Staging Modernist Lives: H.D., Mina Loy, Nancy Cunard, Three Plays and Criticism 9780773548954

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S TA G I N G MODERNIST LIVES

S TA G I N G MODERNIST LIVES H.D., Mina Loy, Nancy Cunard, Three Plays and Criticism

SASHA COLBY

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017 isbn isbn isbn isbn

978-0-7735-4893-0 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4894-7 (paper) 978-0-7735-4895-4 (epdf) 978-0-7735-4896-1 (epub)

Legal deposit first quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This publication has been made possible by a grant from the Simon Fraser University Publications Fund. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Colby, Sasha, 1978–, author Staging modernist lives : H.D., Mina Loy, Nancy Cunard, three plays and criticism / Sasha Colby. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-4893-0 (cloth). isbn 978-0-7735-4894-7 (paper). isbn 978-0-7735-4895-4 (epdf). isbn 978-0-7735-4896-1 (epub) 1. H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 1886–1961 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Loy, Mina – Criticism and interpretation. 3. Cunard, Nancy, 1896–1965 – Criticism and interpretation. 4. English drama – 20th century – History and criticism. 5. American drama – 20th century – History and criticism. 6. Modernism (Literature) – English-speaking countries. I. Title. pr736.c64 2017

822'.91409

c2016-906004-7 c2016-906005-5

Contents

Acknowledgments Staging Modernist Lives: Theory and Practice

vii 3

H.D.’s Autobiographical Theatre

29

The Tree

45

Performance, Performativity, and the Search for Mina Loy

106

The Mina Loy Interviews

118

Nancy Cunard and the Heterotopic Stage

195

These Were the Hours

209

Conclusion

296

Bibliography

303

Index

317

Acknowledgments

The first of these plays, a version of the drama about H.D., debuted ten years ago at the Vancouver Fringe Festival. Since then, I have incurred many debts that have led to the completed book manuscript. Financially, this project has been supported by a multi-year Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and a series of grants from Simon Fraser University: a University Publications Fund Grant, a World Literature Research Grant, and a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Chairs’ and Directors’ Grant. Intellectually, the work has been supported by a number of people. In terms of project development, I owe a great deal to the participants of the faculty writing workshop at the 2011 session of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard, particularly seminar leader Martin Puchner, who asked the crucial question that opened up the theory behind this work. I would like to thank Akitoshi Nagahata at Nagoya University for inviting me to Japan and for organizing the performances in Nagoya and Shizuoka (2010) as well as for his early support of a dramatized method. Suzette Henke has also been a champion of this project and created space for the work at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900 (2010). Sophia Forster (Cal Poly, 2014), Alfred Bendixen (American Literature Association Poetry Symposium, 2007), Luke Carson, Sheila Rabillard, Allana Lindgren, Stephen Ross, and their team of student stage technicians (Modernist Studies Association Conference in Victoria, 2010) all facilitated performances that provided opportunities for experimentation, discussion, and exchange. I also benefited from warm receptions

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and critical questioning at the Center for Biographical Research at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (2011), the Ezra Pound conferences in Rome and Venice (2007 and 2009), the Durrell School of Corfu (2007), the University of Toronto’s Festival of Original Theatre (2012), and the sfu President’s Faculty Lecture (2015). Peter Nicholls’s influence is present in any modernist work that I pursue. Shawk Alani and Lauren Fournier were very fine research assistants and I thank them both for their work on the text, as I do Laura Anderson for her handling of the digital performance materials used in creating and refining the scripts. Librarians and staff at the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Harry Ransom Research Center and the University of Texas at Austin (with special thanks to Pat Fox), and the British Library in London were unfailingly knowledgeable and helpful. At Simon Fraser University, the encouragement and incisive advice of Bev Neufeld has been essential to the project’s successes. Friends and colleagues, many of whom are also working on research-creation projects or support this kind of work, helped move the manuscript forward with their kindness and contributions. They include Paul Budra, Lara Campbell, Richard Cavell, David Chariandy, Peter Dickinson, Stephen Duguid, Holly Hendrigan, Asli Igsiz, Helen Leung, Sophie McCall, Sean Markey, Roxanne Panchasi, Diana Solomon, and Jerry Zaslove. Peter Dickinson and David Chariandy also read sections of the manuscript and provided sensitive and thoughtful comments. The Graduate Liberal Studies program at sfu Vancouver gave this project a place to be – as it did me – at a time when the English Department also extended its generosity and support. Gina Stockdale, Julian Giordano, Audrey Himmer Jude, Heather Blakemore, Eddy van Wyk, Carmine Santavenere, Kayte Summers (Catherine Caines), Ian Graham, James Eadie, Sally Clark, Mary Ann Caws, Margaret Hollingsworth, Rob Kitsos, the sfu School for Contemporary Arts, and the Port Theatre variously provided starting points, encouragement, collaborative insight, and practical help. Theatre projects on Gabriola Island – and the ways in which the community kept faith with those projects over many years – were sustaining forces. Graduate and undergraduate students in my playwriting and performance courses at sfu encouraged me with their talent and enthusiasm. The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Dean’s Office and the sfu President’s Office have both been

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supportive of experimental approaches in research and teaching, which speaks of a notable institutional open-mindedness. At McGill-Queen’s University Press, Jonathan Crago shepherded the manuscript to publication and also worked with me to figure out what a research-creation book of this type might look like. The two anonymous peer-reviewers contributed substantially to the book as it appears here and I thank them for their feedback and diligence. Kathleen Fraser provided fine editorial advice and the mqup publication team, as a whole, was helpful, intelligent, and thoughtful in its approach. I would also like to thank Carolyn Burke, Anne Chisholm, Lois Gordon, Barbara Guest, Susan Stanford-Friedman, and Caroline Zilboorg (among many others) for the foundational work they have done in creating biographical pathways for understanding Loy, Cunard, and H.D. For enduring endless rehearsals and script-readings, often in the kitchen or dining room, I am grateful to my family – Brian Colby, Lucy Colby, John Mallory, and Irina Nikifortchuk. They believed in me and the work I was doing even when it meant divided time and attention. Thanks, too, to Tatianna, who thought character work was a great game and so obligingly fell asleep to the clatter of the keyboard – and to those who entertained and cared for her when she did not. Finally, in the case of the plays, where a great deal of copyrighted material has been employed to show the range and breadth of work by H.D., Loy, and Cunard, the consent of the copyright holders to reprint has been key. I would therefore like to thank the publishers and estates that have provided permission: Robert Bell for materials from the Nancy Cunard Collection at the University of Texas at Austin; Carcanet Press for Collected Poems of H.D. 1912–1944; Roger Conover for published and unpublished writing by Mina Loy; Hugh Ford for Nancy Cunard’s These Were the Hours: Memories of My Hours Press, Réanville and Paris, 1928–1931; John Lucas for Poems of Nancy Cunard from the Bodleian Library; Manchester University Press for Caroline Zilboorg’s Richard Aldington & H.D.: Their Lives in Letters; Columbia University Press for Lois Gordon’s translation of Louis Aragon’s “Poème à crier dans les ruines”; the estate of Pablo Neruda (with thanks to Peggy Gough at the University of Texas Press) for Neruda’s “Sonnet XVII.” New Directions also generously provided permission to reprint the following material:

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• “Oread,” “Sheltered Garden,” “Hermes of the Ways,” “Amaranth,”

“Fragment Forty,” “Fragment Forty-One,” and “Orchard,” by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), from Collected Poems, 1912–1944, copyright ©1982 by the estate of Hilda Doolittle. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. • “Selections from Paint it Today,” by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), from Paint It Today, copyright ©1992 by Perdita Schaffner. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. • “Canto XXVI,” by Ezra Pound, from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, copyright ©1934 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. • “Canto LXXXIII,” by Ezra Pound, from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, copyright ©1948 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. • “Sestina: Altaforte,” by Ezra Pound, from Personae, copyright ©1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. • “Histrion,” by Ezra Pound, from Collected Early Poems, copyright ©1976 by the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. • “Letter to Harriet Monroe,” by Ezra Pound, from Selected Letters 1907–1941 of Ezra Pound, copyright ©1950 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. • “Letter to Nancy Cunard,” by Ezra Pound, copyright ©2016 by Mary de Rachewiltz and the estate of Omar S. Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. David R. Godine also granted permission to reprint: • “From Tribute to Freud by Hilda Doolittle.” Reprinted by permission of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Copyright ©1956 by Hilda Doolittle. I would also like to thank the many publishers who felt material quoted in this book fell under “fair use.” Finally, thanks to Peggy Fox, formerly of New Directions, who was the first to suggest there might be a willingness on the part of publishers to see these plays in print.

S TA G I N G MODERNIST LIVES

Staging Modernist Lives: Theory and Practice

At the inaugural session of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University, convened to discuss ideas and new directions in theatre and performance, lecturer Joseph Roach called for more integration of the fine arts and humanities, suggesting that activating creativity within humanities departments could forge new research paradigms.1 The talk, entitled “A New Poetics: Performance Studies and the Research University,” centred on a revision of Aristotle. “Kinesis,” Roach stated, looking piercingly into the audience, “is the new mimesis.” This model, which places emphasis on dynamism, interaction, and mobility in acts of research and creation, was charged by the nature of the delivery. To a certain extent – and almost always in teaching, public lecturing, or conference paper delivery – the critical act is already performance, so the blending of critical and performative strategies is not as foreign as it may seem. Beyond the use of voice and body in delivering academic ideas, Roach urged the audience to consider using performance to create new research methods: “The poetics I have in mind,” Roach stated, “is predicated on the re-integration of the arts into the humanities (for they have become separated unnecessarily, I think) with the methodological help from the sciences.”2 The how of this statement dominated the question period after the talk, as it has more generally dominated the debate around integrating the fine arts and the humanities. For Roach, the “methodology” of the sciences is the sociability of the sciences. As a veteran performance studies scholar, he advocates collaborative research and archiving as well as collective authorship, as in his own World Performance Project at Yale, where international artists and academics were brought together to

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“[hone] models that link performance to research and publication, with the goal to draw artistic practice into dialogue with scholarly lenses and practices” (World Performance Project website). This model, in which artists and academics work together to achieve both artistic and critical outcomes, integrates arts and humanities approaches and lets scholars and artists bring their specialties and training to bear on a particular research theme.3 In thinking widely about a kinetic model for the arts and humanities, however, this coming together might well take on myriad forms, collective as well as individual, in the work of artists and academics, and the ways and means of this convergence have been the subject of debate around terms that have become prevalent in university contexts: performance as research, artistic inquiry, embodied research, and research-creation. As these terms suggest, Roach is not alone in calling for research innovations that draw on both scholarly and artistic practices. For many in the humanities, it has become clear that multiple approaches are key to strengthening and broadening research methodologies. More pragmatically, there is an associated sense that to survive the challenges of the millennial university the humanities will also need to employ a range of outreach strategies, including those drawn from the fine arts, in order to communicate with broader audiences. Arts-based inquiry and dissemination, which Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter have termed a “revolution in how we look at knowledge today,” have experienced a “boom in such research approaches in the arts and humanities over the last two decades – predominantly in the United Kingdom and some parts of Europe but increasingly elsewhere” (xv). Illustrating the uk’s progress in the field of performance integration, driven in part by a greater emphasis on practice-based learning, the Arts and Humanities Research Board funded a five-year study at the University of Bristol (2001–06) that analyzed “creative-academic issues raised by practice as research” in order to develop national frameworks for “representing practical-creative research within academic contexts.” Baz Kershaw, the director of Practice as Research in Performance (parip), has defined performance-practice-as-research as “the uses of practical creativity as reflexive enquiry into significant research concerns” (4), and it is clear that this practice is becoming increasingly widespread. Riley and Hunter note that practice-based

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research models, already established in the United Kingdom and Australia, are achieving preliminary recognition in the United States and gaining ground in countries like Finland and Canada. As in the uk, institutional recognition is often tied to public funding organizations, many of which now encourage interdisciplinary arts and humanities initiatives. In its 2010 report to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, for example, the Working Group on the Future of the Humanities specifically recommends that scholars seek to “bridge the gap between the creative and interpretive disciplines” (23) by linking the humanities to the “creative arts” to “explore new modes of research and of disseminating research findings, including targeting larger and more diverse public audiences” (24). According to Rachel Nash and W.F. Garrett Petts, “Coming to terms with and understanding artistic research – its limitations and potential – has become a crucial challenge to the academic community at large, not just those directly involved with it” (8). At the same time, acknowledging practice-based outcomes requires a radical reconfiguration of what counts as research within university settings. Like Roach, Hunter and Riley perceive a very real gap between valuations of abstract and embodied knowledge, intellectual versus manual forms of labour, mind over body. For Hunter and Riley, to move toward an arts-based practice, the humanities will have to overcome prejudices that have divided artistic activity and analytical pursuit: “Although the sciences have long understood the value of practice-based research, the modern arts and humanities have tended to structure a gap between practice and analysis” (xv). According to these scholars, the most important groundwork for legitimizing the development of performance in the humanities is institutional recognition of the claim “that creative production can constitute intellectual inquiry.” Although science tends to be the privileged metaphor in thinking about performance methodologies for the humanities, the social sciences provide more concrete examples of both the philosophy and practice of integrating performance-based approaches with other disciplinary models.4 One of the more compelling articulations of the advantages of pursuing performance-based research comes from Dwight Conquergood, an ethnographer who became a central voice in the emerging field of performance studies. An appealing aspect of Conquergood’s vision is

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the emphasis on the symbiotic nature of textual scholarship and performance: “The performance studies project,” Conquergood writes, “makes its most radical intervention, I believe, by embracing both written scholarship and creative work, papers and performances” (152). In bringing “this rare hybridity” into universities, “performance pieces stand alongside and in metonymic tension with published research.” For Conquergood, performances in creative balance with text-based analytical research serve several functions in advancing scholarship: “[T]hey deepen experiential and participatory engagement with materials both for the researcher and her audience; they provide a dynamic and rhetorically compelling alternative to conference papers; they offer a more accessible and engaging format for sharing research and reaching communities outside academia; they are a strategy for staging interventions” (152). In Conquergood’s estimation the joint pursuit of scholarly and artistic practices naturally leads to crossovers in both research outcomes and audience. This “epistemological connection between creativity, critique, and civic engagement,” Conquergood concludes, “is mutually replenishing and pedagogically powerful” (153). While Conquergood’s argument is persuasive, a number of pragmatic questions remain. How can strategies from the arts and humanities be integrated successfully? How can these outcomes be measured by departments accustomed to the traditional article or scholarly monograph? At the same time, practical examples of performance crossovers in the social sciences have created intriguing leads for artists and humanities scholars interested in pursuing these intersections. An early example of this type of interdisciplinary thought in theatre and the social sciences is Richard Schechner’s volume Between Theater and Anthropology (1985). Here Schechner begins by laying out six major “points of contact” between anthropology and performance, particularly as they relate to the performance dynamics of ritual (3). Bringing a director’s perspective to bear on anthropological study, Schechner comments on performance aspects of ritual such as transformations of being and consciousness, performance intensity, audience/performer interactions, the performance sequence, transmissions of knowledge, and the generation and evaluation of ritualized dance and theatre (3–26). As Victor Turner notes in the foreword, this approach can “bring the discipline [of anthropology] back into touch with the bodily as well as mental life” of various cul-

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tures (xii). In an interesting parallel with Roach’s view on performance moving the university from mimesis to kinesis, Turner suggests that disciplinary anthropological concern with “stasis” can be complemented by performance’s interest in “dynamis,” a movement from “texts, institutions, types, protocols, ‘wiring,’ custom, and so on” to the “how of performance, the shifting, evanescent, yet sometimes utterly memorable relationships that develop unpredictably among actors, audience, text, and the other situational variables” (xii). In promoting a performancebased method for anthropology, Schechner and Turner helped open up a valuable vein of study, subsequently developed by both theatre artists and anthropologists, which has led to an established field of performance-based anthropological study.5 More recently in performance and the social sciences, theatre practitioner Mike Pearson and archaeologist Michael Shanks co-authored Theatre/Archaeology (2001), which unites ideas from each discipline with contemporary critical theory to suggest a “blurred genre” between theatre and archaeology, “a mixture of narration and scientific practices, an integrated approach to recording, writing, and illustrating the material past” (131). For the authors, this blending “suggests mutual experiments with modes of documentation which can integrate text and image, new approaches to museum practice and the creation of joint forms of presentation to address that which is, at root, ineffable.” Like Schechner, Pearson and Shanks perceive strong correspondences between disciplines to be the common ground from which to develop joint practices. For theatre and archaeology, these include common concerns with cultural identities, social fabric and practices, ecology and site, cultural production, fragments and assemblage, narrative, deep maps and storytelling, rhetoric and performed lecture, and re-enactment of the past (53–67).6 Charting this terrain allows, as a starting point, for the possibility of thinking about the theatrical aspects of archaeology as well as an archaeological theatre that can animate traces of the distant past through performance. “Within the composite approaches of theatre /archaeology,” write Pearson and Shanks, “we might regard performance as an experimental archaeology of the interpretive. And as information technology brings further challenges to the discrete nature of individual disciplines, archaeology and performance might be drawn into joint endeavours for which, as yet, we barely have names” (132).

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The “open-site” nature of Shanks and Pearson’s theatre/archaeology invites interesting questions about the ways in which literary studies might turn to performance in order to create new modalities for meaning and analysis. In suggesting that the theatre could be a powerful tool for literary studies, I am aware that many crossovers are already in motion. Though literature and theory are currently being staged in a number of ways – adaptations, avant-garde interpretations, biographical dramas, literary enactments, and intertextual retellings, to name but a few – it is fair to say that most literary/theatrical hybrids are developed by the theatre world rather than by scholars. Drama has yet to become a serious method of approach in literary scholarship. Theatre is still largely seen as an object of study rather than an investigative modality in literature departments, and initiatives like Roach’s World Performance Project that bring together artists and scholars (including those from literary fields) are the exception, particularly in North America. Yet like archaeology and anthropology and in many ways a great deal more so, theatre shares with literary studies many “points of contact” that could potentially be explored to bring about new research methods and outcomes. The object of literary studies, literature, has a history undeniably interwoven with theatre’s – often to the point of indivisibility – beginning with the performance of tribal stories and the rise of the oral tradition. As one of the three major literary genres, drama is specifically written for the stage; even today in the turn toward heavily textual and intertextual methods, poetry cannot escape its history as a bardic art or its current reliance on sound-based technique; and fiction is heavily indebted to dialogue and various other modes of “dramatization.” In thinking about structures, functions, and themes, the proximity between literature and drama becomes even more pronounced: the representation of individual lives; the preoccupation with cultural representation; the mechanisms of narrative and suspense; the uses of language; the dependency on empathy and emotion; the relationship to audience; thematic obsessions with love, memory, alienation, and psychology; the weight each carries in grappling with the nature of the human condition through detailed, particular stories. In terms of theory, the rise of performance studies, and notably ideas of identity performance and the performative rituals of everyday life, has shaped the ways we analyze the literature we read. Given these com-

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monalities, it is on some counts surprising that literary studies in the twentieth century has been so exclusively textual rather than using the stage as a powerful method for intervention and analysis, a new kind of literary “research theatre.” Some of the most pervasive reasons that literary studies, and modernist literary studies in particular, may be late in turning to the theatre as a research forum are embedded in disciplinary history as well as within the history of modernism itself.7 Julia A. Walker, for example, has suggested that while anti-performative bias has been seen since Plato and seems to recur in moments of significant theatrical activity, “1914 is the year when the anti-theatrical prejudice resurfaced in a historically specific form, one that situated literary texts in opposition to performance” (150). In arguing that 1914 was the year of a set demarcation between text and performance, Walker points to two important historical markers: 1914 was at once the year that Max Hermann, the German theatre historian, declared that dramatic literature and theatre should be studied independently and also the year that “Oral English” professionals stated their professional independence from literature departments, “paving the way” for segregated departments.8 The fact, Walker writes, that this all took place “in the very moment when [Anglo-American] literary modernism was being born is no mere coincidence. Simply put, the text/performance split produced the category of the ‘literary’ in a way that enabled the production of literary modernism” (150). This fissure, also felt in the politics and impersonality of high modernism and followed by the closed-text strategies of New Criticism and the culture-as-text basis of later theoretical movements, sealed the exclusion of oral interpretation from the discipline of literary studies. High modernism’s anti-theatrical prejudice is something that we will explore in the preface to the play about H.D. But it is useful to be cognizant that modernism’s anti-theatricality may also have carried over into how modernist studies itself has been undertaken. While it is true that in the last two decades scholarship has, on many counts, rehabilitated modernist theatre, and while the textual dimensions of performance studies have been absorbed into the literary tool kit, the idea of pursuing modernist inquiry through theatre, of interweaving text with performance, remains relatively unpursued. At the same time, Walker’s

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historical emphasis on memorization and oral recitation as key components of literary studies throughout the nineteenth century reminds us that to a significant extent the separating out of textual and oral interpretation is “founded upon an arbitrary distinction between words and the bodies that give them voice” (155). Walker’s ideas on modernism’s rejection of the performing body are interesting and useful in considering dramatized literary inquiry in the context of modernist studies. Through the course of her argument, however, it becomes clear that these points are, in fact, background for a thesis on why performance – both as act and as metaphor – has returned with such pervasive force (what Roach and others have called “the performative turn”) in the theory of the last fifty years. For Walker, “performance” is about a reclamation of human agency, a countering of the body’s absorption into discourse that has “erased the material conditions of our existence” (171). With similar intent, critics within literary studies, including Jerome McGann, have pressed for the re-evaluation of texts as “human acts occupying social space” (991). This imperative has also been central to the re-emergence of auto/biographical studies, with theorists like Stanley Fish arguing that not only is the “divorce” between “the question of meaning” and “questions of biography and intention” “inadvisable,” it is also “impossible” (10). Framed in these terms, the fact that performance and theories of the material particulars of the text, including its auto/ biographical dimensions, have enjoyed a concomitant rise in the last few decades may well be seen as part of a similar impulse to recuperate the human dimensions of literary production, a rebirth of the author, as it were, via theories that privilege the individual mind and body. In identifying a common impulse within performance and auto/biography, I am thinking particularly of volumes in which the intersection creates a matrix for inquiry including, among recent publications, Jenn Stephenson’s Performing Autobiography (2013), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/ Image/ Performance (2002), Maggie Gale and Viv Gardner’s Auto/Biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance (2004), and Deirdre Heddon’s Autobiography and Performance (2008). Similarly, texts on theatre and modernism have illuminated the modernist stage in ways that have also presented a material artistic history, notably, Günter

