"So
she stands – nude- stretching dully
Two
amber combs loll through her hair
A
vague molested carpet pitches
Down
the dusty length of stair.
She
does not see, she does not care
It’s always
there.
The
frail mosaic on her window
Facing
starkly toward the street
I
scribbled there by tipsy sparrows -
Etched
there with their rocking feet.
Is
fashioned too, by every beat
Of shirt and sheet.
Still
her clothing is less risky
Than
her body in its prime.
They
are chain-stitched and so is she
China-stitched
to her soul for time.
Raveling
grandly into vice
Dropping
crooked into rhyme.
Slipping
through the stitch of virtue,
Into crime.
Though
her lips are vague and fancy
In
her youth –
They
bloom vivid and repulsive
As
the truth.
Even
vases in the making
Are uncouth".
-
Seen from the ‘L’ by Djuna Barnes, from The Book of Repulsive Women
Hard
boiled. How a term supposedly coined to describe the cynicism of men
fighting organized crime during the Prohibition Era translated so
easily into an unflattering sobriquet for 'the new woman' would make a
neat subject for a doctoral thesis. I can see the footnotes clustering
already. I hereby offer a few hints.
When the New York publisher A.C. Boni issued The Hard-Boiled Virgin by Frances Newman in 1930, the term was already understood to denote a woman who chose - dared even - to remain single. Newman's previous novel Dead Lovers Are True Lovers had been published in 1928. The New Georgia Encyclopedia (where you can read about Newman's life and works) describes her "writing within a feminist tradition of southern fiction that has been nearly forgotten." I'd say obliterated is more like it. I read both novels in the Arno Reprints series when I was in college and wondered at her determination, as a translator fighting encroaching blindness, as a woman who saw too clearly and too soon the price and who paid it for misogyny, racism, and their deformations of female sexuality. Newman died at age fifty, too soon.
Somewhere between the forgotten Frances Newman and the celebrated Djuna Barnes is Mina Loy (1882-1966).. Born in London, Loy's life was restlessness personified (where didn't she go?) and her poetry was agreed to be sui generis from the the moment her Lunar Baedecker (sic) was published in 1923. Sardonic about love and also beautiful, Loy managed to offend many avant-gharde male writers and artists but that seems not to have slowed her down one bit.
so
disappear
The
Book of Repulsive Women by Djuna Barnes was published in 1915, at a price fifteen
cents, too much of a bargain as it turned out, for the price soon more than
tripled as Barnes' sassy, hard-boiled vision of female sexuality became an
underground sensation.
When the New York publisher A.C. Boni issued The Hard-Boiled Virgin by Frances Newman in 1930, the term was already understood to denote a woman who chose - dared even - to remain single. Newman's previous novel Dead Lovers Are True Lovers had been published in 1928. The New Georgia Encyclopedia (where you can read about Newman's life and works) describes her "writing within a feminist tradition of southern fiction that has been nearly forgotten." I'd say obliterated is more like it. I read both novels in the Arno Reprints series when I was in college and wondered at her determination, as a translator fighting encroaching blindness, as a woman who saw too clearly and too soon the price and who paid it for misogyny, racism, and their deformations of female sexuality. Newman died at age fifty, too soon.
Somewhere between the forgotten Frances Newman and the celebrated Djuna Barnes is Mina Loy (1882-1966).. Born in London, Loy's life was restlessness personified (where didn't she go?) and her poetry was agreed to be sui generis from the the moment her Lunar Baedecker (sic) was published in 1923. Sardonic about love and also beautiful, Loy managed to offend many avant-gharde male writers and artists but that seems not to have slowed her down one bit.
“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’s only potence is
respiration
preceding
the eroded bronze contours
of
their other aromas
through
thr monstrous air
of
this red-lit thoroughfare.
Here
and there
saturnine
neon-signs
set
afire
a
feature
on
their hueless overcast
of
down-cast countenances.
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.
2
Such
are the compensations of poverty
to
see –
Like
an electric fungus
sprung
from its own effulgence
of
intercircled jewelry
reflected
on the pavement
like
a reliquary sedan-chair,
out
of a legend, dumped there,
before
a ten-cent Cinema
a
sugar-coated box office
enjail
a Goddess
aglitter,
in her runt of a tower,
with
ritual claustrophobia.
Such
are compensations of poverty
to
see –
Transient
in the dust,
the
brilliancy
of
a trolley
loaded
with luminous busts;
lovely
in anonymity
they
vanish
with
the mirage
of
their passage."
- On Third Avenue by Mina Loy from The Lost Lunar Baedeker by Mina Loy, New
York, Noonday Press: 1996.
Djuna Barnes
(1892-1982) was a literary modernist whose Collected Poems were
reprinted by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2005. The Book of
Repulsive Women remains, as always, a difficult to find gem.
Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology, edited by Robert
Haas & Paul Ebenkamp, Berkeley, Counterpoint Press: 2014.
1. Chana Orloff - Torso of a woman, 1918, Galerie Anne-Sophie Duval, Paris.
Chana Orloff's Torso of a Naked Woman was purchased from the artist by the American expatriate painter Romaine Brooks in Paris shortly after it was completed.
2. Chana Orloff -private collection, France.
