Mina Loy: Apology of Genius by Mary Ann Caws (review)

Reviewed by: Mina Loy: Apology of Genius by Mary Ann Caws Tim Hancock Mina Loy: Apology of Genius. By Mary Ann Caws. London: Reaktion Books. 2022. 223 pp. £20. ISBN 978–1–78914–554–0. There is a need for a popular introduction to Mina Loy. Recent publications have been aimed squarely at specialists (e.g. Tara Prescott, Poetic Salvage: Reading Mina Loy (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017); Sarah Hayden, Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018); Laura Scuriatti, Mina Loy's Critical Modernism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019)), yet, for all her modernist opacity, Loy championed 'pure, uneducated seeing', portraying education as 'the putting of spectacles on wholesome eyes' ('The Public and the Artist', quoted p. 78). Mary Ann Caws's attempt to acquaint the public with Mina Loy is a worthwhile endeavour, then, and the many photographs reproduced in this book go some way towards removing the academic spectacles and evoking the spirit of the avant-garde circles in which Loy moved. The commentary on her life and work is, however, less compelling. As far as the life is concerned, Caws happily admits that her own narrative leans 'heavily' (p. 211) on Carolyn Burke's Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1996): it is a functional outline but there is no new information here. The work elicits some forthright responses, both laudatory (every sentence of 'Stomach'—an 'incredibly strong tale'—is 'weighted with intense spectacularity', p. 68; 'Hot Cross Bum' is a 'miraculously entitled . . . great epic poem', p. 155) and censorious ('Mi and Lo', 'overlong in all its parts', goes 'on and very much on. Pages and pages', p. 72; Insel is 'an effort not worth the time of reading' that would have been 'better left in an unpublished state', pp. 122, 125). But the combination of lengthy quotation, discursive 'interval' chapters on Futurism (pp. 37–62) and Arthur Cravan (pp. 91–113), and a reluctance to add End Page 264 'needless and extraneous comment' to the writing (p. 181) generates an unfortunate sense that the author—for all her conviction—does not really have very much to say about her subject. Poems that would really benefit from some thoughtful exposition are essentially left to speak for themselves: 'Moreover, the Moon—', for example, quoted in its entirety, 'takes no comment, for it says it all' (p. 198). No doubt Loy has left many of her readers feeling lost for words like this at times, but few have expressed their disorientation so candidly: 'With Mina Loy I am never sure where she is or isn't going, and don't really feel either invited or excluded' (p. 12). Caws finds her bearings when relating avant-garde antics, such as the partying of the New York Arensberg circle: there is an engaging description of the 'Blindman's Ball', held to celebrate the launch of The Blind Man: A Magazine of Verse Art in May 1917 (pp. 84–89; the photograph of Loy dressed for this event seems misplaced on p. 141). The appreciation of this writer's memory- and dementia-haunted late poems is also a salutary reminder that her gift endured beyond the modernist heyday (pp. 183–87). But such passages fail to make up for the broader limitations of the analysis, which can feel impressionistic and extemporized: 'Here is something I find true of most of Mina's prose writings: they often feel long, and in general begin with descriptions that set the tone for the whole length of the writing' (on 'Gloria Gamma', p. 65). The book could also have done with another round of copy-editing. There is some careless mistitling: 'An Aged Woman' (pp. 183–84) becomes 'A Woman' when it is requoted (p. 195); the 'Songs to Joannes' (summed up as 'rather far-out and remarkably concrete-sensuous', p. 76) appears in the index as both 'Songs for Joannes' and 'Love Songs' (p. 216). This index sometimes leads the reader astray: the discussion of 'Pazarella' (Loy's parody of Papini), which takes place on pp. 66–67, is here located to p. 56...