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Berghaus’s Theatre, Performance, and the Historical Avant-Garde, Olga Taxidou’s Modernism and Performance (2007), and Penny Farfan’s Women, Modernism, and Performance (2004). In a more limited capacity, we have also seen the emergence of texts that approach questions of performance and auto/biography through critical/ creative paradigms, notably Lynn C. Miller, Jacqueline Taylor, and M. Heather Carver’s Voices Made Flesh: Performing Women’s Autobiography (2003) and Jerry Wasserman and Sherrill Grace’s Theatre and AutoBiography (2006). Taken as a whole, this type of work creates a multi-faceted platform from which to think about the ways performance could be deployed to seek out modernism’s overlooked or underexplored dimensions. To stage a life and thereby encounter a representative/ representation of the author through an incarnated interpretation of his/her auto/biographical writing is, on many counts, an intuitive extension of the restoration of materiality. After all, theatre is a “human [act] occupying social space” par excellence and is consequently uniquely positioned to recreate and explore the human and social conditions of literary production. As a significant amount of work on materiality, auto/biography, and performance has already been accomplished through criticism, however, it seems worth asking: What, specifically, can drama do for literary studies that criticism cannot? What is theatre good at? What complement can material staging provide to textual analysis? In asking these questions directly, the answers seem fairly clear. Theatre is good at showing people, events, and situations. It has emotive power. It allows for the possibility of simultaneous collective experience. Drama provides a physical, visceral complement to the textual. It is an intimate modality, cultivating knowledge through a detailed investigation of the personal. While there may be a keen probing of contexts including race, class, and gender – the mainstays of contemporary criticism – it is achieved at the level of the concrete and the particular. As a result, the ways of knowing that this type of inquiry provides are as much emotional and empathetic as intellectual. As a companion method to criticism, research-based performance offers us a particular window or vantage point on the human experience that draws us to literature to begin with, a literary genre that can also act as literary methodology, an art that can provide the contextual and illuminating

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capacities we sometimes lack in more analytical modes of inquiry. The places where dramatization might be less critically rigorous can to a certain extent be mitigated by the nature of the staging, but they are also the areas that criticism excels at broadening or correcting: reduction, omission, scenes of origin. Similarly, the arenas in which criticism is relatively weak – narrative illustration and emotional connection – are the mainstays of theatre. Performing literary materials also invites collaborations with theatre – in theatre departments or, as in the case of this book, with actors working in worlds outside the university – which can bring very different perspectives to the table (or the rehearsal space, as the case may be). This can shift our understanding not only of texts but also of the mechanisms through which theoretical questions are pursued. Often when this is said, it is in the context of reading texts differently or re-orienting the theory. While these may result from theatre-based literary inquiry, what is really being suggested is a different kind of (re)search: one that takes place through academic theory and artistic concept, in the richness of textual close reading and in the interpretations drawn out through vocalization, through historicized pursuit and an embodied portrait in the re-constructed environment. In pursuing representations that are at once academically productive and dramatically interesting, this involves discussions not only between literary scholars but among academics, directors, designers, and performers. The result is not just about juggling our ideas of who undertakes literary research or where but an epistemological receptiveness to knowledge generated when a play is researched, created, learned, attempted, discussed, re-invented, refined, and performed. To ignore this process – or to fail to consider it as legitimate literary inquiry – is to exclude a realm of understanding that enriches literary and artistic debate. Not inconsequentially, bringing creative practice into dialogue with criticism also brings us closer to ways of knowing pursued by the modernists themselves, be it Ezra Pound’s critical commentaries, expressed through poetry and plays as well as expository essays, Marinetti’s manifesto-fuelled futurist art shows, or Diaghilev’s ballets, which sought the collision of avant-garde aesthetics, musical composition, and performance. Within this idea of research-theatre, there are distinctions to be made. Broadly speaking, there are two major types of research activi-

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ties that might be created by uniting strategies from literary studies and theatre. The first is what we might term performance-based research, akin to Kershaw’s understanding of “practical creativity as reflexive enquiry,” which can be defined as the pursuit of knowledge through theatrical methods such as improvisation and enactment. For example, we might imagine using performance tactics to deconstruct, re-orient, or re-configure primary and secondary texts in ways that generate new insights or directions, broaden understanding, or create new fields of inquiry.9 Another possibility is research-based performance – the dramatization of literary knowledge that we have already acquired through more traditional forms of inquiry.10 While both are valuable to a literature/theatre paradigm, it is helpful to be clear on which route is being pursued in a given moment as the goals and outcomes of each can be quite different: in the case of performance-based research, an experimental, exploratory theatric designed to develop new knowledge types, primarily for specialists in the field; in research-based performance, the animation of our existing knowledge, potentially designed to refine or re-frame scholarly understanding while also disseminating a version of what we already claim to know to broader audiences. This is not to say that performance-based research discoveries are not made during the course of creating a research-based performance or that established literary knowledge would not be employed in exploratory performance-based research. Rather, there is a difference in intent that should be recognized from the outset. Despite these differences, what both research-based performance and performance-based research offer literary studies is an inhabited, interdisciplinary modality, one that relies on representational ways of knowing. As Michel de Certeau argues in The Writing of History, embodied knowledges have often been marginalized in favour of a singular historical discourse. For de Certeau, renovation of contemporary knowledge depends on the reintegration of other branches of episteme, eventually leading, as Valentina Napolitano and David Pratten have phrased it, to a “plurality of histories, phenomenologies, and embodied narratives […] over […] singular interpretations” (4). Like theatre, which tends to use the story of the individual to ruminate on a larger set of preoccupations, literary auto/biography, where authorial production is understood as inextricably connected to a life, foregrounds

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the ways in which the work is produced by a particular mind and body immersed in a specific set of personal, cultural, and historical circumstances. In striving for an empathetic, bodily based complement to analytic criticism, I have, within this book, focused my attention on auto/biographical performance. The usefulness of theory to performance – what Conquergood calls the “metonymic tension” between the two – has been evident, in this endeavour, from the start. Pierre Bourdieu, for example, warns against the false impressions of coherence and intentionality that biography can impart in its use of terms like “already,” “from the start,” and “from a young age,” which create an inevitable sense of teleology (60). Later critics like Mary Evans caution of auto/biographical impossibilities, as instead of non-fiction these forms offer “a mythical construct of our society and our social needs” (1). Internalizing these criticisms before beginning a script and applying this critical mindset to playwriting practice conditions a particular type of production. Confronted with the biographical critique, it is also worth reminding ourselves of the form’s advantages, particularly for a field struggling to connect with audiences beyond the academy. Situated within the human structures of the literary life, biographical studies offer a portal into literary and artistic worlds, an entrée that can provide fascinations that draw general readers into other modes of engagement and potentially provide contextual perspectives for specialists. Working from this common ground – exploring and deepening it, interlacing the conventional structures of biographical drama with more rigorous historical and theoretical knowledge, auto/biographical awareness, and modernist practices and aesthetics – may be a key way in which scholars can have conversations about literature and its creation with those beyond the academy. Certainly the popularity of biography generally, and biographical drama in particular, is difficult to ignore. Bio-drama is a Hollywood favourite – including the depiction of several modernist lives11 – and, as Michael Schiavi notes, at least thirty-five plays about well-known literary figures have debuted in New York over the past thirty years (400). The personal and embedded qualities that make biography suitable for embodied investigation also contribute to emotional and particularized dimensions – as well as narrative ways of learning – which make it appealing to several audiences at once. As

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Sharon O’Brien has written in considering the advantages of biography for feminist studies: It would be foolish for feminist critics to ignore the appeal that biography has for readers. This is a form that can mediate between the academic and the general reader, and so – if we can deal creatively with the tensions in feminist and contemporary literary theory, experiment with the form, and rewrite its “ancient name” while still producing readable, accessible texts (what we used to call books) – we may be able to create a vibrant literary connection between academic and non-academic readers that can only enrich feminism as well as biography. (132) O’Brien’s emphasis on the mediation of specialist and generalist concerns, theory, and popular appeal, as well as her interest in creative strategy and formal experimentation, provide not just important leads for feminism’s relationship with biography but also paths for literary studies more broadly. Within biography, as within theatre, there is important – perhaps vital – potential for bridging the gap between the university and audiences beyond its borders. In thinking about how scholars might participate more fully in a type of biographical drama that balances wider appeal with critical inquiry, it is useful to briefly consider successful stagings of literary lives that have been created by the theatre world.12 Within the scope of what the genre has produced, Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, about poet and scholar A.E. Housman, is frequently considered among the best. By any standard it is a challenging play, filled with Latin and Greek references and steeped in the nineteenth-century culture of Oxford. Still, Stoppard’s script has been reviewed favourably both in the uk and in the US, and called emotionally and intellectually “thrilling” by the Times of London.13 The play begins in 1936, with a near-death embodiment of Housman about to be ferried across the River Styx. The plot follows Housman’s recollections of his youth at Oxford and sets Housman’s own reserved, unrequited yearning for fellow student Moses Jackson against Oscar Wilde’s later – and very public – obscenity trials. Along the way, we are introduced to Housman’s own preoccupations as a classical scholar and poet as well as his influences as a young man,

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including Ruskinian Gothic and Pater’s Renaissance-inspired aestheticism. For audiences who know the context, the play is a rich interweaving of Victorian and early modernist literatures, ideas, and cultures. For those who are less familiar, there is a steep learning curve, yet the emotional power of the story, as well as the wit and intrinsic interest of the telling, maintains a willingness to be swept up by the characters. In this sense, the dramatic form, admittedly as wielded by one of its most skilled practitioners, is able to accomplish what criticism alone often cannot – the attention of larger audiences, but also the interest of academics – and as such provides an opportunity to learn how drama might be employed to build more inclusive literary communities. This is not to say that biographical drama will ever be free of critical anxieties. In addition to the charge of voyeurism, there is frequently a sacrificing of historical exactitude to dramatic form, an exchange of precision for fantasy. Even Stoppard’s play, which makes good use of historical fact and detail, has been accused of capturing the “truth” of at least one episode in Housman’s life, “if not necessarily the facts.”14 This slippery line between “truth” and “fact” is compounded by the erasure of boundaries between quotation and interpretation. In Invention, for example, there is a great deal of quoting that is, to those unfamiliar with the source texts, indistinguishable from Stoppard’s own summaries, additions, and elaborations. Similarly, in William Luce’s literary biographical drama The Belle of Amherst, a monologue about the life of Emily Dickinson, Dickinson’s poetry and prose are interwoven into Luce’s own textual frame. As Luce himself writes of his working method, “During this study, I took extensive notes; culled dramatically workable anecdotes, poems, and excerpts from Emily’s letters; catalogued them under subject headings; rearranged them in chronological pattern; and interwove them in a conversational style, blending in my own words as seamlessly as possible, and with the cadence and color of Emily’s words. Gradually, Emily’s story emerged, as if she were telling it herself” (xiv). While Luce himself calls his work a “creative effort founded on intensive methodological research,” it is clear that this blurring of authorial voices is quite different from the interpretive strategies of criticism. If the biographical drama is to be accepted as a legitimate critical complement, there will have to be a certain amount of give from literary studies in terms of the creative

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structures that govern the genre in order to make it dramatically successful; conversely, the biographical drama can help to secure its own position within a critical domain through attentive research that makes a concerted effort to participate in historical accuracy and – as much as possible – sensitivity to quotation with elaborations that are respectful of the original meaning and tone. Nonetheless, the divide remains between scholarship’s primary focus on fact and the complications of auto/biographical construction, on the one hand, and playwrights’ interest in the autonomy of the story on the other. One of the few volumes that bring together the voices of both academics and playwrights on the subject of auto/biographical performance, Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman’s Theatre and AutoBiography, is illustrative on this point. Born out of a workshop at the University of British Columbia in February 2004 called “Putting a Life on Stage,” the volume layers scholarly and artistic voices, a conversation that mirrors the “lively – at times heated” (19) debates of the workshop. Grace calls the initiative to bring theatre practitioners together with a small group of academics a plan to “throw the cats among the pigeons” for as “anyone working in the theatre or the academy knows, this kind of mixing occurs infrequently and can be problematic because we do not always speak the same language.” In addition to language, there is also the question of process (or, to emphasize the point about language, “methodology”). Linda Griffiths, the Canadian writer and actor, writes of her own preparation for a biographical portrayal: “You suck in everything you can about the person, you stuff yourself like a prize goose. The limit is how much time, money, how long you can wait. You talk to people, you read, you ingest” (301). Here, the method of the playwright is not so different from that of the academic. Learning is immersion. It is in production, what Griffiths calls the “expiration,” that the crucial difference seems to lie: “It’s like a purge. By that time you and the person have merged, your adolescence twisted through Margaret Trudeau’s, your relationship to ambition coming through Wallis Simpson, your need for a spiritual life merging with Maia Campbell’s.” The vivid identifications that Griffiths describes, the inter-subjective blurring of histories and experiences, are a concern to criticism. While the perception of seeing “the object as in itself it really is” is long behind us, the commitment to distanced,

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analytic treatment remains. To abandon this position is to give way to the autobiographical fantasies and displacements fundamental to performance but seldom discussed in the critical realm. Beyond imperilling the motivations of the critic, however, drama also retains its sticky relationship with accuracy. Playwright Sally Clark notes in her contribution to the volume: “I don’t object to the research; I love the research. The hard part is finding the story when you’ve got a ton of information. It’s easier to write a play when you’ve only got a few salient details” (321) – a frequent truth of imaginative production which is, nonetheless, counter to the central tenets of research criticism. As a final example of perspectives drawn from drama, an alternative handling of the fact/fiction and historical/imaginative questions is provided by Sarah Ruhl’s play Dear Elizabeth, a “play in letters” that draws on the thirty-year correspondence between poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. With the exception of selecting and excerpting letters from 875 pages of correspondence and inserting some of Bishop’s and Lowell’s better-known poems, Ruhl makes no authorial additions and calls her work an “arrangement.” In choosing the epistolary form, Ruhl consciously creates a more reflective structure rather than one that relies on the turmoil of Bishop’s and Lowell’s lives. “I didn’t want that to be the theater of it. We know that she was an alcoholic. We know that he had manic depression,” Ruhl said in an interview with the Boston Globe. “I was interested in their letters and their relationship and their language.” But in opting not to intervene, bridge, or otherwise write in the blanks that are inevitably left by private correspondence, Ruhl is making an important choice, one that is in fact debated by Bishop and Lowell at the rhetorical and intellectual – as well as dramatic – apex of the play. On reading Lowell’s The Dolphin, a heavily autobiographical poem sequence about the disintegration of his marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick and his relationship with Caroline Blackwood, Bishop composes a letter expressing her doubts about the ways in which Lowell has edited Hardwick’s letters. Quoting Hardy, Bishop writes: “I’m sure my point is only too plain … there is a ‘mixture of fact & fiction’ and you have changed her letters. That is ‘infinite mischief,’ I think” (Dear Elizabeth 56). When Lowell writes back that he omitted the worst things about himself in Hardwick’s letters in order to avoid seeming “selfpitying” and says that he would own up to the fact that “the letters

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are cut, doctored, part fiction” (57), Bishop is not appeased. “My point,” she replies, “was that one can’t mix fact and fiction – What I have objected to in your use of the letters is that I think you’ve changed them – & you had no right to do that.” The challenge levied at Lowell is equally faced by the biographical dramatist: does one present the material as is, unadulterated if it is to be used at all, or is the “art” of the thing the expansion and re-telling, the rendering of often disparate or documentary pieces of writing into something else? This has been the question that has plagued my experiments with auto/biographical materials, modernism, and the stage. It is the question that has most led me to think that drama should be left to the dramatists and criticism to the critics. And yet. The temptations of a laboratory. The sound of modernist poems I had only ever encountered on the page echoing through the theatre, the perspectives on performativity gained by the nuanced delivery of the actor, the emotional rendering of highly personal autobiographical writing that at once humanizes and complicates concepts of “trauma” and “testimony.” The attraction of audiences who speak of their own war stories, their parents, their response to a particular poem after the show is over, of audiences who feel something in response to academic work. So yes, I have involved myself in a kind of “infinite mischief,” adapting texts for the stage, combining passages from different works. But I have done so by degrees, providing various options that might be performed and tested both for their academic integrity and for their appeal to wider audiences. The play about H.D., The Tree, is somewhat like Ruhl’s work, an arrangement, largely an adaptation based in quotation with some creative bridging. The play about Mina Loy, The Mina Loy Interviews, is fashioned out of quotation in the parts that deal with Loy, and framed by a sequence set in the archive based on academic accounts of archival work. By contrast, the Nancy Cunard play, These Were the Hours, draws on Cunard’s written accounts, historical fact, and quoted words, but also makes use of invented dialogue based on what we know in order to explore the circumstances of her life and work. The processes of adaptation that would, I think, seem quite natural to a stage or screen writer gave me critical pause. At the same time, the adapted texts permit a transmission of the work onstage that would not be possible if the texts were merely read aloud. Where possible, I

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have let the writing stand, as a major interest of the project has been to see what the writing gains through embodiment, though as the footnotes to each performance text make clear, passages have been edited and a/bridged and, in the case of romans á clef, pseudonyms have been replaced with the names of the referent. The Nancy Cunard play, in particular, makes use of invented dialogue based on scholarly records of events. As a result, I cannot help but be conscious that the shadow meaning of “staging” something is to construct or falsify it. That this definition is contained within the word itself reveals the complications of the enterprise, and there is very real risk in meddling with modernist writing – particularly, perhaps, auto/biographical materials, written in a particular way to present a particular self. Another complicating factor in creating dramas out of modernist materials is the risk of containing often non-linear and non-story-based materials in a narrative form, which is to say a return to issues of storytelling. In this sense, drama and biography are aligned, as both are said to create a false sense of story – story that modernists themselves were often attempting to exceed or deconstruct. As part of the process of making this book, I did attempt stagings without narrative – in many cases collages of H.D.’s, Loy’s, and Cunard’s work without narrative contouring – but readers and test audiences, both general and academic, were quick to point out their innate lack of dramatic appeal. In the end, I have opted for forms that at once are broadly accessible (stories are in place, drawn out of the structures of these women’s writing or created through parallel storylines) but at the same time attempt to convey the more challenging aspects of the avant-garde by using techniques particular to the writers themselves, including temporal overlay, structural irony, and montage/collage, processes I elucidate in each of the prefaces. New capacities for multimedia within theatre in many ways enable performances that exceed traditional storytelling through the integration of film and interruptive lighting and audio effects. Yet the tension between narrative and non-narrative elements has been a central one during the course of this project and has been illustrative. Unquestionably, narrative achieves something, an “amplitude” as Walter Benjamin has called it, an invitation to broader audiences, and, frankly, the interest of most spectators. The fact that modernist materials quite viscerally resist narrative incorporation has created inter-

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esting variations in the dramatic form. The interviews in the Mina Loy play, for example, press against the confines of narrative structuring – as does the poetry in all of the plays. These elements slow down the viewing experience and, consequently, the dramatic momentum in ways that illustrate how forms press against each other and how certain types of work exceed their presentation. My finding, in the end, and through several failed experiments, is that some narrative presentation is worthwhile if a primary goal is to connect these writers with audiences beyond the academy – or even beyond the discipline. At the same time, it is important to be attentive to modernist techniques and highlight formal characteristics of each writer’s work. Admittedly, this melding of forms and objectives often results in imperfect renderings. But it is one of several possible starting points for marshalling knowledge toward more visible platforms. Despite these tensions and challenges, putting modernist materials onstage has had a demonstrated research value, here recorded in the prefaces, which state what performance-based research has given us in the case of H.D., Loy, and Cunard. Throughout the project, performance, generally, has shown itself capable of conditioning types of critical awareness and demonstrating avant-garde capacities that written work does not, of exposing some of its own contradictions as well as troubling textual accounts of literary production. The presence of the actor on the stage undoubtedly offers a humanity and an immediacy to the subject being depicted, a lure of palpability. But the disconnect between actor and subject also provides undeniable evidence of the truth: this is a representation, a performance, a replica. The actor is not the subject, but someone doing a convincing imitation for the purposes of edification, entertainment, and exploration. In this sense, biographical performance implicitly reveals its own truth as a “fiction,” albeit one that is making attempts at verisimilitude, something that text-based biography can only do through explicit disclaimer. In addition, as Lindsay Adamson Livingston has suggested, there are “ways in which theatre, with its particularly phenomenological elements, can deconstruct traditional text-based life writing, thereby troubling the fraught auto/biographical relationship of ‘doing’ and ‘reporting’” (16). As a type of secondary doing rather than a transcription (though one that is mediated by script), performance permits a physical experience of something that was originally

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accomplished by a body and not just by a series of textual interactions. In this sense, performance reunites writing not just with a life context, but also with a life force, intrinsically re-embedding that which emerged from a bodily realm. This returns writing to the hand rather than just the mind, to vocalization as opposed to silent writerly “voice.” In this sense, drama re-inscribes the artistic process into a domain where many writers feel it belongs, as a form of physical as well as intellectual labour, as in Baudelaire’s comments on the “ferment of violent activity” that accompanies artistic creation (12). In addition to meditating on the biographical genre, performance also provides critical possibilities for animating issues in auto/biographical studies. As the scripts rely on life writing – diaries, romans à clef, letters, memoirs, etc. – staging provides a window into the ways the author creates and performs a self for public consumption. As Jo Burr Margadant writes, “The subject of biography is no longer the coherent self but rather a self that is performed to create an impression of coherence or an individual with multiple selves whose different manifestations reflect the passage of time, the demands and opinions of different settings, or the varieties of ways that others seek to represent that person” (7, emphasis added). Here, Margadant draws attention to the ways in which authors themselves are involved in the performative dimensions of their own self-creation. Thinking about the autobiographical record in this way may be particularly fruitful for embodied investigation, as it presents the possibility of a dialectic between authorial performance and subsequent theatrical representation, a kind of double enactment of identity that allows us to consider not only the performance of the actor but also the performance of the author. In this sense, performance-based inquiry allows for a unique exploration, a performance of a performance, a mirroring that makes a great deal of room for self-conscious considerations of what it means to write oneself into being for the sake of a reading audience. To a certain extent, this can be implied by the performance itself, yet it also provides ground for critical work that might be written around the play, providing a symbiotic opportunity for performance and performative theory, enactment, and analysis. Even without this critical mediation, however, performance responds directly to the conditions and preoccupations of modernism in several

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ways. Though themes of self-fashioning have become critically popular in considering most historical moments, modernism presents a particularly powerful matrix for thinking about self-staging. The narration of the self through Freudian psychoanalysis, the staging of civilization through the rise of public exhibitions, the acceleration of branding in advertising, the self-consciousness of the image brought about by the advent of film all contributed to revising notions of the self and selfpresentation.15 Moreover, the role of the theatre itself as a model for modernist behaviour and production is an area that is currently experiencing scholarly interest.16 For writers in artistic circles, the avantgarde’s theatrical stagings of “being modern” – from Dadaist cabaret to futurist ballet – refreshed awareness of not only living in the modern era but also the need to embody and perform this modernity. Modernism’s sense of itself as a break with the immediate past in a climate of performative expressiveness leads to paths of inquiry: How do the contexts of modernism, notably the fields of war and psychoanalysis, artistic and sexual revolution, generational and gender rupture, create new platforms for a staging of the self? How does dramatic channelling of literary, historical, and mythic predecessors, so key to the high-modernist method, create a bridge with the past? How do processes of rehearsal act as a self-readying for newly formed modern subjectivities? How are drama and theatre themselves invoked or rejected to create stages for these performances? The fact that the auto/biographical writing explored here is by women also highlights gender, notably the privately constructed stage of women’s autobiographical writing and the public stages of social engagement, brought into focus by feminist advocates and suffragettes who turned to performative strategies to advance their political aims. The unification of the personal with performance has been intriguingly explored by Barbara Green, who notes, “Autobiography opens spectacle to a discussion of the concept of experience, and to the possibility of resistance within spectacularity. Spectacle opens autobiography, the singular speech-act of an individual woman, to collectivity, group-action, and intersubjectivity. Problem and solution, display and critique, and collectivity and the individual subject are all bonded together in the pairing of spectacle and confession” (8). Green is here referring to literal acts of spectacularity performed by suffragettes in order to bring women’s voices into public and political domains.

