation than Poetry, he and coeditor Walter Arensberg agreed that poems by Loy and Wallace Stevens were a must. She has always been able to understand." William Carlos Williams in his prologue to Kora in Hell (1920) divided the psychic landscape of New York's avant-garde into the Dionysian South of Mina Loy and the fastidious North of Marianne Moore. was able to understand without the commas. Toklas (1933) remembered that in 1913 Mina Loy did not ask for the addition of commas when she read the manuscript for Stein's The Making of Americans (1925): "Mina Loy. Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Loy was too radical for Poetry's editor Harriet Monroe, who published her poetry only in a review article, but the generation's more innovative members admired her defiant honesty of subject and applauded the new directions she advanced for poetry. Mina Loy, poet and painter, was a charter member of the generation that-beginning in 1912 with the founding of Poetry magazine-launched the modernist revolution in poetry in the United States. ![]()
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