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These include pageants, performances, and hunger strikes, all of which employed the body to stage the political drama of the right to vote and be heard. However, we could also imagine several metaphorical ways in which struggle and identity negotiation might be performed in autobiographical writing, as the play of identity is staged on the individual mind and body for the purposes of experimentation, navigation, resistance, and ultimately goals of personal and social redefinition.17 This is certainly the case for H.D., Mina Loy, and Nancy Cunard, all of whom wrote extensive autobiographical prose that examines their roles as women and as artists in modernist culture. In the performancetexts that follow, it is largely these materials that have been staged: autobiographical – or to use a more descriptive term borrowed from Alex Goody, “auto-mythological” – writing shaped into a biographical frame. While varied in content, tone, and technique, each play draws on life writing – romans à clef, letters, memoirs – which allows each writer/character to narrate the course of her life. In this sense, the texts are at once drama and auto/biographical anthology. From a research point of view, this allows for the performance of a performance that invites investigation of the creation of the authorial persona and its representation. From a pedagogical perspective, it provides the initiate in modernist literature with an introduction to the scope and style of these writers’ works. Perhaps the best term to describe this type of staging is lecture/performance, as texts and contexts of modernism have been gathered in theatricalized form with informational intent. As a result, some sections might be more useful for some readers than others: the critical preface to each play details the gains of performancebased research, while the plays themselves are more broadly construed, with notes that at once confirm sources for modernists and provide additional context for non-specialists. In attempting to accommodate these audiences simultaneously I am aware that there is a tension between the complexly articulated scholarly argument on the one hand and broader accessibility on the other. However, I see this as a central challenge for literary studies as a whole: to both build more inclusive networks and public research and maintain scholarly momentum. It strikes me that whatever solutions emerge, multiple levels will be key. In addition to the fact that H.D., Loy, and Cunard all left autobiographical records, there are other similarities that make their lives and

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works particularly suitable for staging: all were intimately concerned with circumnavigations of the self that provide intriguing commentary on their interests and preoccupations; they were all restless expatriates, whose phenomenological searching took place across a varied backdrop including America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and South America; they all experimented with liminal femininities, rejecting Victorian standards of being and of literary production for more expressive and experimental models. Among the three, there is also a set of recurring connections and dramatis personae, too numerous to list.18 But this is not really a surprise, given the intimacy of modernist circles and the expansiveness of these women’s lives: collectively, H.D., Loy, and Cunard were involved with avant-garde movements that include the literary scenes of pre-war London as well as European and American branches of Dadaism, futurism, and surrealism; they participated in emerging discourses around new forms of identity; they were affected by and wrote about the major political events of their times, including the two world wars and the Spanish Civil War. This intellectual participation not only provides context and setting; it also allows for detailed, intimate investigations of the lived experience of some of the twentieth century’s most important movements and events. In pursuing these auto/biographical dimensions and performance simultaneously, the project seeks to find embodied forms of expression for literary scholarship and also to give voice to often under-represented embodied forms of modernism – autobiographical writing, and particularly the autobiographical writing of women – often subsumed both by modernism itself and by subsequent critical appraisals. Critics of these plays have tended to focus on the emphasis on personal facts and details; yet these women’s autobiographical writing is fundamentally about personal facts and details. It is part of their work and, consequently, part of their modernism. In bringing this autobiographical writing into productive tension with their more impersonal writing (notably the often better-known poetry), there is an interest in challenging not only how we pursue our investigations of the modernist moment but also the limits and definitions of modernism itself. ⢘⢚

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In 1966, Susan Sontag called for a new type of literary and artistic engagement: “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means” (14). While many of us are still profoundly committed to expository criticism, Sontag was right to suggest that there may be other ways of communicating the function and value of literature. In its capacity as a collective art, the theatre seems to offer this complement, a way of showing as well as re-examining the texts and contexts that intrigue us and of connecting with broader audiences. I have here suggested that variations on auto/biographical drama may be one means to this end, and the performance-texts that follow are experiments in bridging different interpretive domains. However, I have also suggested the theatre as a forum for literary experiment because its dynamism and malleability provide many possibilities for exploring literary worlds, coming to new understandings, and imparting this knowledge to others. For those of us who have long been immersed in a climate of deconstruction, the fundamentally creative and re-constructive structures of drama provide another avenue for engagement, not only with texts and histories, but also with new collaborators, new audiences, and new possibilities for literary research.

1

2

3

4

note s The first session of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research, directed by Martin Puchner, ran 6–17 June 2011 at Harvard University. See http://thschool.fas.harvard.edu/ icb/icb.do. A digital recording of the “New Poetics” talk can be viewed here: http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k76089&pageid=ic b.page386654&pageContentId=icb.pagecontent1163139&state= maximize&view=watch.do&viewParam_entry=54354. For more on Roach’s views on humanities/performance integration see his article in PMLA , “Performance: The Blunders of Orpheus.” As explored below, the fairly standard turn to science to develop practice-based approaches in the humanities is, on the one hand, functional, and on the other historically ironic as on many counts it was the early twentieth-century push to make humani-

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6

7

8

9

10

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ties disciplines more like the sciences that divided theoretical and embodied study. Schechner lists Grotowski, Brook, Barba, Turner, and Turnbull as examples of both social scientists and theatre practitioners working at the intersection of anthropology and theatre (26). See also Barba’s A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology (with Nicola Savarese), The Performance Studies Reader, ed. Henry Bial, and Victor Turner’s The Anthropology of Performance. Bringing to life fragments central to theatre/archaeology could also be useful in thinking about modernist production, particularly given modernism’s emphasis on reclaiming the energies and material remains of the ancient past. See also Marvin Carlson, “Theatre and Performance at a Time of Shifting Disciplines,” and Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality and Drama. For more on this history see also Marvin Carlson, “Theatre and Performance at a Time of Shifting Disciplines,” and Gerald Graff, Professing Literature. Here we might look to the dramatic writings of Hélène Cixous for suggestive leads. Portrait of Dora, for example, a play that is often alluded to as Cixous’s “pre-theoretical” writing, radically re-orients Freud’s Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria through dramatized critique. My thanks go to Martin Puchner for helping to define these terms and the differences between them during the course of the Mellon workshop. See, for example, Iris (dir. Richard Eyre), Frida (dir. Julie Taymor), Pollock (dir. Ed Harris), Sylvia (dir. Christine Jeffs), Georgia O’Keeffe (dir. Bob Balaban), and Surviving Picasso (dir. James Ivory). There are many of these which include, in addition to those listed above and limited to a short selection of published plays about nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary lives: Joy Coghill’s Song of This Place, David Hare’s The Judas Kiss (an excellent play among countless Wilde dramas), Linda Griffith’s Alien Creature (Gwendolyn MacEwen), Robert Lee and Jerome Lawrence’s The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, Edna O’Brien’s Virginia (Virginia Woolf), Marty Martin’s Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude

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15

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Stein, and a cluster of plays about the life of Ezra Pound, which include Tom Dulack’s Incommunicado, Timothy Findley’s The Trials of Ezra Pound, and Billy Stoneking’s Sixteen Words for Water. Jeremy Kingston, “The Invention of Love,” The Times (2005). Matt Wolf, “The Invention of Love,” Variety (1998). Wolf is commenting on Stoppard’s speculation that Housman threw over his university degree in a “spasm of erotic despair” (41). See, for example, Patrick Campbell and Adrian Kear, eds., Psychoanalysis and Performance; Susan McCabe, Cinematic Modernism; Günter Berghaus, Theatre, Performance, and the Historical Avant-Garde. Penny Farfan and Katherine Kelly, for example, argue that the modernist theatre played a “central role” in “forming and circulating modernist ideas and aesthetic practices” (1). There is a significant body of theory surrounding women and the performative uses of auto/biography in the modernist age. In addition to titles listed above, see, in particular, Linda Anderson, Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century: Remembered Futures; Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation; and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Cunard was friendly with Loy and H.D.; Robert McAlmon, who was married to Bryher Ellerman (H.D.’s life partner) in what was likely a marriage of convenience, was a good friend of Loy’s and Cunard’s and published Loy, H.D., and Bryher through his Contact Editions, established with money from the Ellerman family; Richard Aldington, husband of H.D., was a friend, admirer, and collaborator of Cunard’s; both H.D. and Loy saw Freud for treatment (H.D. extensively, Loy less so, though she did sketch him); Pound was engaged to H.D., was a lover of Cunard’s, and critiqued Loy’s poetry, to name only a few of these intersections.

H.D.’s Autobiographical Theatre

The Tree is a twenty-five-character, one-woman auto/biographical play that draws on H.D.’s memoirs, romans à clef, poetry, and letters. Other sources include documents in the H.D. collection at Yale, autobiographies by H.D.’s associates, biographies, and other critical accounts that create an underlay for the script. This immersion in primary and secondary texts and an attention, as much as possible, to textual intentions and the historical record make The Tree what I have referred to as research-based performance. Autobiographical and critical writing both inform and constitute the work, as the play is not just written with an eye on H.D.’s writing and the writing around it but crafted out of these sources.1 This is true both in terms of quotation, which represents the majority of the written text, but also in the collage-like approach, which mirrors H.D.’s own palimpsestic method of pasting time over time, text over text, and scene over scene. The narrative trajectory, moreover, follows the path established by what are critically considered to be H.D.’s most autobiographical works, which are in many ways a multivolume meditation on the emotional and artistic development of the artist. In this sense, the play, like H.D.’s most liferesonant writing, is created in the tradition of the künstlerroman, especially in its attention to early influences and experiences. Originally and in early performances, I titled this play H.D.: A Life, hoping to provide a representative portrait of each of H.D.’s life stages.2 Performing from this twenty-five-character one-woman show in community and academic settings in North America, Europe, and Asia revealed how this broad scope was less effective than focusing on a particular storyline and specific works. For example, in finalizing material for the

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adaptation, it became clear that texts including the Madrigal Cycle and End to Torment were much more stage-transmissible than some of H.D.’s other writings, notably works like Palimpsest and Narthex. Those who are familiar with H.D.’s work will realize this means that, while Bryher Ellerman appears as a major character, there is less time spent on this relationship than actual chronology suggests. The relationship between these two women, in its emotional and intellectual dimensions, merits its own play, a project enabled by existing and emerging scholarship about Ellerman. However, the narrative arc that I have chosen here, from H.D.’s emerging sense of herself as a writer in Philadelphia to her late reminiscence as illustrated by her published work, is attached to the figure of Ezra Pound, who was present in body at the beginning and in mind at the end. While some might suggest this emphasis perpetuates the myth of H.D.’s “creation” by Pound or somehow obscures her homosexual commitments, the shifting, evanescent nature of that relationship here acts as a pole whereby we can understand Pound – and by extension canonical modernism – as both someone very near to H.D. and someone about whom she was deeply ambivalent and from whom she strayed very far indeed. In the sense that the play intersects with Poundian history, it also engages other dramatized representations, notably Tom Dulack’s Incommunicado and Timothy Findley’s The Trials of Ezra Pound.3 In addition to providing new audiences with an introduction to H.D. through dramatization, an important part of the performance-based research component of the play was in pursuing H.D.’s most theatrical autobiographical writing, the writing that literally, figuratively, and structurally referenced the stage. In this sense, materials were also chosen in relationship to my research questions, notably: In what sense can the theatre mediate between H.D.’s autobiographical drama and the aesthetics of impersonality that characterize her poetry? How can H.D.’s multi-layered sensibility be physicalized and entered into differently through the staged environment? What does performance, and solo performance in particular, reveal about H.D.’s multiple subjectivities? How can the elements of gender performance encountered in H.D.’s writing be productively explored through performative inquiry? How can we come to understand the implications of H.D.’s theatricality and theatrebased writing through dramatization? In what follows, I engage with

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some of the critical sources that have drawn out these elements of H.D.’s work in textual criticism and show how these issues have been pursued through dramatic treatment, recognizing that any subsequent stagings will, in a very real sense, create different results depending on emphasis, interpretation, and other variables of the theatre. To write of H.D.’s theatre is to admit to a contradiction. There is at once what Sarah Bay-Cheng and Barbara Cole have termed “a distinct current of theatricality” (64) running through H.D.’s autobiographical prose and, at the same time, something that at first seems quite anti-theatrical about some of H.D.’s other work – notably the flat presentation and impersonal elements of some of the poetry and the textual imperatives of her plays. That said, the theatrical current is present in H.D.’s classic and contemporary texts, often carrying autobiographical experience into dramatized environments or dramatic structures into life writing. As Bay-Cheng and Cole note of Hippolytus Temporizes, H.D. “translate[s] the experience of modern life into classical poetic theater: life disguised as performance” (64). Similarly, in her classical novels, there is a strong dramatic element at play. The afterword to Hedylus, H.D.’s 1928 novel exploring the conflict between ancient Athens and Alexandria through mother and son poets Hedyle and Hedylus, highlights the dramatized subjectivity of the characters: “Hedylus is vertical, hermetic, idiosyncratic; its world encompasses an externalization of inner states. Its shifts in consciousness follow a psychological stream of awareness; its symbols are visualized projections […] Both its main characters are extreme in self-consciousness, theatrical in a word; their thoughts form themselves readily into interior monologues, approaching at times the soliloquy of drama” (147; original emphasis). Both the “externalization” of the inner world and the formal conventions that approach soliloquy are indicative of a dramatic mode that summons some kind of externalized, dramatized delivery. In Hedylus, as in H.D.’s autobiographical prose, the writing can be so highly wrought that this externalization onstage can feel like both realization and release. Immediately, this theatricality, along with the personal dimensions of biographical drama, seems to be very much in tension with the distanced aesthetics of the poetry, both the imagism of H.D.’s early writing and the “air and crystal” (End to Torment 35) that characterizes the later

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work. To exclude the poetry from a biographical dramatization would be reductive; to include it risks subsuming it to “story.” Yet this complication also raises interesting possibilities as to how theatre itself can mediate the tension between H.D.’s most embodied and disembodied writings. In working with this poetry onstage, it became clear that impersonality exists, in H.D.’s work, by matters of degree. Poems like “Fragment Forty” and “Fragment Forty-One” contain a distanced aesthetic that can be translated through a flattening of vocal tone and Greek imagery that can be materialized through visual projection, but also an autobiographical layer that is contextualized by its position within the drama.4 In this sense, tone, visual realization, and the auto/biographical frame provide insight into the layering taking place within the poem through concurrent acts of reception. At the same time, dramatization also provides interpretive possibilities for H.D.’s more resolutely impersonal, philosophical, and historical works that exist outside of the personal sphere, such as the excerpt from Helen in Egypt that appears at the end of the play. What I can only describe as an oracular delivery of this poem, which is to say one in which verse almost seems to be coming from “outside” of the actor, even as it is delivered through the body, can set the poem in relief with the emotive delivery of the autobiographical prose and also connect the poetry to H.D’s ideas of historical channelling. Like Pound, who believed that “souls of all men great / At times pass athrough us, / And we are melted into them, and are not / Save reflexions of their souls” and that he could “for an instant” be Dante or François Villon (“Histrion,” New Selected Poems 8), so H.D. believed in the blurred instant when “a layer out of ourselves, in another sphere of consciousness” could be realized, so that a daily household object could also be “imbued with a quality of long-past, an epic quality” (Asphodel 152). This “giving over” to the historical times and voices, a minimizing of the self in order to summon the historical subject, is a method that H.D. uses in early collections like Heliodora (1924) through to her final epic poem, Helen in Egypt (1961), where it is frequently Helen’s voice that speaks: “You will not understand / what I have taken years / or centuries to experience” (80). When paired with a historical sensibility that responded to ideas of divination or inhabitation, the use of monologue also bears resemblance to the working method of actors who feel they are channelling the voice of another.

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In this sense, the malleability and range of voiced expression can allow at once for an auto/biographical narration and, in marked contrast, an enacted withdrawal of subjectivity in moments of historical overcoming or more cerebral forms of composition that represent an important part of H.D.’s artistic process. These variations in delivery respond both to the presentational range we find in H.D.’s work and also, implicitly, to her interests in historical masks and masking central to those works that operate in the sphere of impersonality.5 Diana Collecott, for example, notes that H.D.’s adoption of “fictive and mythic” voices in her more impersonal work allows her to “combine the Imagist requirements of ‘direct treatment of the “thing” […]’ with the ‘indirect method’ of dramatic characterisation” (155). This description of the dramatic lyric highlights the ways the indirect elements of impersonality are cohesive with H.D.’s dramatic structures and forms, both of which can be usefully explored through the theatre. The blurring of time that historical summoning evokes and the associated condensations of geography and subjectivity that have long been at the centre of H.D. criticism are also particularly suited to renewed attention onstage. As noted, the compositional method of the play is palimpsestic, layering times, characters, and ideas. The multisensory possibilities of the theatre also permit a simultaneity of experience that realizes an important dimension of modernist methodology, generally, and H.D.’s work in particular. Arthur Holmberg writes: “Ever since Cubism, simultaneity has been the war cry of the avantgarde […] By telescoping space and time, by yoking together a kaleidoscope of clashing perspectives, simultaneity enables an artist to create new aesthetic unity without denying the contradictions and chaos of experience” (93). Onstage, overlaps in visual projections and soundscapes provide a great deal of potential for the realization of this avantgardism and also push against the more constrictive elements of the biographical form. The layered, blurred, and mystical elements of H.D.’s work, which are on many counts difficult to adequately represent in linear criticism, can be captured in ways that contribute not only to a visual aesthetic but also to an atmosphere that pervades H.D.’s work, a disorientation of linear time, a heightened sensibility, which, as in reading H.D., is not just descriptive but felt – a stretching of the imaginative limit at once intriguing and laced with emotive and

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physical vertigo. Textual criticism has long concerned itself with the visual nature of H.D.’s world, but the stage presents an opportunity to realize it. A palimpsest is, after all, a text that has been written over many times, and this textual layering can be accomplished through an overlap of words and images, just as the “image” itself invites visual play. H.D.’s condensed geographical landscapes that overlay multiple locations, moreover, can be visually inhabited through projection as can the more predictive elements of H.D.’s mysticism, like in the excerpt from Helen in Egypt discussed above: and the hooves of the stallions thunder across the plain, and the plain is dust, and the battle-field is a heap of rusty staves and broken chariot-frames and the rims of the dented shields and desolation, destruction – for what? (243) The visual nature of what is presented here summons images of ancient Greek battlefields, and the resonance for H.D. was in the bombing of London. At the same time, for contemporary audiences, “the plain is dust,” “desolation,” and “destruction” in describing wartime rather inescapably summon news images of more recent conflicts like those in Afghanistan and Syria. As a result, directors have a certain amount of interpretive latitude in considering what the poem can accommodate onstage. In this sense, the visual extension provided by staging permits an exploration and representation of H.D.’s visual and multiplied sensibility within its time even as it contains the possibility of bringing the work into dialogue with contemporary contexts and exploring its prophetic tone. Within The Tree, these external compressions of time and place are mirrored by fissures and compactions in subjectivity explored through the work of the actor, the one woman who performs the twenty-five roles. While this may seem ambitious, solo performance has shown itself to be feasible and particularly useful in illustrating both the

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mnemonic dimensions of autobiographical reminiscence, taking place, as it does, within the individual mind, and the internal divisions and multiplications we find in H.D.’s work. This visceral fracturing is central to the theory of solo performance. Katherine McLeod, for example, points to Ric Knowles and Jennifer Harvie’s categorization of “dialogic monologue” as “a term that challenges Bakhtin’s notion of drama as striving through an individual speaker towards unitary language and, instead, posits drama as enabling a dialogic monologue that conveys ‘a fractured, incoherent or self-alienated subject through which various voices are heard’” (98). In The Tree, the actor’s division of the self into multiple roles is an embodied exploration of fissures and subjective limits. This is true both for the actor, who must find and accommodate each of the characters within her own body, but also for audiences, who frequently comment that watching a performance unfold is like observing “multiple personalities on stage.” Importantly, in working on H.D., this allows for the elucidation and consequent discussion of fragmentations of the self in H.D.’s work as well as an exploration of its multiplications. As Lara Vetter has noted, in H.D.’s fiction, there are frequently “characters created as composites” (116): “as the narrator states in one such fiction, ‘We’re not three separate people. We’re just one’” (108) – a merging that is made manifest in the play by the containment of these characters within the body of the single actor, enabling distinctly different perspectives on ideas of fractured or multiplied selves and an important glimpse into H.D.’s subjective universe. While the simultaneity of the stage speaks of its ability to accommodate multiple visual and vocal modalities, the subjective elements are suggestive of other theoretical insight that can be gained through stage work. In considering these other theoretical possibilities, gender and performance loom particularly large. H.D.’s fluctuating identification with various personae and their varied sexualities is coherent with what we now think of as certain types of gender performance and a refusal to conform to set patterns of desire. Those familiar with H.D.’s work will know that in HER , H.D. explores triangulated desire between a female interest, Fayne (Frances Gregg), and her on-again, off-again fiancé, George (Ezra Pound). Paint It Today tells much of the same story, but forsakes Pound, the “hectic, adolescent, blundering, untried, mischievous and irreverent male youth” (7), for a steady erotic fixation on

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Gregg, which is supplanted, after Gregg’s defection, by an explicitly sexual bond with a character modelled after Bryher Ellerman. Yet in retelling parts of the story many years later in her memoir about Pound, End to Torment, she stresses a heterosexual imperative, describing Pound’s embraces as “electric, magnetic, they do not so much warm, they magnetize, vitalize” (4), a discourse on the magnetism between men and women that returns in Bid Me to Live. Similarly, H.D.’s novels also tend to interrogate gender definitions, refuting dichotomies in favour of more complex formulations. In Asphodel, H.D. claims that both she and Gregg are like Joan of Arc, “a girl who was a boy” (9). The possibilities for gender play are pronounced onstage when one considers that all of these roles are taken on by one actor. “Gender performance” is rarely so acutely visible as when one gender assumes the characteristics and mannerisms of another. The fact that Pound and Aldington, for example, “disappear” suddenly into other characters onstage – the elderly H.D., the young Hilda, the sexually aggressive Brigit Patmore – is a palpable expression of the ways in which personae, particularly those rooted in gender traits, are repertory actions. In this sense, solo performance reflects back on questions of subjectivity, but it is also an embodied vehicle for considering how gender can, quite literally, be taken on and performed by the individual through modifications in voice, tone, stance, and gesture in ways that are cohesive with H.D.’s own sense of gender’s malleability. It is one thing to think about gender performance through the critical text; it is quite another to witness gender performed and, in this sense, performing, and performing H.D. in particular opens up a materialized dimension through which to consider how gender plays both on the body and throughout the body of her work. In addition to the formal and theoretical insight gained through production, the rehearsal process itself opens different dimensions of H.D.’s compositional method. This is largely as a result of some of the constructive similarities between H.D.’s writing and theatre-making. In corresponding with Norman Holmes Pearson about the collection of her work being compiled at Yale, H.D. wrote: “For me, it was so important, my own legend. Yes, my own legend. Then, to get well and re-create it” (17 June 1951, quoted in Stanford-Friedman, Penelope’s

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Web 67). As the emphasis on “recreat[ion]” implies, this was not just a matter of telling something once, but telling and retelling, crafting and re-crafting in order to reach a version that best reflected the lived reality. This near obsession, or what Vetter has called a “serial recasting of the same period of her life” (108), is made clear by the ways in which the early novels and many of H.D.’s memoirs turn on and return to the same themes, relationships, and events, particularly through the Madrigal Cycle. Even while there is narrative progress throughout the cycle, the looping back to revisit past scenes creates a circular, internalized chronology that disputes linear time in its insistence on associative, poetic, and emotion-based repetitions. At the same time, as Nephie Christodoulides suggests, H.D. avoids stasis by weaving in new detail and approaches: the “repetitions […] involve additions, ‘becoming detailed with each recurrence’” (24). In this sense, Christodoulides argues, H.D.’s eternal returns are paradoxically generative: “‘The story must create [her]’ and, as if in accordance with Olney, she ‘creates a self in the very act of seeking it’” (23). In a strikingly similar manner, Harvie and Andy Lavender note that the repetitive act of rehearsal is “never just the learned delivery but the creation of performance” (1). Like rehearsal, H.D.’s repetitions are not static but constitutive. Making lies both in the repetition and in what is generated by repetition, a surplus of effect, like so many turns of a potter’s wheel. In this sense, in mounting a production based in H.D.’s writing, there is a synchronicity between rehearsing the material and the material that is rehearsed. In learning lines, in saying them out loud, in finding and learning blocking patterns, the process is of constant repetition, but repetition with difference. Like in H.D.’s writing, it is this casting and recasting that brings about the final iteration. The processes of the theatre bring knowledge seekers into a relationship with H.D.’s methods, which allows them to arrive at a different understanding of what repetition does – how each reiteration is at once “practice” or “drafting” but also constitutive of the whole. This is an immersive imperative, as much felt as intellectual, and quite different from the critical position that considers the writing at a remove. In this sense, theatrical processes provide experiential insight into H.D.’s work through a rough replication of its making.

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Similarly, in both H.D.’s work and the rehearsal process, making relies on not only the act of repetition, but also the hermeneutics of revisitation. As Herbert Blau describes: “Do it again” you say, but the demoralizing thing in rehearsal – what the French call répétition – is not really knowing what it is, “it all, it all,” as Beckett says, the intangible referent that always escapes you, not that, this, not this, that, nor do you really want to repeat it, not that merely, because it would be the same if it were only the same, it would be nothing but a repetition, not as right as it was, spontaneous, as when it happened for the first time, because the actors were, as they say, “living the moment,” not what was, but what is, while the desire to get at it, whatever it (again) is, drives the rehearsal even more, sometimes driving it crazy. (28) This description feels very much like H.D.’s prose writing, particularly in its attention to the desire to “get at it, whatever it (again) is.” The repetitions, questioning, and moments of borderline madness reflect H.D.’s attempts to get to the root of her own condition and experience. Importantly, however, Blau is not only talking about rehearsal in this passage but also using it as a metaphor for psychoanalysis: the desire to get at the quintessential thing, the key moment, through the act of returning. In this sense, acts of rehearsal and performance provide tremendous room for considering the interpenetrating realms of autobiography, analysis, and theatre, particularly their linked strategies of repetition, self-narration, and self-disclosure. In The Tree, this nexus is explored through material from Tribute to Freud and framed by scenes from End to Torment and Compassionate Friendship in which H.D. at once relives her history with Pound – which is to say performs the autobiographical self – while also, and quite actively, dramatizing her analytic sessions with Erich Heydt in Küsnacht. A final way in which the theatre serves H.D.’s writing is by illuminating, in new and very palpable ways, the dramatic structures, tropes, and themes that operate in the work. In considering how theatre functions within H.D.’s novels, critics have centred much of their attention on Bid Me to Live. Susan Stanford-Friedman notes that in providing

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Holmes Pearson with the “keys” to Bid Me to Live, H.D. called this list of names a “dramatis personae” (Penelope’s Web 71). In a close reading of the layout of H.D.’s apartment at 44 Mecklenburgh Square, where much of the novel takes place, Caroline Zilboorg has addressed how H.D.’s description suggests a kind of double theatre: “the performance, which is H.D.’s narrative and her life, goes on both privately (the room as stage) and publicly (the room as auditorium)” (30). Moreover, in analyzing the structure of Bid Me to Live, Joseph Milicia sketches the novel’s “unpredictable development,” highlighting how the episodes read like a list of scenes in a stage drama featuring H.D. (Julia), Aldington (Rafe), Lawrence (Rico), Arabella (Bella), and Gray (Vane): Chapters I–III: early morning before one of Rafe’s departures. IV–V: an evening with Rafe. VI: scene with Rico, interrupted by Elsa and Bella; scene with Bella. VII: evening with Vane at Julia’s, a café and a cinema. VIII: farewell to Rafe; farewell to Rico, interrupted by Vane. IX: afternoon walk alone, followed by evening with Vane. X–XI: monologue to Rico. (280–1) In addition to the use of scene-based structure, the dramatic action of the novel culminates in a play within a play, a D.H. Lawrence–directed “Bible-ballet” in which Richard and Arabella are Adam and Eve, Frieda Lawrence is the serpent, Gray is the angel at the gate, and H.D. the apple tree. It is from this scene that H.D. merges into her relationship with Gray, a move that is meant to remove the H.D./Julia figure from the “charade” of her relationships with Aldington and Lawrence, even while the fact that she plays and replays the Bible-ballet in her head during her time with Gray suggests that she cannot escape from the drama that has been set in motion. Theatre within fiction is common enough, but its consistent and constitutive use in Bid Me to Live makes it somewhat unusual as highmodernist composition of the type with which H.D. is generally associated. As Puchner has argued, a suspicion of theatre, theatricality, and embodied representation is frequently found in high-modernist attitudes and aesthetics. While this should be qualified – Pound, for

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example, certainly had an interest in theatre, notably Noh drama and opera (including his own), started a PhD thesis on the role of jesters in Lope de Vega’s plays, and attended the theatre in London and Paris, as did most of the avant-garde circle – Puchner identifies the resistance to popular theatre with a simultaneous rejection of the “unprecedented celebration of the theatre and of theatricality” in the late nineteenth century (6) and, concurrently, a desire by high modernists to separate themselves from avant-garde theatricalism (7). As noted earlier, we can associate H.D. with the high-modernist tradition of anti-theatricality in several ways. Hippolytus Temporizes is a verse or “closet drama,” which Puchner identifies as resistant to the theatre, partly because it “complicate[s] the conditions of the material stage” (Bay-Cheng and Cole 16). Moreover, at first pass, Bid Me to Live also seems to suffer from “the more traditional, moralizing suspicion that actors are whores” (Puchner 5). In characterizing Aldington’s lover, Arabella Yorke, in unflattering terms, H.D. consistently uses the language of the theatre. Bella (the Yorke character) “predict[s] that later film or stage type […] more fashionable, then, the more determined to selfdestruction […] In any time, lost, the harlot of the middle-age miracleplay” (7–8); “[c]ertainly Bella in her green silk, her rose-paint, her insect black up-darting eyebrows, her simmering narrow dark eyes, was perfectly in character” (95); “in action, stage-business, she over-acted” (20); “[s]he moved with set precision, as if she knew her part very well, but was having stage fright” (96). This emphasis on performance in both a stage and a sexual sense is compounded by the Aldington character, who insists that Bella is “a star-performer” (47). This association echoes H.D.’s earlier connection in Asphodel between actresses and licentious behaviour in her description of the Brigit Patmore character, Merry, as “a slut, a little fox-coloured wench out of some restoration comedy” (131). H.D.’s summoning of theatre and theatre types is complicated, however, not only by a consistent undercutting of the original description – “Bella […] was perfectly in character. But Bella was not all ‘character’” (95); Bella was the harlot “while Julia [H.D.] was almost ridiculously some nun-figure, gaunt, over-intellectualized, of the same play. But Bella was not a harlot, Julia was not a saint” (7–8) – but also by the descriptions of H.D. and the other characters as dramatic types:

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Rafe Ashton [Aldington] in his uniform, was dressed-up, playacting, “That’s the stuff to give the troops.” It was all neat, all neatly dated, war-time heroics … And Rico [Lawrence], playing any part, but always, when he entered, taking for granted that his was the centre of the stage. His was the centre of the stage, however tiny the little act he put on, Miss Ames [Amy Lowell] … a sort of prompter in the wings … Vane [Gray] when he came there, fitting into some part already allotted to him … (150) The theatrical language reveals a fundamental falsity or hypocrisy in the characters’ behaviour and, in this sense, is characteristic of modernist anti-theatrical prejudice. But it also suggests that circumstances, notably the Second World War, create a stage upon which only a limited number of scenarios can play out: “Now Bella had entered. Would everyone else do a little turn, while she watched them, wondering when it would ever be over? (The war would never be over)” (91). Ultimately, in embodying a stage type, Bella provides the overt clue that the dynamics among the characters are somehow pre-formulated or pre-scripted. But Bella also forces Julia to confront the associations between the theatre and her own aesthetics: “The funny thing was that facing Bella, Julia felt that she was looking at herself in a mirror, another self, another dimension but nevertheless herself. Rafe had brought them together; really they had nothing in common […] She looked vampire-ish, the stage type of mistress, but no. She was eighteenthcentury in that frock, she was something out of a play. They all were” (103). In recognizing Bella as a reflection of herself and in implicating herself in the unfolding play that she herself is writing – “[t]he exits, the entrances. It was all minute, perfect as a play, her play” (151) – H.D. implicitly acknowledges the performativity of her own autobiographical work and its embodied experimentalism, which consciously refutes the high-modernist emphasis on anti-theatricality. Within the novel, this more dominant modernist aesthetic is voiced by Rafe/ Aldington, who on reading one of Julia’s drafts says, “A bit dramatic […] It’s Victorian” (54). In associating the “dramatic” with the “Victorian,” Rafe simultaneously dismisses both the heightened language and emotion modernist views ascribed to the “dramatic” as well as its ties to the late nineteenth century. Julia, stung, locks the draft in a jewel

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box along with a portrait of her mother. “Victorian had he said? […] Inside the box was the portrait of her mother, with the hair dressed high, 1880 and Victorian […] Yes, she was old fashioned (her mother was old-fashioned)” (57–8). By placing together her “dramatic” writing and the picture of her mother, and subsequently playing with a double referent through the ambiguous use of the female pronoun, H.D. seems to make a strong associative statement about the resuscitation of nineteenth-century theatricality in women’s autobiographical writing and the centrality of this working method in creating an alternative to anti-theatrical modernist production. H.D.’s signalling of Bid Me to Live as “theatre” is highly inviting for actors and directors. The fact that the novel often sounds like a play when read out loud was, in fact, the original impetus for an adaptation that was the beginning of this book. The theatricality of the novel is on many counts best explored onstage: the novel’s dialogue transfers into drama with very little adaptation; the characters translate well; the conflicts are crafted with an eye on dramatic intensity. It is easy to say that H.D.’s writing is structurally and thematically theatrical, but there is something to actually enacting this assertion in a staged environment to see if it can be borne out. And, in H.D.’s case, the stage does bear it out by highlighting the dramatic elements at work, aspects that can be supported by the interpretive skill of an actor capable of an ironic capturing of H.D.’s stagier and more mannered moments – a self-reflexive performance which at once stays true to H.D.’s prose even as it shows itself, as does much of H.D.’s work, as theatre. If, as H.D. seems to suggest, autobiographical theatricality is an important alternative to anti-theatricality – and tangentially related to the theatrical, masked dynamics of impersonality – then so too, as receivers and interpreters of this work, should we look for modes of engagement that provide epistemological alternatives to the anti-theatrical nature of criticism.

note s 1 To be sure, the result presented here is not a transparent portrait of the artist. As I discuss below, even while H.D. frequently wrote her own reality, her auto/biographical refractions and complicated auto-constructions make absolute “truth” an impossible,

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perhaps self-defeating objective even when a great deal of care is given to actual historical and biographical circumstances insofar as they are known. The scenes and quotations presented in The Tree are selected, a two-hour dramatized condensation derived from thousands of pages of writing with all of the editorial choices and elisions that this entails. While significant effort has been made to be sensitive to H.D.’s writing and intentions it is, nonetheless, also the case that the process of adaptation – and a desire to reach audiences that exceed a small number of avantgarde enthusiasts – has resulted in more linear momentum and less interiorized exploration than H.D.’s written work provides us with. Ultimately, this is not the complete portrait of H.D. that she herself would have written or, indeed, did write. For that, readers can – and hopefully new readers of H.D. will – turn to her remarkable and varied corpus of work and the fine critical writing that has served to illuminate it. 2 The title The Tree arose out of H.D.’s lifelong identification with trees and tree spirits. Additionally, there is resonance in her early reminiscence of Pound in a treehouse and Pound’s appellation for her, “Dryad”; the fact that H.D. played a tree in the Lawrence drama; and the use of tree imagery in correspondence between H.D. and Bryher. 3 The ripples of Pound’s fascism travelled far beyond the confines of his incarceration, and the absorption of this reality is something we see in the writing of both H.D. and Nancy Cunard. Their contrasting reactions – both disappointed and disillusioned, one meditatively so and the other outraged and indignant – are highly illustrative of their own experiences and temperaments. In this sense, these women’s relationships with Pound personalize not only the modernist influence that emerged from his work but also the lived experience of the fascist moment and what it must have been like for this ideology to creep deeply into one’s own circles and become pivotal to the life, thinking, and, ultimately, fate of a friend and former love. 4 “Fragment Forty-one … thou flittest to Andromeda” is frequently considered one of H.D.’s best dramatic lyrics, one where Sappho’s epigraph is expanded into a lyric meditation by an

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abandoned lover. On one level, the poem is a finely wrought elaboration of Sapphic betrayal by a female supplicant, which can be drawn out through the visual projections accompanying the recitation of the poem. And yet, as critics like Louis Martz and Erika Rohrbach have argued, H.D.’s drafting process and coded references within the poem also implicate H.D.’s husband, Richard Aldington, and his affairs with other women. 5 As yet, I have not materialized masks in staging this play, though it would certainly be possible. There may also be room to include some choral elements, either through soundtrack or by integrating live choral speaking during the course of the performance.

The Tree

List of characters played by solo performer h.d.

Hilda Doolittle, age 67; the play’s narrator (English intonation)

hilda

A young Hilda Doolittle (American)

ezra

American writer; childhood friend and adolescent love of Hilda

mrs doolittle

Hilda’s mother

mr doolittle

Hilda’s father

old school friend

High school friend

frances

Frances Gregg, university friend and love of Hilda

english critic

Figure on London literary scene

bertie

Socialite on London literary scene

margaret

Margaret Cravens, American pianist, patron of Ezra

delia

Hostess on London literary scene

brigit

Brigit Patmore, English member of the Imagist circle

richard

Richard Aldington, English writer, husband of Hilda

maid

Maid of Margaret Cravens in Paris

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nurse

In London after birth of daughter

official

Marries Hilda and Richard Aldington

arabella

Arabella Yorke, mistress of Richard Aldington

english man, american man

Gossips at party for D.H. Lawrence

lawrence

D.H. Lawrence, English writer, married to Frieda Lawrence

frieda lawrence

German émigreé; married to D.H. Lawrence

landlady

At pension in Ealing and in Cornwall

gray

Cecil Gray, Scottish composer, friend of the Lawrences, father of Perdita Aldington, Hilda’s daughter

bryher

Bryher Ellerman, shipping heiress; long-time partner of Hilda

freud

Sigmund Freud, psychoanalyst; treated Hilda in 1933–34

Pre-recorded voices erich heydt

H.D.’s analyst in Switzerland, 1953–61

pound

One voiceover as indicated

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act i At rise, H . D. sits C.S. The setting is at Dr Brunner’s house in Küsnacht, Switzerland, 1953.1 heydt 2 (voice) Frau Aldington, thank you for waiting. Now, as I understand it you have been here at Dr Brunner’s house for a few weeks now … h.d. Yes. heydt (voice) You prefer it to the clinic? H . D.

raises her eyebrows as though to say “wouldn’t you?”

heydt (voice) You have a history of breakdown. It is true that the war was difficult on many. H . D.

is silent.

heydt (voice) Now, if you will extend your arm, Sister will administer a hypodermic to help you relax.

1 During the composition of End to Torment, H.D. stayed at the Klinik Dr Brunner in Küsnacht, Switzerland. As related in Compassionate Friendship, H.D. stayed some time in Dr Brunner’s house before taking a room in the clinic. 2 Erich Heydt (1920–1991), H.D.’s doctor and (later) confidant. The sessions with Dr Heydt are a condensation of H.D.’s recollection of their first meeting and the years (1953–60) that H.D. spent in conversation with him as a friend and analysand.

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Staging Modernist Lives H . D.

extends her arm, slowly. Blackout. Lights rise on a new session. H . D. rubs her arm where the hypodermic has been inserted.

heydt (voice) You know Ezra Pound,3 don’t you? h.d. (To audience) A shock from a stranger. Perhaps he has injected me or re-injected me with Ezra. What business is it of his? heydt (voice) I saw him, you know. H . D.

looks up.

heydt (voice) When I was travelling in America on fellowship. I visited various hospitals and clinics. I saw him in the garden surrounded by a circle of visitors – disciples, really. I asked who they were. I had seen some of them in the canteen. h.d. (To audience) I do not want to talk of this. heydt (voice) Why do you look out of the window? I am talking to you. h.d. I was too weak to listen or care. But maybe I did care.4 Short blackout. A new session.

3 Ezra Pound (1885–1972), American writer. 4 “You know Ezra Pound” to “did care” adapted from End to Torment, 11.

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heydt (voice) You must write about him. h.d. But what I write, they don’t like.5 heydt (voice) Then why were you so excited when you read those notes to me? h.d. I don’t know – I don’t know – it’s the fiery moment but it’s all so long ago. heydt (voice) It has no time. It’s existentialist – h.d. (To audience) There’s a word I can never cope with – heydt (voice) It has no time, it’s out of time, eternal.6 h.d. Dr Erich Heydt injected me with Ezra, jabbing a needle into my arm, “You know Ezra Pound, don’t you?” That was almost five years ago. It took a long time for the virus or the antivirus to take effect. But the hypodermic needle did its work, or didn’t it? There was an incalculable element.7 pound (voice) My only real criticism is that it is not my child!8

5 “You must write” to “don’t like” adapted from ibid., 4. 6 Adapted from ibid., 26. 7 Ibid., 20–1. 8 This line recurs consistently in End to Torment.

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h.d. He lay on the floor of the Iron Cage and wrote the Pisan Cantos.9 He lay on the floor … Mussolini strung up by his ankles. Ezra would have destroyed me and the centre they call “Air and Crystal” in my poetry.10 heydt (voice) Frau Aldington, I must leave for a moment. Will you wait? h.d. Yes. (Sounds of door closing) Where would I go? A turn-of-the-century dance song plays. H . D. listens for a moment, trying to place the music. h.d. (To audience) In 1901, Ezra Pound was maybe sixteen; I was a year younger. Immensely sophisticated, immensely superior, immensely rough-and-ready, a product not like any of my brothers and brothers’ friends.11 I suffered excruciatingly from his clumsy dancing.12 I suffered, indeed I suppose we all did. He himself, in a certain sense, made no mistakes. He gave, he took. He gave extravagantly.13 One would dance with him for what he might say.14 The music grows louder. H . D . is “danced” around the chair and becomes a young HILDA in the process. Both EZRA and HILDA are out of breath. 9 Ibid., 44. 10 Ibid., 35. 11 Adapted from ibid., 3. The original describes Pound in 1905, when he is nineteen. 12 H.D. alludes to Pound’s poor dance skills several times in her characterizations of him, notably in End to Torment and HER mione. 13 End to Torment, 49. 14 Ibid., 3.

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ezra Hilda Doolittle. What a queer name. Hasn’t anyone ever told you you look more like a wood spirit? A dryad.15 A very tall one.16 hilda No. And what are you supposed to be? ezra Well, it’s a Hallowe’en party, isn’t it? I am a Tunisian princeling. I purchased this headpiece on my travels in Africa.17 hilda Africa? ezra Yes. Tunisia. Extraordinary culture. I wrote a great many poems to tall women while I was there.18 Music ends. h.d. A group of us, young poets, Ezra and William Carlos Williams, I and others would go to parties and picnics. Ezra had been everywhere – to Europe. He tried to educate us. ezra Now Bill, Hilda, try this. It’s a French cheese called brie.

15 H.D. and Pound first met at a Hallowe’en party at the Burd School in Philadelphia in 1901. This scene is a condensation of this anecdote and Pound’s invention of his lifelong nickname for H.D. A dryad is a tree nymph or female tree spirit in Greek mythology. 16 H.D. was 5⬘11⬙. 17 In 1898, an aunt took Pound and his mother on a trip to Tunisia, Venice, and Gibraltar. 18 Pound’s literary experiments began at a young age, mostly stilted imitations of formal poetic styles.

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hilda But the ham sandwiches? ezra Just try the brie, Dryad, it’s … educational. hilda Oh, Ezra, it’s hideous. Isn’t it, Bill? ezra You – you are philistines – you have no palates. No palates! Blast – it’s starting to rain. Get the books, Bill. Come on, Dryad, run for the tree. h.d. But rain was transfixing in Philadelphia. Transformative. hilda Come, beautiful rain. Beautiful rain, welcome.19 (Runs as though into the sea) Whirl up sea – whirl your pointed pines, splash your great pines on our rocks, hurl your green over us, cover us with your pools of fir.20 mrs doolittle 21 Wake up, Hilda, wake up. You walked out into the sea and were taken by the undertow. You had to be dragged out unconscious. Wake up now. You’ve ruined your dress.22 19 The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, 69. 20 Excerpted from “Oread” in Collected Poems, 55. 21 H.D.’s mother, Helen Eugenia (Wolle) Doolittle (1853–1927), homemaker with talents in painting and music. 22 The incident is as described by Williams in The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, 70–1.

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h.d. I was always ruining my dresses. And Ezra was always reciting poetry. ezra “Rendez Vous.” A poem for Hilda Doolittle. She hath some tree-born spirit of the wood About her, and the wind is in her hair Meseems he whisp’reth and awaiteth there As if somewise he also understood. The moss-grown kindly trees, meseems, she could As kindred claim, for tho to some they wear A harsh dumb semblance, unto us that care23 – h.d. Truly dreadful poetry. But the sentiment was nice. ezra There, Dryad, you are like a tree spirit, aren’t you? I wrote it for you. I’ve written a whole book for you. Hilda’s book. Do you like it? You should like it. I wrote it for you. h.d. There was a treehouse that my younger brother had built – bench boards and a sort of platform.24 A young HILDA jumps up onto the chair, which becomes the treehouse.

23 Excerpted from “Rendez Vous,” in “Hilda’s Book,” reprinted in Michael King’s edited edition of End to Torment, 84. “Hilda’s Book” is a series of poems Pound wrote for H.D. during the opening years of their relationship, 1905–07. In addition to the association Pound makes here between H.D. and “some tree-born spirit of the wood,” another poem in the collection is called “The Tree.” H.D. makes frequent associations between herself and trees throughout her writing. 24 End to Torment, 12. In the original, H.D. says “crow’s nest” rather than “treehouse.” The substitution has been made for clarity.

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hilda From there, the house was hidden by great branches. Ezra’s kisses were electric, magnetic, they did not so much warm, they magnetized, vitalized.25 turns toward EZRA as though mid-embrace, then breaks away.

HILDA

Look, Ezra, it’s the last trolley. Don’t miss the last train to Wyncote.26 Come on – ezra No, Dryad.27 hilda He snatches me back. We sway with the wind. There is no wind. We sway with the stars. They are not far. We slide, slip, fly down through the branches, leap together to the ground. (Balances precariously and then leaps off the chair) No, I say, breaking from his arms. No, drawing back from his kisses. I’ll run ahead and stop the trolley, no – quick, get your things – books –whatever you left in the hall. ezra (Running for the trolley) I’ll get them next time! hilda Run. Run. He just catches the trolley, swaying dangerously, barely stopping, only half-stopping. Now I must face them in the house. mr doolittle 28 He was late again. 25 Adapted from ibid., 4. 26 H.D. and Ezra Pound both lived in suburbs of Philadelphia, she in Upper Darby and he in Wyncote. 27 End to Torment, 12. 28 H.D.’s father, Charles Leander Doolittle (1843–1919). Doolittle was a professor of astronomy at Lehigh University in Bethlehem and subsequently worked as the director of the Flower Observatory at the University of Pennsylvania.

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hilda My father was winding the clock. My mother said – mrs doolittle Where were you? I was calling. Didn’t you hear me? Where is Ezra Pound? hilda Oh, he’s gone. mrs doolittle But his books? Hat? hilda He’ll get them next time. (To audience) Why had I ever come down out of that tree?29 Hilda curls up in the chair and writes a letter. To Mr William Carlos Williams: Dearest Bill. It is important that I let you know that I have decided to dedicate my life and love to one who has been, beyond all others, torn and lonely – and ready to crucify himself yet more for the sake of helping all – I mean that I have promised to marry Ezra. I tell you because you are to me, Billy, nearer and dearer than many – than most.30 h.d. The next few months were much the same, Ezra’s kisses, Ezra’s books, Ezra. Filling up room, filling space. There was no air for studies at Bryn Mawr. I left in my second year, having done badly in mathematics – and English. I read the books that Ezra gave me: Swinburne, Ibsen, mystical yogi books. I watched the sky. 29 “He snatches me back” to “out of that tree” adapted from End to Torment, 12. 30 Adapted from letter to William Carlos Williams from H.D., quoted in Barbara Guest’s Herself Defined, 6.

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A faint projection of birds against a Greek-blue sky appears. hilda Do you see that bird, Mama? The Greeks made bird flight symbolic. I mean the Greeks said that this spelt this. The sort of way the wing went against the blue sky was, I suppose, a sort of pencil, a sort of stylus engraving, to the minds of the augurers, signs, symbols that meant things …31 hieroglyphics against the sky … mrs doolittle Hilda, you say such pretty, odd things. You ought to go on writing … hilda Writing? mrs doolittle Those dear little stories you did … hilda Oh, Mama, that’s not writing.

32

The birds turn into hieroglyphs and then disappear. h.d. (To audience) Writing was something different, something, something else … mrs doolittle Someone at the door for you, Hilda. It’s Ezra Pound.

31 HER mione, 125. 32 “Hilda” to “not writing” in ibid., 80.

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hilda My parents always said “Ezra Pound” and would never answer about him directly. They would say – mrs doolittle He is so eccentric. He is impossible; he told Professor Schelling that Bernard Shaw was more important than Shakespeare. hilda Or – mrs doolittle He makes himself conspicuous; he wears those lurid, bright socks. The sophomores threw him in the pond. You can’t possibly marry him. hilda Or – mrs doolittle He’s taking graduate courses now and will be an instructor of Romance languages. He’s very far away, dear. hilda Or – mrs doolittle He’s lost his position at Wabash College. They’ve dismissed him. A scandal. A girl in his room – hilda Was there a girl in your room, Ezra? ezra Oh, yes. I found her in the snow, when I went to post a letter. She was stranded from a – from a travelling variety company. She had nowhere to go. I asked her to my room. She slept in my bed. I slept

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on the floor.33 Anyway, they say in Wyncote I am bisexual and given to unnatural lust. You must come away with me, Dryad.34 hilda But how could I? His father would scrape enough for him to live on in Europe. I had nothing.35 old school friend Anyway – hilda An old school friend confided, as if to cheer me up. old school friend They say he was engaged to Mary Moore.36 And Bessie Elliott37 could have had him for the asking. There was Katherine Heyman,38 before that. h.d. And so in 1908 Ezra sailed to Europe – with Mary Moore.39 hilda It was dark without Ezra, very dark. A vacuum.

33 End to Torment, 14. This incident is alluded to several times in End to Torment as well as in HER mione and Paint It Today. Pound, who had been appointed an instructor of French and Spanish language at Wabash College, was dismissed over the matter in January 1908. 34 End to Torment, 15. 35 Ibid. 36 Mary Moore, poet, from Trenton, New Jersey. 37 Pound was simultaneously courting H.D. and Mary Moore and possibly other women as well. H.D. creates pseudonyms for the women Pound was close to. Viola Baxter is a likely candidate for the character Hermione refers to as “Bessie Smith.” 38 Hermione (the Hilda character) refers to “Louise Skidmore” as another romantic rival for Pound’s attention. It is possible, though less certain, that this is a pseudonym for the pianist Katherine (Kitty) Ruth Heyman, who was eight years Pound’s senior. 39 Pound and Moore sailed for Europe on Saint Patrick’s Day, 1908.

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I have had enough. I gasp for breath. … I have had enough – border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies, herbs, sweet-cress. … For this beauty, beauty without strength, chokes out life. I want wind to break, scatter these pink-stalks, snap off their spiced heads, fling them about with dead leaves – … O to blot out this garden to forget, to find a new beauty in some terrible wind-tortured place.40 h.d. The light, as I believe frequently happens in these circumstances, came from the most unexpected quarter. I had been invited by one of the usual hangers-over of tepid school friendships to an “afternoon.” There was nothing to be done about it. Too listless to actually rebel from middle-class society and too listless, at the particular moment, to frame an adequate excuse, I went.41 40 Excerpted from “Sheltered Garden” in Collected Poems, 19–21. 41 Adapted from Paint It Today, 7–8.

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Projection of Greek statue of a woman’s form. hilda It was not that the girl, Frances,42 was beautiful, judged by the ordinary standards. She came into the room, stood stiff against the oak doors that closed heavily behind her. She was inordinately selfconscious. Perhaps she was shy. Her face was slightly spotted. Her colour was bad. The slate-grey raincoat did not do it justice. The grey veil was not altogether an inspiration. The girl, I thought, somehow or other felt this, was almost glad of this. It was her eyes, set in the unwholesome face; it was the shoulders, a marble splendour; it was her hand, small, unbending, stiff with archaic grandeur; it was her eyes.43 I went to see her in an amateur play. She came to visit me at home. We read poetry and wrote letters. We kissed. (To FRANCES ) Sister, my sister, O fleet sweet swallow;44 thy way is long to the sun and the south. We were neither girls nor boys. Not girls or boys. I, Hilda, tell you that I love you, Frances Gregg. Men and women will come and say I love you. I love you Hilda, you Frances. Men will say I love you Hilda but will anyone ever say I love you Frances as I say it?45 h.d. Then a letter from Ezra. ezra I’m coming back to gawd’s own god damn country.46

42 Frances Gregg (1885–1941), American writer. 43 Adapted from Paint It Today, 8–9. 44 H.D. is quoting from Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poem “Itylus,” also quoted in HER mione, 158. 45 Adapted from Asphodel, 52–3. 46 Letter from Pound to H.D., quoted in Guest, 24.

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h.d. Ezra wasn’t happy about Frances. ezra You and that girl, a hundred years ago, would have been burned in Salem, for witches.47 hilda We witches. Wee witches, we laughed and cast spells, invoking all the gods of Greece. We were very, very careful. Then one day, Frances was ill. sinks to the floor and presses her hands against FRANCES ’s body. A white Greek landscape appears in the background. HILDA

I sank down to the floor, through the floor, above the earth, was on the earth, rock of earth-rock simply. Prophetess to prophetess on some Delphic headland. I pressed my cold hands against her eyelids. frances Your hands are healing. They possess a dynamic white power. hilda Sleep, sleep, my Itylus. frances Tell me what Ezra Pound says about me. Tell me, Hilda. Greek landscape fades. hilda (Surprised) He says you are – he says you are –

47 Paint It Today, 9.

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frances He thinks I’m – I’m beautiful? hilda Oh, he doesn’t exactly say it. He thinks you very striking. h.d. Frances lay passive, hypnotized by white hands.48 frances He has kissed me too, Hilda. He loves me. I’m sure of it. And I love him. If I say I love Ezra, it isn’t the flimsy thing you call love. You loved him, if you loved him, superficially. You never saw the bright sort of aura that he wore, the poems he wrote for me. Perhaps you thought you loved him. I suffered, watching. hilda One I love, two I love …

49

h.d. Ezra went back to Europe and left us both with the same ugly pink carnations. And soon after, Frances, her mother, and I toured Europe as well. It was the summer of 1911. Frances’s mother didn’t like me, didn’t think me good for Frances. But then again my mother didn’t like Frances either. mrs doolittle This girl – she’s all wrong. People think her most – most unwholesome.50 h.d. When Frances and her mother went home, I stayed. I stayed in London. With Ezra. 48 “through the floor” to “white hands” adapted from HER mione, 180. 49 “If I say I love” to “two I love” adapted from ibid, 218–19. 50 Adapted from ibid., 176.

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Projection of British Museum and area circa 1911. (Thinks back, weighing her words) In London, people did not laugh at Ezra. People asked his opinion, a little reverently. It was funny watching people reverencing Ezra. He had done a book on Dante and Provence and Renaissance Latin poetry. Ezra in London. His clothes were not so odd here, his little brush of a beard and his velvet coat and his cravats like flowers in mosaic of maroon and green and gilt and odd vermilion. Ezra didn’t look odd though he looked more odd than ever. People seemed to understand, did not waste time commenting on his clothes. Said, “Ezra Pound, odd fellow … he has a flair for beauty.”51 hilda They were high times in London, on the literary scene. Symbolism, free verse, had taken us by storm. Ezra took me ’round: ezra This is Miss Doolittle – they call her – she loves London. bertie O, I am so glad. Why do you love London? ezra O let me really tell you, Bertie, that Miss Hilda Doolittle loves London. bertie Such a quaint person. hilda 52

Yes, I love London.

51 Asphodel, 71. 52 “This is” to “London” adapted from ibid., 41.

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ezra You’re odd here; you’re a great success, but you don’t dress right.53 You seem somehow more provincial than ever.54 hilda Provincial? ezra I said I don’t like that grey chiffon, it’s too nun-ish. Maybe all right for Philadelphia. hilda Yes. No. ezra Yes. No. Yes. Have you heard a word I’m saying? hilda No. I mean yes. ezra Yes, I mean no. What in Hell’s name do you mean?55 hilda I mean, we’re not engaged, Ezra? ezra 56

Gawd forbid.

h.d. But Ezra could be tender, thoughtful suddenly.

53 Ibid., 49. 54 Ibid., 39. 55 “I said” to “do you mean” adapted from ibid., 49. 56 “I mean” to “forbid” adapted from ibid., 41.

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ezra Getting enough to eat, Dryad? hilda O lots. Yes. ezra I make a point of looking up old Mrs Towers once a week to find out. hilda Yes, Ezra, she tells me when you drop in. She adores you.57 Oh, excuse me, Lady Prescott – ezra Don’t be so provincial, Dryad. Don’t let me hear you saying Lady Prescott that way again. It’s back-stairs. Everybody calls her Delia.58 hilda Oh, excuse me, Delia – h.d. It was here apparently “smart” – as they called it – to be shabby. delia You have to be a duchess to dress like a fish-wife. It’s sheer crass outrage. Putting on airs. She’s making out her pedigree to be somewhat on the grand scale. hilda How do you mean, Delia? But she’s shabby.

57 “But Ezra” to “adores you” in ibid., 71–2. 58 Ibid., 42.

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delia I mean that people here can’t be shabby unless they’re great.59 Projection replaced with salon at BRIGIT ’s house. h.d. There were parties. And there was poetry. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford. It was the war before the Great War – to free modern poetry from Romanticism, Victorianism – and adjectives. There were debates about metrical experiments, subjects from contemporary life, natural language. On these occasions, Ezra’s poetry may not have been the best, but he was certainly the loudest. ezra Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace. You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to music! I have no life save when the swords clash. But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson, Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.60 hilda Hands closed over Ezra’s mouth. A slim, elegant shape crowded into the divan between me and Ezra. brigit 61 (Closing her hands over EZRA ’s mouth) Ezra, darling.

59 “It was here” to “great” in ibid., 61. 60 Pound, excerpted from “Sestina Altaforte,” New Selected Poems and Translations, 11. Pound had a habit of reciting this poem loudly in public, including in a Parisian restaurant with Aldington and H.D., which caused the waiters to erect screens around their table. 61 Brigit Patmore (1882–1965), English writer.

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hilda Ezra had removed the hands from his mouth and was gallantly, in his best Provençal manner, kissing them. Backs of small hands. Yes, Ezra did it nicely. brigit So quaint of you, dearest, to read that poem. ezra Why, princess, Brigit? brigit Well, you told me, didn’t you, it was written for – moi? ezra Did I? Maybe, but you see I tell everybody that. brigit O, Ezra, shockingly inadequate. If you are being cutting, be cutting. ezra I leave that for you, dearest Brigit. hilda I slunk further into the corner of the divan. Who was this marooncoloured person who had stolen Ezra? Ezra was petting her, making himself charming. ezra Brigit, if you don’t mind … brigit What, dear Ezra? ezra There’s someone in the corner, you’ve not noticed. Hilda.

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brigit O yes. I have. I did notice. But is it grown up? Why do you ever let it come to parties?62 Listen, my dear, let me introduce you to someone – another enfant like yourself. (Beckoning someone in the distance) Richard – this is Hilda Doolittle, the American. Hilda, this is Richard Aldington.63 He writes such beautiful poems, don’t you, darling? And what a gorgeous moustache. Come along, Ezra. Projection fades. Spotlight. heydt (voice) Here, take this. h.d. (Startled) What is it? heydt (voice) Selections from the new German-English edition of Pound’s Cantos. Do you want it? h.d. (To audience) The face looked at me from the dark reflection of the paperback cover. I liked the feel of the cover. The face, full-face, bronze against the dark background, looked at me, a reflection in a metal mirror. (To HEYDT ) No. heydt (voice) But this is about you. Eva Hesse says that Pound invented the Imagist title to explain the verses of the young poet – poetess – here – you. h.d. (Dryly) Yes. I read that somewhere before.64

62 “Hands closed” to “parties” adapted from Asphodel, 59–60. 63 Richard Aldington (1892–1962), English writer. 64 “Here, take this” to “somewhere before” adapted from End to Torment, 4–5.

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Lighting change. (Pause) Was it 1912? Ezra, Brigit, Richard, a French critic named Flint, and I spent most every afternoon in tea shops, talking about poetry. We were all writing. Or trying to. Then one day, in the tea room of the British Museum, I gave four of my new poems to Ezra. I waited in silence while he read. “Hermes of the Ways” is projected on a screen overlaid on an image of Greek shore. The hard sand breaks, and the grains of it are clear as wine. Far off over the leagues of it, the wind, playing on the wide shore, piles little ridges, and the great waves break over it.65 ezra But Dryad, this is poetry! (Approaches the screen and writes on the page) Cut this out, shorten this line. “Hermes of the Ways” is a good title. I’ll send this to Harriet Monroe66 of Poetry. Have you a copy? Yes? Then we can send this, or I’ll type it when I get back. Will this do? (Scrawls H.D. Imagiste at the bottom of the page) H.D. Imagiste.67

65 “Hermes of the Ways,” Collected Poems, 37. 66 Harriet Monroe (1860–1936), American editor and critic. Monroe founded the experimental and modernist magazine Poetry, which she edited and sustained until her death. 67 End to Torment, 18.

69

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(To audience) Dear Harriet, I’ve had luck again, and am sending you some modern stuff by an American. It is objective – no slither; direct – no excessive use of adjectives, no metaphors that won’t permit examination. It’s straight talk, straight as the Greek!68 The poem fades. hilda Then a letter from Frances. frances I will be married when you get this. A person, a professor, Louis Umfreville Wilkinson,69 not one of your little poets. I’ll write you when we get to London. We will be honeymooning from there in Belgium and we want you to come with us. ps: Perhaps one day wee witches will grow up.70 hilda Did I decide not to go? No. Ezra decided.71 I went to the station as arranged with bags and baggage and found Ezra had waited, seen me, seen the things coming through, countermanded the order, bought the ticket back from Frances’s husband. Could I see Frances after this? Frances’s last word had been with an odd theatrical little lift of brows “O I hadn’t realized it had gone so far with Ezra Pound.” The husband was all suavity, but I saw, they let me see, what they thought. ezra Her mother cabled –

68 Adapted from a letter to Harriet Monroe, October 1912, in Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, 11. 69 Louis Umfreville Wilkinson (1881–1966), English writer and lecturer. 70 “Perhaps…” in Paint It Today, 32. 71 Pound disapproved of Gregg’s marriage to Wilkinson as he suspected it was a cover for Gregg’s affair with Wilkinson’s friend John Cowper Powys, who was already married. This was likely the case. H.D. describes Pound’s objections in Asphodel, 84.

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hilda He had made that up and other things but shame burnt across me. I don’t think I can stay now in London. Everything looks different and my room’s changed. I mean it used to be full of light, rose colours, all your letters. (To audience) If I go across to Paris will you write me? Will you, Richard?72 Images of Paris appear on the screen. Parisian music from the twenties plays over the speakers. hilda Richard got a job, came over. Paris suddenly became (with the coming of Richard) Paris. Space existed as space, Paris as Paris.73 Paris was all symbolism and cubism. I began writing free verse at length. Music and Paris images fade. While in Paris I visited Margaret Cravens, the American pianist Ezra had introduced me to in London.74 Margaret had everything. It was quite something to have everything. Margaret was very kind. Projection of MARGARET ’s elegant home interior, including piano and painting of EZRA . hilda Thank you so much, Margaret, yes I do like lemon. Yes, in England everyone has milk, never lemon. They say, “Lemon is so Russian.” margaret You see, I seem to know you, knowing people that you do.

72 “Did I decide” to “Will you, Richard?” adapted from ibid., 88. 73 Adapted from ibid., 96. 74 Margaret Cravens (1881–1912), American pianist.

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hilda Yes. Yes. What people? margaret Well, there’s Ezra Pound. hilda O, of course, Ezra Pound. h.d. Did this Margaret love Ezra? Ezra kept coming up, coming back. margaret (Gesturing to painting on the wall) That’s a portrait of him. hilda O yes, I saw it when I came in. margaret I told Ezra I’d keep it here though it’s really his, belongs to him. hilda O yes. margaret And what really is the girl like he’s engaged to? This Dorothy Shakespear.75 hilda Engaged to? But I didn’t know he was engaged. h.d. (To audience) I had been under the vague half-impression that it was I who was vaguely half-engaged to Ezra Pound. 75 Dorothy Shakespear (1886–1973), English artist. Shakespear and Pound were married in 1914 after a five-year courtship.

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margaret O, but I thought he’d told you. hilda O no, never. margaret But how terrible of me. He wrote me in the strictest confidence. hilda O, Ezra didn’t exactly tell me but he hinted. margaret Well, I thought it odd. He said, always said, that he was your nearest relative – hilda (Quoting EZRA ) “Male relative. Nearest male relative.”76 h.d. With Richard there, I was no longer in the same catalogue as “poor Margaret” as they called her. Margaret herself being a little vague, lost, talking on and off in bright spurts about Pater,77 about Landor,78 and other writers. Talking of the pianist Walter Rummel.79 Richard finding Margaret clever, sparks flying. Ezra making a little mew-call from the divan in the corner. ezra Ain’t you ever, Dryad, going to speak to me again properly?

76 “Margaret had everything” to “Nearest male relative” adapted from Asphodel, 92–3. 77 Walter Pater (1839–1894), English critic and novelist. 78 Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864), English writer. 79 Walter Rummel (1887–1953), German pianist. This line has been added to integrate H.D.’s view that Cravens was in love with Rummel or Pound (or both).

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hilda I can’t see that I, Ezra, haven’t. ezra What’s the matter? Why so standoffish, Dryad? h.d. (Confidentially, to audience) In light of Richard’s arrival, I could afford to sting out at him. hilda Don’t you think, Ezra, it was a little, just a little odd – ezra Odd, Dryad? hilda I mean if you were engaged to Dorothy Shakespear all that time to – to – kiss me. ezra The odd thing is not to kiss you, Dryad. hilda No. I don’t like it – ezra Listen, Dryad, darling. hilda O Ezra, you might – you might have told me – ezra Dryad, developing a puritan conscience – hilda No. No, that isn’t the argument. It doesn’t – seem – right –

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ezra Well, Dryad, as I never see my, ah – fiancée save when surrounded by layers of its mother, by its family portraits, by its own inhibitions, by the especial curve of the spiral of the social scale it belongs to, I think you might be – affable. hilda Would you be affable if I were engaged to – to – Richard? ezra Are you? hilda I didn’t say I was or wasn’t. Would you? h.d. But Ezra’s only answer was to draw me toward him, behind Margaret’s baby grand with its baby-grand manner scowling its disapproval.80 hilda (Pulling away) Don’t rumple and ruffle my dress. ezra Since when, Dryad, have you begun to worry about dresses? hilda Since this minute. richard Margaret … hilda … said Richard, from the other side of the room. 80 “in the same catalogue” to “scowling its disapproval” adapted from Asphodel, 96.

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richard We never ask you to play for us – ezra Gawd, don’t ask her – hilda Margaret looked up, an odd twist to her fine straight eyebrows. A white flame of pain crossed her eyes, dark eyes, wide apart staring like a crystal gazer’s. Why had Ezra said that? Was he being rude simply? But now his rudeness seemed insanity, seemed blatant cruelty. His rudeness, his casual approach to both of us, for I was sure he had kissed, had long been kissing Margaret. Wide flame of pain in the almond eyes of Margaret, flashed, went, and the almond eyes of Margaret were just odd almond eyes with a little glow of passion. margaret O, Ezra is like that. He thinks I play so badly. richard O – but you don’t – I’m sure you don’t. I know you do play nicely. hilda It was Richard. For a moment, pain was swept away and I loved Richard. Richard who was making me write again, who was bringing Margaret’s almond eyes back to their normal level of just rather odd blank kindness.81 Lights fade followed by the projected images of artworks from the Louvre, including the Venus de Milo. richard Hilda, darling, if I don’t marry you someone else will.

81 “Don’t rumple” to “odd blank kindness” adapted from ibid., 97–8.

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hilda Marry me? richard Hadn’t you thought about it? Isn’t it what we’ve been thinking of all the time?82 hilda Ezra says I should marry you.83 richard Well, Ezra is a genius when he isn’t a damn fool. Now that we are here at the Louvre, what is it you propose to see? Look at all these American tourists … And what is that girl doing in front of the Venus de Milo? hilda Richard laughed but here, in the flow of visitors, I hardly dared let go of realities. I dared not follow the curve of the white belly and short space before the breasts brought the curve to a sudden shadow.84 richard Look, it’s almost four o’clock. Shall we have tea, darling? hilda What? Oh. No. I said I was going to visit Margaret. She invited me for tea today. I had better run.

82 “if I don’t” to “all the time” in ibid., 66. 83 Despite – or perhaps because – H.D. and Pound were engaged and broke it off twice, Pound encouraged the relationship between Aldington and H.D. in several ways, including giving Aldington advice on courtship and recommending Aldington as a husband to H.D. This did not prohibit occasional jealousies on all sides. By and large Pound approved of Aldington. Aldington found Pound brilliant but pretentious. 84 “here, in the flow” to “shadow” in Paint It Today, 60.

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The museum images are replaced by the elegant façade of MARGARET ’s Paris house. hilda Miss Cravens, please. maid Mademoiselle est morte.85 hilda The maid said this simply. She made no gesture of apology. Something was lacking. People didn’t say in French, Mademoiselle is dead. They didn’t say in English, Miss est morte. Mademoiselle est morte. That is what she said. Was it possible I had mistaken it? Was she saying. Mademoiselle is out, or had I forgotten my French, did morte mean asleep or gone away to the country? But Mademoiselle asked me here for tea. It is Sunday? She asked me to come Sunday. What, what did Mademoiselle die of?86 h.d. The letter made it all clear. She was obsessed with the idea of some white afterlife, words like that. Some said she died of love, simply.87 Projection of the Pont Saint-Louis. hilda (Standing) Walking with Ezra by the Seine. We stood close together on a bridge near the Île Saint-Louis. I drew close to him. None of us left him alone – Ezra was carrying his ebony stick. He waved it toward the river, the chestnut blossoms, seemed to wave it, at all his friends and himself. 85 “Miss is dead.” Margaret Cravens shot herself in the chest with a small silver revolver the night of 1 June 1912. She left two notes on her piano: one for Walter Rummel and the other for Pound. H.D. arrived at Cravens’s for tea on 2 June, where she learned of the suicide. 86 “Mademoiselle est morte” to “die of” adapted from Asphodel, 100–1. 87 Adapted from ibid., 103.

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ezra (Slumping) And the morning stars sang together in glory88 – Projection fades. HILDA sits. h.d. Something about Margaret’s death helped me make a decision about Richard. We travelled Italy: Venice, Capri, Verona. An image of the Hermaphrodite appears on the screen. In Rome, we saw a statue of the Hermaphrodite.89 The gentle breathing image, modelled in strange, soft, honey-coloured stone.90 Not a girl or boy. official (Standing) Do you, Hilda, take Richard to be your loving husband, to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, as long as you both shall live?91 hilda (Pause) I do. sits, as though stunned. The image fades.

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88 “I drew close to him” to “glory” adapted from H.D.’s writing in The Cantos of Ezra Pound: Some Testimonies, quoted in Korg, 23. Pound returned to Paris about a week after Cravens’ death. He had been on a walking tour of southern France. 89 H.D. saw the statue at the Diocletian gallery in Rome during her visit with Aldington in December 1912. 90 “gentle” to “stone” in Paint It Today, 65. 91 H.D. and Aldington were married in the registry office of the district of Kensington, London, on 18 October 1913 in the presence of Pound and Helen and Charles Doolittle.

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h.d. Richard and I stayed in London. We had one perfect year. Then there was a war. A cloud.92 A baby – a daughter – born dead. A breakdown. nurse You know, dearie, you must not have another baby until after the war is over. You’d best keep your husband away from you.93 h.d. And there were the raids – slides off the chair and onto the floor beside RICHARD .

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hilda Read Browning to me, Richard. 94

richard What just do you want, dear, and the room’s too dark; can’t turn on the electricity ’til the raid’s over. hilda Read anything – your voice – it was always your voice – sometimes in the worst times, I hear your voice. richard (Putting his arm around HILDA ) Do keep still. Don’t fidget. Now rest there. What shall I read, darling? hilda (Lying against RICHARD ) That thing by Browning about Fortù – Fortù was it? The Englishman in Italy, you know what I mean. It takes me back to our travels in Sorrento, to Anacapri. It makes things come right. I know the baby – our baby – I know all that … 92 “there was a war. A cloud” in Paint It Today, 45. 93 Adapted from Bid Me to Live, 25. 94 Robert Browning (1812–1889), English poet.

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richard Hush, hush, darling. Sound of the blasts. hilda Another gun – perhaps we’ll go this time – read Fortù. richard Fortù, Fortù, my beloved one, / Sit here by my side.95 Blast. hilda Go on, go on reading, don’t let anything stop you. Go on. It will make things come right. Go on reading. Don’t let anything stop you. They only broke all the upstairs windows last time … They may do better this time …96 scuttles backward onto the chair, terrified by the bombs.

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h.d. (Recovering from the memory) Richard enlisted in 1916.97 Brigit Patmore began visiting our flat in Mecklenburgh Square.98

95 Richard is quoting from Robert Browning’s “The Englishman in Italy.” 96 Adapted from Asphodel, 108–9. 97 The Military Service Act was passed in March 1916. Likely recognizing conscription was inevitable, Aldington and his friend Carl Fallas enlisted in late May. 98 Brigit Patmore is the likely model for Mary/Merry Dalton, the character described here, in Asphodel. It is possible that Aldington and Patmore were romantically involved before Aldington met H.D. Based on H.D.’s account in Asphodel, it seems likely Aldington and Patmore were also together during the Aldingtons’ marriage. More certainly, Aldington and Patmore were romantic partners 1928–38.

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hilda The war turned things. On leave, Richard’s moods were more violent. The stranger became singularly strange, his language, his voice, the thing he brought into the room.99 Even now his “I won’t come back from the front, you might allow me a little fun” was someone else speaking.100 (To BRIGIT ) O, do stay here, Brigit. It’s too late. There will be raids tonight and you won’t want to be outside. Stay here in the big room with us. brigit How wonderful. How beautiful. hilda Richard went on undressing. Brigit didn’t want a nightdress. She pulled off the mauve and old gold and she was gold and mauve underneath. brigit I don’t take up much room. hilda Richard out of delicacy seemed to have removed bits only, rolled in his great coat. He was simply “rolling in” as people did nowadays. People didn’t sleep, pulled off bits of things and I pulled off bits of things. Richard seemed to be asleep. (To RICHARD and BRIGIT ) Who’ll blow out the last candle? But it must be almost day … Goodnight. Silence. Spotlight. As in a dream, I could hear them on the other side of the room, but why wake? Brigit was a slut, a little fox-coloured wench out of some 99 Bid Me to Live, 45. 100 Ibid., 49.

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restoration comedy. I had always known. Brigit was like that. Sleep with my arm above my head and listen if I want, for what I hear is nothing, a sort of sweep of swallow wings. But it had been a moment, a dream, a yellow lotus of forgetfulness …101 I was not indifferent when I strayed aside or loitered as we three went, or seemed to turn a moment from the path for that same amaranth. I was not dull and dead when I fell back on our couch at night. I was not indifferent though I turned and lay quiet. I was not dead in my sleep.102 h.d. Richard went back to his regiment in France … and then on leave … to France … another leave. Arabella Yorke,103 a young American, moved into our upstairs room. I never thought they would “carry on” to the extent that they did. richard Listen, it’s perfectly clear. I love you. I desire the other.104 We both believe in one love and many lovers. Darling, it won’t change us. A Greek landscape is projected in the background with an androgynous figure gradually revealed to be a young woman.

101 “How wonderful” to “forgetfulness” adapted from Asphodel, 130–1. 102 Excerpted from “Fragment Forty-One,” Collected Poems, 182–3. 103 Dorothy (Arabella) Yorke (1891–1971), American artist. 104 Bid Me to Live, 56. In the original, the Aldington character says “l’autre,” French for “the other.”

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hilda Ah, love is bitter and sweet, but which is more sweet, the sweetness or the bitterness? none has spoken it.105 … Let him go forth radiant, let life rise in his young breast, life is radiant, life is made for beautiful love and strange ecstasy, strait, searing body and limbs, tearing limbs and body from life; life is his if he ask, life is his if he take it, then let him take beauty as his right.106 … Love is bitter, but can salt taint sea-flowers, grief, happiness? Is it bitter to give back love to your lover if he crave it?

105 Excerpted from “Fragment Forty,” Collected Poems, 173. 106 Excerpted from “Amaranth,” Collected Poems, 313.

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Is it bitter to give back love to your lover if he wish it for a new favourite? who can say, or is it sweet? Is it sweet to possess utterly, or is it bitter, bitter as ash?107

107 Excerpted from “Fragment Forty,” Collected Poems, 173.

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act ii H.D.

sits C.S., waiting for another session with HEYDT to begin.

heydt (voice) Mrs Aldington, a pleasure to see you again. You continue to keep your journal? h.d. Yes. heydt (voice) Very good. Now, where did we leave off? h.d. (To audience) He pretends to disregard the “classic” Freudian technique but he is always eager for gossip of those very far-off days and people.108 heydt (voice) (Sound of shuffling pages, as though reviewing notes) Ah yes, we were speaking of D.H. Lawrence.109 h.d. Lorenzo, we called him. heydt (voice) Lorenzo, yes. Continue, please. h.d. (Looking away) What can I tell you? …

108 Magic Mirror, 47. 109 D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930), English writer.

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hilda (Eagerly, to audience) Richard and I met D.H. Lawrence during the first days of the war in a fabulous suite of rooms overlooking Green Park on Piccadilly. They discussed him before he came in to the party. english man I heard the old chap is tubercular.110 delia He ran away with someone’s wife, a baroness, wasn’t it?111 american man His novel is already being spoken of as oversexed, sex-mania, they say. A damn shame if they suppress it!112 hilda Then the little man came in, looking slender and frail in evening dress. His wife, Frieda,113 was elegant, poured into a black gown. Her hair was like wheat.114 richard What’s this?

110 Lawrence died in 1930 from complications due to tuberculosis. The fact that H.D. incorporates Lawrence’s illness (and other details) is indicative of the fact that she wrote and rewrote the manuscript of Bid Me to Live over two decades. The novel is set during the Second World War, though it is based on events that took place during the First. 111 Lawrence met Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen) in 1912. She was married to Ernest Weekley, a former professor of Lawrence’s at University College, Nottingham, and the couple had three young children. Lawrence and von Richthofen eloped and were married in Britain after she secured her divorce in 1914. 112 Most of Lawrence’s novels were heavily censored for sexual content. The scandal here may refer to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. 113 Frieda von Richthofen Weekley Lawrence (1879–1956), German literary figure. 114 “first days of the war” to “hair was like wheat” adapted from Bid Me to Live, 137.

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hilda (Startled out of the memory) That? (To audience) I was waiting for Richard to say something in keeping with the whole mad show of his affair. He should say, “Arabella is waiting for me upstairs. Arabella is a star performer. Arabella understands these things. I’m going up to Arabella.” richard (Interrupting) Old Lawrence. What is damn old Lorenzo writing to you? hilda Read it – richard (Reading letter aloud) Dear Hilda – There is no use trying to believe that all this war really exists. It really doesn’t matter. We must go on. I know that Richard will come back. In your “Eurydice” poem, your frozen altars mean something, but I don’t like the second half of the Orpheus sequence … It’s your part to be a woman, the woman vibrations, Eurydice should be enough. You can’t deal with both. If you go on – richard Go on, what? What’s this poem that you’ve been writing for Old Lorenzo? hilda I wasn’t writing it for Lorenzo. (To audience) But I had, I was; it was Lawrence’s pale face and the archaic Greek beard and the fire-blue eyes in the burnt-out face that I had seen, an Orpheus head.115 (To Richard) … Well, you’re upstairs so much of the time –

115 “What’s this?” to “Orpheus head” adapted from ibid., 50–1.

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richard What did you expect when you so sweetly refuse me and give us carte blanche? hilda I don’t in the least know what I expected – richard I should think you didn’t. It’s obvious that you only wanted to get me out of the way – hilda Out of the way? richard One can’t be expected to believe in the entire altruism of your scheme. hilda Scheme? richard Obvious – hilda You’re quite wrong – richard Wrong? In the end – hilda The end! (To audience) If he said anything now, I would tear at his throat. My hands were thin, were fine, but if they met on his bull throat … richard Darling –

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hilda (To audience) Why did he say that? richard What’s come over us? hilda I didn’t know. Couldn’t say. But I was so tired and the coal had entirely given out. Looking at each other like two peasants in a Tolstoy novel. Life is Russian. Life is damn bad art.116 h.d. By 1917 there were more rumours about the Lawrences. landlady They left their light on and were singing German songs during a raid, like. The wife is German, right? Spies, the police think. Gave ’em three days to clear out.117 lawrence It’s your fault, you damn Prussian!118 h.d. And then after dinner, when Lawrence had burnt himself out. lawrence Frieda is there. Hilda, you are here. Frieda is there at my right hand. You are here. You are there for all eternity, our love is written in blood.

116 “Well, you’re upstairs” to “damn bad art” adapted from Asphodel, 145–6. 117 After a harassment campaign by the British authorities, the Lawrences were forced to leave Cornwall in 1917 in accordance with a notice delivered under the Defence of the Realm Act. In addition to their eviction, the Lawrences were not allowed to reside on the British coast and were told to keep authorities apprised of their whereabouts. 118 Bid Me to Live, 75.

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hilda But whose love? His and Frieda’s? No – that was taken for granted. It was to be a perfect triangle.119 The next day, everyone was out. Lawrence was writing. That seemed to be all that mattered. Now was the moment to answer his amazing proposal of last night, his “for all eternity.” I put out my hand. My hand touched his sleeve. He shivered, he seemed to move back, move away, like a hurt animal.120 Frieda said when we were alone – frieda But Lawrence does not really care for women. He only cares for men. Hilda, you have no idea what he is like.121 hilda A party. What a party. Lawrence, Frieda, Richard, Arabella, and Cecil Gray,122 a young composer, a favourite of Frieda’s. Lawrence saying – lawrence (Directing) We’ll do a Biblical charade; you be the tree of life, Hilda. hilda Adam and Eve were Richard and Arabella, of course. Cecil Gray was the angel at the gate. It was the end of madness. It was the beginning. Gray was the angel, a joke with an umbrella. Bright light illuminates the stage. Projected shadow figures represent the dancers. 119 “Frieda is there” to “triangle” in ibid., 77–8. 120 Ibid., 81. 121 Quoted in Norman Holmes Pearson’s foreword to Tribute to Freud, xiv. Lawrence had developed a strong (and possibly sexual) relationship with a farmer named William Henry Hocking in Cornwall, a source of tension in the Lawrences’ (open) marriage. 122 Cecil Gray (1895–1951), Scottish composer, musician, and critic.

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lawrence Take your umbrella! Cecil, you be the angel with the flaming sword – it will be our best Bible ballet yet! Dance! You dance! hilda But I’m the tree, or what am I? lawrence You are the apple tree – you dance. Now Adam and Eve, you come along here, and Frieda, you be the serpent, you growl and writhe. frieda Serpents don’t growl. lawrence (To audience) You be the audience, you be the chorus of the damned. Good. Come on, Eve – excellent, Arabella. Come along, Richard. richard What are you? What’s left for you? Oh, I see, Old Lorenzo, of course, is Gawd-a’-mightly. lawrence Women, I say unto thee … The tree has got to dance, dance, hand them the apples. More, more, more – enough!123 Blackout. Spotlight S.L. cecil Come on, Person. hilda Cecil Gray grabbed my hand and we made our way out onto the landing, out of the madness … 123 “We’ll do a Biblical charade” to “enough” adapted from Bid Me to Live, 111–12.

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Lights up. h.d. (From chair) Even when I had run away to Cornwall with Cecil Gray, Richard continued to write from the front: richard (Kneeling) O my dear Dooley, I would so like to be like your Cecil Gray – witty, contemptuous of “ordinary” people – how I envy Gray his contempt – but there are too many dead men, too much misery. I am choked and stifled not so much by my own misery as by the unending misery of all these thousands. Who shall make amends for it? Dooley, I have made a great mess of my life. But I would have been content if I hadn’t made you suffer so much. And then, and then, I must look after Arabella. I find it hard to write to her. Twice last week I tried to get killed and was unlucky or lucky, whichever you like. Isn’t this folly? Do be happy with Cecil. I shall get over this someday.124 hilda When I told him I was pregnant, Cecil said he would “look after me,” but I ran away. I couldn’t sit night after night … We would have had a pretty house and the romantic scandal all patched up, poetical, and his family so wealthy … I couldn’t have stood it.125 h.d. One day, a girl came to visit me. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-four. bryher 126 Oh, Mrs Aldington, I hope you don’t mind, I got your address from Mrs Shorter. I am Bryher Ellerman. And – I – I must tell you I think 124 Adapted from Aldington’s letter to H.D., May 1918, in Richard Aldington & H.D.: Their Lives in Letters, 1918–1961, 49. 125 Adapted from Asphodel, 170. 126 Bryher (Annie Winifred) Ellerman (1894–1983), English writer, editor, and heir to the Ellerman shipping fortune. Ellerman and H.D. met in July of 1918.

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you are the greatest poet ever. I’ve read all your poems. And memorized your first book, Sea Garden127 – I saw the first pear as it fell – the honey-seeking, golden-banded, the yellow swarm was not more fleet than I, (spare us from loveliness) and I fell prostrate crying; you have flayed us with your blossoms, spare us the beauty of fruit trees. The honey-seeking paused not, the air thundered their song, and I alone was prostrate. O rough-hewn god of the orchard128 – Well, you know your own poems, don’t you? I don’t mean to say that you don’t. It’s just they mean so much to me. Sometimes, life is so bleak, I – well, I don’t think I can stand it anymore, but then there are your poems, you see – hilda The girl, the heiress actually, came to visit me every day. One day, when I was ill, the landlady accosted her outside my room.

127 Sea Garden was H.D.’s first volume of poetry, published in 1916. Bryher memorized much of it. 128 Excerpted from “Orchard” in Collected Poems, 28–9.

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landlady Who’s going to pay for the funeral, eh? Mrs Aldington’s got the Spanish influenza, like. Be surprised if she made it through the night. bryher Wake up, wake up, Mrs Aldington. Hilda. You’re going to be fine. I’ve hired a nurse.129 Please wake up. You’ve survived double pneumonia. Shall I read you some of your poetry? Please wake up, without you there’s really not much to live for, you see. h.d. Near the birth of my baby in 1919, Ezra hurtled himself into the decorous St Faith’s Nursing Home.130 Beard, black soft hat, ebony stick – something unbelievably operatic – directoire overcoat, Verdi. He stalked and stamped the length of the room. He coughed, choked, or laughed.131 ezra You look like old Mrs Grumpy, in Wyncote.132 It’s that black lace cap. hilda 133

It was true – I looked no sylph.

ezra But Dryad, in all this mess – my only real criticism is that it is not my child.134

129 H.D. fell ill during the final months of her pregnancy and the influenza epidemic of 1919. Ellerman secured medical care. 130 Frances Perdita Aldington, H.D.’s only living child, was born at St Faith’s Nursing Home in Ealing on 31 March 1919. Pound visited the day before the birth. 131 End to Torment, 7. 132 Ibid. 133 Ibid., 8. 134 Ibid.

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hilda Lawrence came to visit but said very little. Richard, still strange, shell-shocked from the war, first agreed to accept the baby and then changed his mind.135 richard You go at once and register that child as Gray’s.136 Of course you know if you make a false statement it’s perjury – and five years’ penal servitude.137 h.d. I registered the child as Frances Perdita Aldington. Perdita. Aldington because it was my name and I had every right. Perdita for the child I lost who had come back to me in the shape of this new one. Frances, my dear friend. Frances for the love I might find again. hilda I want to tell you, Bryher. bryher Yes. hilda I want to make a bargain with you. If you promise never again to say that you will kill yourself, I’m going to give you something. bryher Yes? hilda If you promise that you won’t smuggle in any more of those frightful and dangerous … things … I want to tell you something. The little girl is not my husband’s little girl … do you understand these things? 135 In a long series of letters, Aldington had promised to support H.D. and the baby with a third of his income and allow the baby the use of his name. 136 Adapted from Asphodel, 197. 137 Ibid., 201.

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bryher I hate your Richard Aldington. I am so glad. h.d. I want you to promise me to grow up and take care of the little girl. bryher Do you mean – do you mean – hilda A light is shining at the far end of a long, long tunnel. bryher Do you mean … for my own … exactly like a puppy? hilda Exactly … like a puppy.138 h.d. When I was well, we made sure Perdita was well cared for and Bryher and I travelled to Greece. Travel was difficult, the country itself in a state of political upheaval; chance hotel acquaintances expressed surprise that two women alone had been allowed to come at all at that time. We were always “two women alone” or “two ladies alone,” but we were not alone.139 One day, when we were at our hotel in Corfu, I saw a dim shape forming on the wall of our room. It was later afternoon; the wall was a dull, matte ochre.140

138 Adapted from Asphodel, 205–6. 139 Tribute to Freud, 50. H.D. and Bryher visited in the spring of 1920 during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–22. 140 Ibid., 44. H.D. and Bryher stayed at La Bella Venezia Hotel (still in operation) on the island of Corfu.

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Greek landscape fills the room followed by gyrations of light and sound resembling the “aura” phase of migraine. Bright telescopic pictures of an airman’s head, cup, and tripod appear among the flashes of light. hilda Bryher – Bryher – I am seeing pictures – I thought they were shadows at first, but they are light, not shadow. They are quite simple objects – bryher Are you seeing things? Is it the heat? hilda No – it’s quite clear. There is a head and shoulders, three-quarter face, no marked features, a stencil of a soldier or airman … Now there is a … cup, actually suggesting the mythic chalice … But of course it’s very strange. I can break away from them now, if I want – it’s just a matter of concentrating … The third is a circle or two circles, the base the larger of the two; it is joined by three lines … the tripod of classic Delphi. Should I stop?141 bryher No – it’s wonderful. Go on. Images fade after a burst of light and Greek symbols. They are replaced by images of BRYHER and H . D . in Borderline.142

141 Adapted from Tribute to Freud, 40–1. 142 Borderline is a 1930 black and white silent film by the Pool Group, an avant-garde film company founded by Kenneth MacPherson (1902–1971), Bryher, and H.D. Both Bryher and H.D. appear in the film alongside actor Paul Robeson (1898–1976). The film tells the story of interracial relationships in a hotel in Switzerland.

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h.d. We travelled Europe and Egypt. Bryher took husbands to gain independence from her parents.143 In public, she and I were “cousins.” We were neither women nor men. I published novels and poetry. We made experimental films. Fourteen years passed that way … In 1933, Bryher arranged for my sessions with Freud in Vienna. It was clear another war was coming. I needed to prepare myself. Projection of FREUD ’s library in Vienna, with an emphasis on books and statues of mythic figures. freud Won’t you recline, Mrs Aldington? Now, if you don’t mind my telling you, I see you are going to be difficult. Now, although it is against the rules, I will tell you something: you were disappointed and you are disappointed in me.144 hilda In truth, I may have been disappointed he was not taller. I always imagined Freud was a giant but I was taller than he was.145 Projection fades. h.d. Friends at home were not altogether impressed that I was seeing the Professor. Ezra wrote:

143 Bryher was married to Robert McAlmon from 1920 to 1927 and to Kenneth MacPherson from 1927 to 1947. Both were likely marriages of convenience so that Bryher could achieve and maintain autonomy from her parents. MacPherson was H.D.’s lover rather than Bryher’s. 144 Adapted from a letter H.D. sent to Bryher and Kenneth Macpherson 1 March 1933 in Analyzing Freud, ed. Susan Stanford Friedman, 34. 145 Distilled from Tribute to Freud, 40–1.

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ezra You got into the wrong pigsty, ma chère. But not too late to climb out.146 h.d. But with the Professor I could share the visions that had been haunting me. Images from the scene in Greece reappear, flashing against the projection of FREUD ’s library. freud These pictures you saw on the wall, the picture writing – the tripod and the head of the airman. A desire for union with your mother, yes? You were physically in Greece. In Hellas. Your mother’s name was Helen. You had come home to the glory that was Greece.147 hilda (Distracted, playing with a light-projected Greek symbol that has landed in her hands) Perhaps. The symbol flits from H . D .’s hands. It briefly turns into a swastika before disappearing from the upper corner S.R. h.d. Yet already in Vienna, the shadows were lengthening. There were, for instance, occasional coquettish, confetti-like showers from the air, gilded paper swastikas and narrow strips of printed paper like the ones we pulled out of our Christmas bonbons … The party had begun, or this was preliminary to the birthday or the wedding.

146 Letter from Pound to H.D. quoted in Norman Holmes Pearson’s foreword to Tribute to Freud, xiv. 147 Dialogue based on H.D.’s account of Freud’s response in Tribute to Freud, 44.

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Coloured paper falls from the sky. hilda I stooped to scrape up a handful of these confetti-like tokens as I was leaving the Hotel Regina one morning. (Picks up papers, unfolds and reads from the first) “Hitler gives bread.” (Unfolds and reads from the second) “Hitler gives work” … The paper was crisp and clean … The gold, however, would not stay bright, nor the paper crisp, very long.148 allows pieces of paper to flutter to the ground and watches them fall.

HILDA

h.d. (Sitting) I left Vienna for London before the war started. In 1942, my friend Frances was killed, exploded with her mother and daughter in the Plymouth Blitz.149 In the end, it was Ezra who got into the wrong pigsty, making proMussolini radio broadcasts for the fascists in Rome.150 My sessions with Freud did not prepare me for this war. I was not strong enough.151 hilda Read Browning to me, Richard. Read anything – your voice – it was always your voice – sometimes in the worst times, I hear your voice. bryher Hilda, Hilda, it’s Bryher. You’re hallucinating.

148 “Yet already” to “very long” adapted from ibid., 58. 149 End to Torment, 29. 150 Disillusioned by the first war, Pound had become increasingly radical and intolerant in his politics. In 1935, he began issuing pro-Mussolini radio broadcasts via Radio Roma. The broadcasts continued through the war until April 1945. As a result of these broadcasts, he was indicted for treason in absentia in the United States in 1943. 151 H.D. suffered a breakdown at the end of the Second World War.

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hilda That thing by Browning about Fortù – Fortù was it? The Englishman in Italy, you know what I mean. It takes me back to our travels in Sorrento, to Anacapri. It makes things come right. I know the baby – our baby – I know all that … Another gun … And I wrote … Projected montage/collage of previously projected images, war footage, soundscape of voices and Second World War radio, bombing. pressure on heart, lungs, the brain about to burst its brittle case (what the skull can endure!) over us, Apocryphal fire, under us, the earth sway, dip of a floor, slope of a pavement where men roll, drunk with a new bewilderment, sorcery, bedevilment: the bone-frame was made for no such shock knit within terror, yet the skeleton stood up to it: the flesh? it was melted away, the heart burnt out, dead ember, tendons, muscles shattered, outer husk dismembered, yet the frame held: we passed the flame: we wonder what saved us? what for?152 152 Excerpted from “The Walls Do Not Fall” in Trilogy, 4. H.D. wrote Trilogy in London during the Second World War. She and Bryher stayed in London throughout the German bombing campaign, which had a profound effect on H.D.

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Images and sound end abruptly. Silence. h.d. (Looking into space) After the war, Ezra was arrested for high treason. They locked him up in a cage at Pisa.153 The prison actually of the Self was dramatized or materialized for our generation by Ezra’s incarceration.154 He composed his Pisan cantos – his best work – locked up in that cage. Projections and landscape suggest the Pisan landscape, shadowed cage. ezra (In cage at Pisa) With clouds over Taishan-Chocorua when the blackberry ripens and now the new moon faces Taishan one must count by the dawn star Dryad, thy peace is like water There is September sun on the pools155 h.d. (Pause) Perhaps there was always a challenge in his creative power. Perhaps … there was unconscious – really unconscious – rivalry … It all began with the Greek fragments – and living in seclusion I finished … a very long epic sequence, my “Cantos.”156

153 Pound gave himself up to the American military in Italy in May 1945. After questioning in Genoa, he was transferred to the United States Army Disciplinary Center north of Pisa and imprisoned in a six-foot-by-six-foot steel cage. 154 End to Torment, 56. 155 Excerpted from Canto LXXXIII, New Selected Poems and Translations, 227. 156 End to Torment, 41. Also mentioned in this passage is that it was H.D.’s literary executor, Norman Holmes Pearson, who originally suggested that the verses of Helen in Egypt were H.D.’s “Cantos.”

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During the recitation, there is an atemporal, palimpsestic layering of war scenes, ranging from Greek battle to the Second World War to more contemporary conflict. hilda I say there is only one image, one picture, though the swords flash; I say there is one treasure, one desire as the wheels turn and the hooves of the stallions thunder across the plain, and the plain is dust, and the battle-field is a heap of rusty staves and broken chariot-frames and the rims of the dented shields and desolation, destruction – for what?157 h.d. There is a photograph of Ezra as he left the Pisan camp, fettered, between two detectives.158 When tried, he was judged insane159 and sentenced to St Elizabeth’s mental hospital.160 (Pulling photograph from her pants pocket) I look at Ezra’s picture; this is an old man, they say. It is only by admitting that Ezra is an old man that I can say that I am an old woman. But this is not true. There are others. They go on painting pictures or they go on writing poetry.161 They go on … 157 Excerpted from Helen in Egypt, 243. 158 End to Torment, 36. 159 Ibid., 31. 160 The insanity verdict saved Pound’s life. He was confined to St Elizabeth’s hospital’s psychiatric facility from 1945 to 1958. On his release, he returned to Italy. 161 End to Torment, 42.

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H.D.

rises, with difficulty, from her chair and makes her way S.R.

(Looking back over her shoulder and then at audience) Though, sometimes, I do wonder … why I ever came down out of that tree.162

162 This ending has been controversial in performance. However, while the relationship with Pound was certainly conflicted, there is enough nostalgia in End to Torment to suggest that there was more than a moment’s wistfulness for earlier days when H.D., Pound, Williams, and Gregg were young. This longing for relatively uncomplicated times is what should be implied in the delivery and stands in contrast with much of H.D.’s arch, ironic performance elsewhere.

Performance, Performativity, and the Search for Mina Loy

Within the context of modernist studies, who could be either a better or a worse subject for auto/biographical dramatization than Mina Loy? It is difficult to dispute that events of Loy’s life invite dramatic treatment. The arc from a Victorian childhood to modernist innovation in Florence, New York, and Paris and the compelling details of Loy’s life story, including near-fatal starvation in Mexico, the unresolved disappearance of her second husband, Arthur Cravan, and Loy’s creative methods of survival – poet, designer, inventor, lampshade entrepreneur – are intrinsically suited to drama. Moreover, the scope of Loy’s acquaintance and exposure, a foundational but later antagonistic relationship with Italian futurism, a suggestive if ultimately non-identical affiliation with New York Dada, a place at the centre of interwar Paris, and associations with Barney, McAlmon, Cunard, Pound, and Stein, to name but a few, suggest tantalizing lines of influence. The diversity of Loy’s own work is impressive and interesting – manifestoes, plays, poems, and unconventional prose. And then there is Loy herself, cosmopolitan and controversial, but perhaps more than this, someone who genuinely pushed the limit of what was acceptable, particularly for women, in both art and life. All of this not only puts Loy at the top of the list for a stage drama but also makes her a good candidate for a biopic. And yet, most of us who have spent time with Loy’s writing are left with questions about who Mina Loy really was and the ability of conventional forms to adequately convey her intellectual project. The fact that Loy uses her own life in her writing should make the task of biographical investigation easier, but this promise is often chimeric.

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Loy’s later drafts and fragments, promisingly referred to as her “autobiographical prose,” seem like they would offer answers, but in their spiralling intellectualism, fragmented composition, and roving exploration they are often more like flashes in the night than a steady, illuminating biographical force. As has been well-documented, Loy is chameleonic in her poetry, layering life episodes with discourses of the day – newspapers, dialects, science, street vendors, psychoanalysis, and her signature encyclopedic idiom.1 At times Loy is introspective, genuinely reaching to understand the flickering states of human consciousness as in the more meditative sections of her long poem on the discontents of love and sex, “Songs to Joannes.” Similarly, poetry like “The Widow’s Jazz” and Loy’s autobiographical prose tributes to Cravan seem to offer insight into a finely wrought inner world and Loy’s feelings on love and loss. Other times, particularly in her poetry, Loy adopts a mock seriousness and it can be difficult to differentiate confession from subtle satire. In keeping with Loy’s work as a painter it is tempting to say that Loy uses her life as canvas, but it might be more accurate to say she works a self out of clay, subject to constant formation and remodelling. It is not new to call Loy’s work and this play of identity employed within it “performative,” but it is interesting to think about how this critical term can be enhanced or entered into differently through stage work. Moreover, a crucial way this performativity is staged, in Loy, is on the body, which is to say that dramatization could also bring her highly cerebral writing into a more profound working tension with its central and most controversial subject. While the performance of performativity and the ability to engage the body were the initial lures in pursuing dramatized exploration, several other advantages presented themselves, notably the ability to draw out the more sensory and understudied aspects of Loy’s work: the aural dimensions of her poetry and Loy’s lesser-known painting and montage practices. A layering of theatre and film also revealed itself to be particularly appropriate for a conceptual engagement with Loy’s ideas of memory. Finally, the complexity of Loy’s archival collection and its bearing on how Loy is interpreted invited a staging of the “scene of the archive,” and, consequently, a probing of the relationship between researcher and subject through the dramatized encounter.

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In tracing Loy’s performative traits, the connection is often made with the historical avant-garde for, unlike H.D., Loy’s affiliation was with the more radical – and theatrical – units. Alex Goody, analyzing Loy’s fluctuating, performative self, makes explicit links between Loy’s poetic method and Dadaist performance. For Goody, Loy’s “identities and her poetic articulations issue from an unstable subject position that ultimately embraces the ambivalence of contingency and performativity. This radical attitude has more than a passing affinity with the Dadaist performances and contingencies of Marcel Duchamp” (“Gender, Authority, and the Speaking Subject”). Similarly, in thinking about the influence of futurist performance, Julie Schmid has examined how Loy’s published plays – Two Plays (Collision and Cittabappini) and The Pamperers – incorporate futurist aesthetics, syntax, and kinetics as a result of her 1913–15 affiliation, even while they satirize the movement itself. The kinetic composition Loy experimented with through plays also permeates her autobiographical prose of this period, particularly unpublished drafts of “Brontolivido” in which Marinetti/Brontolivido, leader of the “Flabbergasts,” and Loy/Sophia/Gloria engage in paragraphs of verbal sparring particularly suitable for a staged adaptation. In staging herself in these early writings, Loy at once adopted performance-based models even while she used conventions of satirical drama to separate herself out. Loy continued to adopt and reinvent the performance-based and performative strategies of the avant-garde by keeping the performative basis in her writing while redefining the model. Perhaps most interestingly and pressingly, her insistence on the flesh-and-blood elements of the body exceeds Dadaism’s interest in the body as metaphor and challenges the futurist ideal of mechanized fleshlessness. There are numerous critical articles on Loy and the body – all of them, of course and by formal necessity, entirely body-less. And so what emerges from thinking about what theatre can do for Loy’s work is an unstable, performative identity on the one hand and, on the other, a physicalization of Loy’s insistence on the body itself. Dramatizing Loy’s poetry, in particular, creates the opportunity to present that which is about the body through the body, notably poems like “Parturition,” where physical presentation and breath patterns heighten labour enacted through the poem’s rhythms, as well as “Songs to Joannes,” where a voiced and embodied expression of Pig Cupid “rooting erotic

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garbage […] among wild oats sewn in mucous membranes” reinforces the unabashed carnality of the words, causing audiences to confront – and potentially re-evaluate – the visceral dynamics of her work. Bringing the staged body into an analysis of Loy’s writing has also revealed how implied tone and gesture within the poetry – which is to say the summoned but invisible body – frequently act in tension with the words themselves. An illustrative example of this tension between stated and underlying meaning is the way the comic operates in Loy’s work. As Peter Nicholls notes, there is humour in Loy to “which Pound, with his rather Pre-Raphaelite notion of sexual passion, was not particularly well-attuned” and which even contemporary critics miss in a keenness to “emphasise depressive tendencies at work in Loy’s writing” (142). One reason for the limited commentary on Loy’s comic instincts may be that she tends to tell her jokes with a straight face. As this figure of speech suggests, Loy’s writing is often staged on an imaginary body, brought into being by the disconnect between the words and the delivery that undercuts their meaning – the raised eyebrow, curling smile, or mocking pitch that lets the audience know what is meant by more ambiguous words. In the poetry, this body is invisible yet seemingly perceptible, a vague apprehension there is something, some kind of physical cue, lurking behind the words, an intricate choreography between literal meaning and intention. This often undervalued part of Loy’s writing can be drawn out by the actor, who can use voice and body to illuminate this formal working principle. In poems like “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” for example, Loy’s characterization, irony, and skilful skewering can be inhabited and accentuated by the actor who can take on these elements in a searing combination of vocal delivery and gestural enactment. My interest in Loy’s performative and embodied selves encouraged the use of Loy’s interviews as a frame for the play, both her print interview with the Evening Sun in 1917 and the tape-recorded interview with Paul Blackburn and Robert Vas Dias in 1965. As John Rodden has argued in Performing the Literary Interview: How Writers Craft Their Public Selves, audiences have become increasingly aware of the literary interview as a performative event and of the interview itself as genre. The Mina Loy Interviews leverages this audience savviness, inserting Loy’s writing about herself into the context of the interview situations.

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In this sense, the play does not, in an absolute sense, replicate the interviews, but rather uses them as a platform, allowing the interview frame to implicitly draw out the constructed nature of the versions of selfhood explored in the writing. Not immaterially, the time lapse between the interviews also allows for a broader spectrum of understanding through both what changes and what remains the same from the time Loy first arrived in New York, with the full force of her emerging celebrity, to her last interview in Aspen as a woman of eighty-two who had spent some years outside of modernist circles and their associated limelight, which, in Loy’s case, had dimmed particularly abruptly. In addition to the meta-dimensions offered by the interview situation – the performance within the performance – the inclusion of the interviews also allowed the material to press upon the form, which is to say that the performance puts pressure on the drama. This seemed to be particularly suitable in staging Loy, whose work often challenges traditional form, and allowed for a more experimental use of the biographical drama itself. In Act I, the performance that Loy gives in the Evening Sun interview corresponds quite well with a character Rodden describes, in an article that expands on his book’s thesis, as “the provocateur.” Rodden writes: “the provocateur is a playful, bemused interviewee – a special type of raconteur – who enjoys poking fun at the form and treats the interview as a chance to realize other dimensions of himself or herself. The aim is often to co-create a new literary identity” (404). Conducted after the 1915 furor over the publication of “Love Songs,” the Evening Sun interview was the newspaper’s effort to define the “modern woman.” But it was also Loy’s attempt to “co-create” an identity that responded to the scandal and, in some sense, made legible the logic behind what many perceived as her alarming candour. The element of contradiction between Loy’s emphasis on the frank and direct in the interview and her elaborate self-constructions (including those found in the article) is a paradox that gives the interview a particularly interesting dynamic. Similarly, the first act, when the interview “ends,” moves into writing drawn from Loy’s autobiographical prose. In placing this writing outside of the public performance of the interview but still within performance space, the play probes confessional writing, which

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at once requires the composition of a performed self to narrate events even while its allure lies in the promise of an intimate transparency. Act II is grounded in the 1965 taped interview with Blackburn and Vas Dias.2 It was an important choice, here, to include Loy’s older voice, not because it mitigates the more radical elements of her youth, but because it provides another perspective on them, a perspective that is sometimes obscured by the emphasis on glamorous accounts of youthful modernists. In the early minutes of the tape, we hear Loy voicing her concern about her new dentures. This attention to the body and its relationship to her poetry brings us back, in new ways, to Loy’s concerns about how bodily processes shape poetic ones. From here, Loy moves into a reminiscence on Cravan, and his loss recurs as a central theme of the tape and of her writing. At the urging of the interviewer, Loy reads from her poems, which causes her to evaluate her career and its reception. Loy still has concerns about the size of her oeuvre – “I don’t think it matters how many poems you wrote, do you?” – even while she harbours surprise and consternation over the reception of some of her work: “somebody, some female poet, said I was the most immoral creature that ever lived” (“Mina Loy Interview with Paul Blackburn and Robert Vas Dias” 214). At this point, in defending herself and her work, Loy says something significant: “I suppose I sounded as though I was rather pugnacious, you know, I wasn’t at all … and I’d only written these things for the sake of the sounds of the words. It was like making jewelry or something” (214, emphasis added). While Loy’s poetic agenda, in its emphasis on subjectivity and sexuality, undoubtedly exceeded sound, it is nonetheless true that orality is an important aspect of Loy’s work often overshadowed by its more explicit content. To bring the body into this equation, to hear breath and hesitation, to incarnate the flesh that is so vividly discussed, is certainly part of what makes staging Loy worthwhile, but the project also reflects the underemphasized oral aspects of early twentieth-century verse. As Raphael Allison has argued, “oral performance has been largely overlooked in modernist studies” (“Robert Frost, Live” 609), partly due to issues of access, as researchers often have to travel to archives to listen to recordings, and partly because “modernist poets obviously recorded less frequently than the next generation” (610),

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who not only recorded their work more often but also used sound technologies in the composition of their work.3 Charles Bernstein suggests that, among other consequences, the absence of a history of modernist poetic voicings “has had the effect of eliding the significance of the modernist poetry traditions for postwar performance art” (2). As a result, Bernstein argues for “close listening” as well as close readings of modernist poems, allowing the voices of the poets to shape our impressions of the words.4 While Bernstein professes a prejudice against “acting out” poetry, readings mindful of the tone and timbre of original recordings seem a valuable way of voicing the work. This may be particularly true in Loy’s case, not just because her poems emphasize the body or, as I have mentioned, because the ironic split between words and meaning can perhaps best be delivered through recitation, but also because Loy’s poetry seems to want to be read aloud. Michael Andrew Roberts, who provides a historicized reading of Loy’s recitation of “The Widow’s Jazz” at Natalie Barney’s salon in 1927 (for which Loy trained with a voice coach), has also detailed the formal elements of her work that seem to seek articulation: A number of aspects of Loy’s poetry, such as her use of space within lines, lines displaced from the left-hand margin and (in poetry and prose), the use of dashes, while they work in one way as visual effects on the page, can also be taken [as] indications of how to “perform” her words. Her sustained irony of tone and diction might also invite an oral delivery […] But Loy’s spaces on the page […] enhance the physicality of the poem, whether through material space on the page or the presence of the breathing body of the poet/performer. (122) In this sense, a performance of the 1965 interview nets the oral dimensions of Loy’s work (as she reads several poems throughout the recordings) even as it physicalizes the “presence of the breathing body of the poet/performer.” The tensions between text and voice can also be accentuated through projections of the poems that allow audiences to both see and hear what is happening in the work. Performance allows us to at once appreciate the work in a simulation of its time and also engage with issues that have been raised in

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contemporary criticism. When “The Widow’s Jazz” is performed at the end of Act I against a projected background of a 1920s jazz club and overlaid by a jazz soundtrack, we historicize the relationship between jazz and modernist poetry and also enter into an enacted version of the critical preoccupations of an article like Roberts’s. Moreover, in response to Bernstein’s interest in the ways a vocalized modernist history would help us understand the roots of poetry in the 1950s and ’60s, a performance of this poem – with an attention to its gaps and breath and sound – gives scholars renewed insight into the antecedents of Black Mountain, for example, and ideas about breath and the body as explored in Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse.” Recitations of Loy’s poetry can also be very helpful in teaching Loy – a notoriously difficult thing to do. Students who are ambivalent about Loy’s verbal acrobatics on the page have been noticeably more receptive after seeing filmed excerpts from the play. As one student articulated, hearing an actor recite the Loy poetry and give voice to Loy’s meditations about her work “gave me a place to start.” In addition to whatever formal and theoretical insight the stage may be able to provide modernist writing, giving new readers a way in – however we may want to elaborate on this entry point – is a valuable element of what performance offers.5 Another dimension of the stage is its audio/visual potential, particularly its ability to incorporate and interact with film, something that was quite useful in re-evaluating Loy’s visual interests. Unlike in The Tree, and for different reasons than the documentary imperatives of These Were the Hours, film plays a central role in The Mina Loy Interviews. In its capacity to hold multiple voices and images, film as a medium is responsive to Loy’s archival documents and their surplus of people, influences, and ideas. The form of this integration, however, comes from “Colossus,” in which Loy talks about the “the newsreel of my memory” (“Excerpts” 113). For many of us, the way the historical imagination unfolds has attached itself to film. It is interesting to think about how, for Loy and in Loy’s age, personal memory and historical imagination might have found expression in contemporary visual media: the slightly stilted black and white films interspersed with still photographs, characteristic and still so evocative of that time. In the first act, the films bring in other voices and provide context. In the second act, where Loy is older, they perform a function more specific to

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memory, allowing flashes and scenes of her youth to bleed through. The effect is a portal into what Loy termed her “subconscious archives” (“O Hell,” Lost Lunar Baedeker 71), a visual illustration of recurring scenes and memories that at once enrich and undercut the interview situations. More playfully, the integration of film is also a route through which Mina Loy can confront her doppelgänger, 1930s film star Myrna Loy, often dubbed “the perfect wife” because of her representations of conformist female characters and with whom Loy is so consistently and ironically confused. Within the play, the situational juxtaposition of Myrna Loy’s films (through the archivist’s obsession) with Mina Loy’s writing animates how radically different Loy’s views were from the dominant cultural narratives of that time. Projections are similarly enriching, permitting us to see the poems where appropriate and also to view Loy’s visual work, including paintings like L’amour dorloté par les belles dames. Computer technologies like VideoMaker can even allow us to reconstruct Loy’s montage process; toward the end of Act II, we see her create one of these montages. In the end, integrating film, projections, and other technologies makes the production “multimedia,” a newer term that, retrospectively applied, is appropriate to Loy, who was herself a multimedia producer of text, watercolours, montage, and objets trouvés. Building on Loy’s use of the term “subconscious archives,” The Mina Loy Interviews, in a manner quite different from those of the other plays presented here, dramatizes the encounter between author and critic by interspersing the Loy interviews with scenes in the literary archive. This simultaneously allows the play to operate in a realm that is structurally ironic – the archival discoveries shape and undercut the material in the Loy scenes in a manner that is cohesive with Loy’s own ironic conventions – and, along with the marked presentation of archival images and text throughout the play, makes archival work visible. The scenes in the archive are based on stories that I gathered from archival researchers and in this sense are “true stories,” including the fire drill, the found knife, and the stolen documents. As these anecdotes and experiences are undocumented, the drama itself becomes an archive for a particular type of oral history, one that opens up, humanizes, and allows for a questioning of this type of work. The archive presented here is not the Beinecke Library, where Loy’s documents are actually held. Nor are

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these scenes meant to be representative of archival work: dramatic imperatives privilege stories of intrigue and conflict over the more typical tales of helpful encounters between researchers and archivists. Nonetheless, the presence of an archival plot line within the play sets the Loy material in tension with the site from which much of it is drawn. The site of the archive is a particularly important one in Loy studies, as Loy’s archival documents are, on the whole, a fairly disordered collection of drafts, fragments, sketches for inventions, fashion designs, doodles, and letters, all of which have been meticulously organized by later hands. As Sandeep Parmar writes of Yale’s Mina Loy Papers: “On the surface, her archive is an idiosyncratic collection of typescripts, handwritten drafts, address books, letterhead and graph paper that illustrates the fantasy of a modern writer at work, outpacing the swiftness of inspiration with whatever comes to hand. And yet, the archive’s carefully ordered folders are at odds with their, at times, chaotic contents: drafts that appear to be missing pages have been reassembled, and pages that have no designated place are ordered by theme” (5). In the play, materializing the researcher – who by profession mostly appears as a disembodied voice in the pages of academic books and articles – highlights the physical dimensions,6 as well as the subjective decisions, involved in writing the author. Quite literally, staging the researcher puts the critic inside the scene rather than outside of it. The actors’ double roles – the researcher as Mina, the archivist as an older Loy, the guard and archival assistant as Cravan – also probe the imaginative identifications and displacements that take place within the research context. Of course, to work at the intersection of archive and stage is also to engage with questions about the movement between them. The archive stands in marked contrast with the theatre; it holds “the dead” while the theatre houses “the live”; archival work is mostly solitary while the theatre is marked by a series of communal encounters; and yet, in working with these archival materials, there is always the possibility of some historical flash, some jolt of recognition in a handwritten line or sketch that jars us into a more immediate relationship with the author and her work.7 And, in the end, it is this historical voltage that can be transmitted onstage, connecting audiences to archival sources and the writer’s published work: aurally, visually, viscerally.

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1 2

3

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not e s See, for example, Marjorie Perloff’s “English as a ‘Second’ Language: Mina Loy’s ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose.’” Unlike the Evening Sun interviewer, who was mostly interested in Loy’s turn as the modern woman, Blackburn and Vas Dias were deeply invested in the poetry itself. The fact that the interview was tape-recorded (the only known recording of Loy) rather than transcribed is also significant. Blackburn, as a leading translator of Provençal verse, was keenly aware of the oral dimensions of the troubadour tradition, but this awareness was also central to his interest in contemporary poetry, as witnessed by his role in organizing readings by Beat poets as well as his (unsuccessful) attempt to get poetry recordings into jukeboxes across the United States. Vas Dias was similarly interested in the importance of sound to contemporary poetry – both its creation and its reception – as illustrated by his own collections, notably Speech Acts & Happenings (1972). Books by Allison, Derek Furr, Adalaide Morris, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Laura Severin, among others, have done much, in recent years, to redress the scholarship gap around modern poetry and performance. The Morris book even includes an audio recording. But the corporeal body, though privileged in these accounts, is still absent; staged readings of modernist poetry and stagings that incorporate modernist verse could make an important contribution to modernism’s vocalized performance history. Bernstein catalogues several ways in which hearing poets read alters our reception of the poetry: “the unanticipatably slow tempo of Wallace Stevens’s performance tells us much about his sense of the poem’s rhythms and philosophical sensuousness, just as John Ashbery’s near monotone suggests a dreamier dimension than the text sometimes reveals. The intense emotional impact of Robert Creeley’s pauses at line breaks gives an affective interpretation of what otherwise reads as a highly formal sense of fragmented line breaks – the breaks suggest emotional pitch and distress in a way audible in the recordings but not necessarily on the page. The recordings of Gertrude Stein make clear both the bell-like reso-

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nance of her voice and her sense of shifting rhythms against modulating repetitions and the shapeliness of her sound-sense; while, hearing Langston Hughes, one immediately picks up not only on the specific blues echoes in the work but how he modulated shifts into and out of these rhythms” (6). Once we have heard these poets read, Bernstein suggests, we will also change our own “hearing and readings of their works on the page.” This experience, for Bernstein, transforms the poem from a “textual entity” into a “performative event,” which also invites a plurality of read and performed realizations (9). 5 Script-reading in class and classes in writing literary drama have also proved to be useful and immersive forms of pedagogy. I elaborate on this in the conclusion. 6 See, for example, Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, which talks about the physical effects of archival work. 7 In the case of Loy’s archive, the jolt for me came from an encounter with a sketch of Loy’s husband, Stephen Haweis, juxtaposed with a sketch for one of her inventions, a particularly functional-looking window-washing squeegee. I have written about this encounter and the movement from archive to stage in “Live from the Archive: Film, Folders and Mina Loy,” in Performance Matters 1–2, no. 1. (2015). The issue, edited by Peter Dickinson, is dedicated to performance and the archive.

The Mina Loy Interviews

stage In the archive, present day neva

Archival researcher, mid-thirties

gertrude

Archivist in her seventies

lloyd

Archival assistant and guard, early thirties

New York and Mexico, 1917–18 mina

Mina Loy, age 35

sage

Reporter from the Evening Sun, 1917 (anon.)

cravan

Arthur Cravan, age 30

Aspen, 1965 loy

Mina Loy, age 82

blackburn

Paul Blackburn, poet/interviewer, age 39

joella

Loy’s eldest daughter, age 58

The play is written for five stage actors, with the following multiple roles: neva/mina; gertrude/loy; lloyd/cravan; sage/blackburn. The joella role should be kept separate, if possible, for the sake of clarity. Costumed, these actors can also perform the film roles,

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though these can equally by undertaken by additional actors according to directorial intentions and resources. The film excerpts from Libeled Lady and Test Pilot are meant to be the Hollywood originals.

films marinetti

Filippo Marinetti, leader of Italian futurists

dodge

Mabel Dodge, arts patron

stein

Gertrude Stein, American writer

papini

Giovanni Papini, futurist philosopher

duchamp

Marcel Duchamp, French artist (ny Dada)

picabia

Francis Picabia, French artist (ny Dada)

cravan mina blonde countess

Figure at the Arensbergs’ salon

williams

William Carlos Williams, American writer

brown

Bob Brown, American writer

mcalmon

Robert McAlmon, American writer and publisher

barnes

Djuna Barnes, American writer

walters

Member of modernist scene in McAlmon’s “Post-Adolescence”

police officer

Mexico City, 1918

joella

Age 16

pre-recorded voices british art school teacher

At Saint John’s Wood

marinetti

Reciting the futurist manifesto in Italian

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act i At rise, GERTRUDE sits at the archivist’s desk, filling out a form in pencil. LLOYD stands to the right of the desk, hands clasped behind his back, looking faintly bored. NEVA sits at the researcher’s table, a pad, pencil, and tablet in front of her, waiting with growing impatience. She is obviously cold and puts her jacket on. Eventually, she stands and approaches GERTRUDE ’s desk. neva Excuse me. GERTRUDE

looks up, nonplussed. gertrude

Yes. neva It’s 1:30. gertrude (Checking her watch) 1:33. neva Okay, 1:33. Didn’t you say the files would arrive from the central library at noon? gertrude They did. neva Well, do you know when my Loy files might arrive? gertrude Loy?

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neva Mina Loy. gertrude The actress? neva The poet. The files I ordered yesterday? gertrude (Checking her chart) Yes, they’ve arrived. They’re being processed downstairs. neva Do you know when they might be brought up? gertrude Yours isn’t the only request, you know. neva Er, right … But I’m the only one here. gertrude Correction. You are the only one who has chosen to wait here. There’s a professor working on environmental records who has come every day for three months. neva Right, well, I’m only in town for two days. What are the chances I might see something this afternoon? gertrude We are dealing with budget cuts, you know. neva Yes, of course.

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gertrude And it’s been very busy. neva (Looking around the empty space) I can see that. gertrude Fine. (Pushing a piece of paper across the desk to NEVA ) Why don’t you write down what you most need and I’ll see what I can do. neva Great. (Digging in her pocket for something to write with) Thanks a lot. pulls a pen out of her pocket and moves toward the sheet of paper.

NEVA

gertrude STOP! neva What? gertrude Is that a PEN? neva Ah – gertrude Lloyd! LLOYD

approaches.

gertrude Lloyd, this woman has a pen. It is your job to ensure that no one enters the archive with a pen.

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lloyd I checked her bag. gertrude Diligence! The pen was hidden in her pocket. neva It wasn’t hidden – gertrude It was concealed. A concealed pen. pulls forward a sign on her desk that reads: PENCILS ONLY. PENS WILL BE CONFISCATED. She holds out her hand to NEVA . GERTRUDE

neva Seriously? gertrude I assure you we take the care of our materials very seriously. hands over the pen. takes it, handling it like a dangerous weapon.

NEVA

GERTRUDE

gertrude You may claim it when you leave. (To LLOYD ) Lloyd, please check downstairs on the status of the Myrna Loy1 files. neva Mina Loy.

1 Myrna Loy (1905–1993), American actor.

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gertrude That is what I said. You may return to your seat while Lloyd inquires downstairs. Lloyd exits S.R. NEVA loiters by GERTRUDE ’s desk, waiting. She rubs her arms again. neva Is there any chance the heat might be turned up a little? It’s really cold. gertrude This is the temperature best suited to the conservation of documents. neva It feels like it’s five degrees in here. gertrude Ten degrees. Control of temperature and relative humidity is critical in the preservation of library and archival collections because unacceptable levels of these contribute significantly to the breakdown of materials. Heat accelerates deterioration: the rate of most chemical reactions, including deterioration, is approximately doubled with each increase in temperature of ten degrees.2 neva I see. stares. NEVA returns to her seat and rubs her arms and blows into her hands for warmth. GERTRUDE

GERTRUDE

2 Quoted from Northeast Document Conservation Center, https://www.nedcc. org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/2.-the-environment/2.1-temperature, -relative-humidity,-light,-and-air-quality-basic-guidelines-for-preservation.

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returns to her paperwork. LLOYD enters S.R. with a large box of files and places them on the desk beside NEVA . neva Thanks. LLOYD

nods and turns to leave.

neva Um – sorry about the pen thing. lloyd ’T’s okay. neva I didn’t mean to get you in trouble. I mean – (NEVA lowers her voice and LLOYD moves toward her) is it always like this here? lloyd Pretty much. Except on fire drill days. neva Fire drill – ? lloyd And once someone discovered a bloody knife in one of the boxes. neva A? lloyd Knife, yeah. Something to do with a murder case like a hundred years ago. neva Wow. That must have been exciting.

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lloyd Yeah, sorta. There is an awkward pause. pulls the box toward her.

NEVA

neva Well, thanks. I guess I’ll dig in here. nods and walks back to his post beside GERTRUDE ’s desk, hands behind his back. NEVA removes the top of the box and goes to pull out one of the files. GERTRUDE looks up and jumps out of her seat. LLOYD

gertrude Wait! NEVA

jumps and backs away from the box. gertrude

Gloves! neva Gloves? gertrude Did you bring white gloves to handle the materials? neva I’ve worked in a lot of archives. I’ve never had to wear gloves. gertrude Then we will have to supply them.

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removes a pair of white gloves from a drawer in her desk and hands them to LLOYD .

GERTRUDE

gertrude Lloyd, please instruct this woman on how to put on the gloves and handle the materials. neva My name is Neva. brings the gloves over to as GERTRUDE watches.

LLOYD NEVA

lloyd Ah – so. You gotta put on the gloves. sighs, takes the gloves, and puts them on.

NEVA

lloyd Um – what are you looking for? neva An interview, mostly – that Loy did with the Evening Sun in 1917. And a bunch of other stuff. I’m writing a book on Loy. Loy and the interview as literary genre – lloyd Okay. Well, interviews are print. If you get to photographs, try to handle them on the edges only. neva – I think it’s about genre. But it could be about poetics. Like, is the poetic voice authentic in Loy, or is it, like the interview, always performed?

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lloyd Okay. neva Especially with Loy. Is she confessing … or is she playing? Honestly, I don’t know and I’ve been working on her for three years. There are all of these layers … Does that make any sense? lloyd Sure. I mean, yeah. neva (NEVA looks over her shoulder and sees GERTRUDE looking at them) She’s watching. lloyd Gertrude is always watching. She’s like – neva God? lloyd More like Big Brother. neva In Orwell? lloyd On cbs. neva Okay. lloyd Your name’s Neva? neva Yeah. Yes.

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129

nods and walks away.

neva (To herself) Stop talking. Just stop talking about the project. NEVA

looks over her shoulder. is watching.

GERTRUDE

gertrude Ssshh! turns back to her charts. NEVA takes a breath, looks over her shoulder, and begins to sort through the files. The stage lights darken and are replaced by a black light, which shows the white gloves moving back and forth between box and table. NEVA opens a file. As she takes out materials and spreads them on the table, archival images appear on a large projection screen onstage: a sketch of one of Mina Loy’s inventions, a handwritten page from a short story, a drawing. Each piece has words at the bottom of the page, which spell out the following phrase: “Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea – Mina Loy.”3 NEVA opens another file. We hear MARINETTI shouting the futurist manifesto in Italian. NEVA quickly shuts the file and the noise stops. NEVA opens another file. We hear the sounds of a jazz club in Paris in the 1920s. NEVA ’s gloved hand rises as though she is about to call a waiter over to order a drink. She lowers her hand and closes the file. NEVA opens a third file. On the screen, we see an image of the 1917 newspaper interview. The image fades as the lights rise C.S. on MINA ’s apartment in Greenwich Village, which is draped in exotic fabrics and papered with sketches for art projects, inventions, etc. There is a knock at the door, unanswered, followed by another. SAGE enters S.L. GERTRUDE

sage Uh – hello? 3 “Modern Poetry,” The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 157.

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looks around the apartment and scribbles something in his notebook. SAGE

sage Miz Loy? looks at a few poems that are scattered on the desk. He raises his eyebrows. SAGE

sage Miz Loy? MINA enters, in a bohemian dress and with a cigarette in a long holder.

mina Real or apparition? sage Pardon? mina (Lighting her cigarette and walking around SAGE ) It’s the first thing one must ask when something appears in the living room. Is it real? Or has it been created in the realm of the imagination? sage Well, the door was open. mina It always is. One must never close the door on imagination – or on the unexpected. sage Miz Loy. I’m Sage. From the Evening Sun? I have an appointment?

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mina How fascinating. sage What’s that? mina That we have an appointment. Usually I like to be taken by surprise. Of course I forgot about you, so you’re a surprise after all. Won’t you sit down? sage Sure. Sure, that’d be swell. sits in an overstuffed purple loveseat. MINA moves over to an easel and begins to paint. SAGE

sage I’m glad I’ve found you. Greenwich Village is a jungle. But here you are – 150 West Fifty-Seventh. mina Here I am. sage Er – yes. Well, let’s start, shall we? As my editor may have mentioned, the article is about the modern woman. Who is she, where is she, what is she? Some people think women are the cause of modernism, whatever that is. (Trying to be clever) Looking at you now I already have a caption in mind. “Mina Loy, Painter, Poet, and Playwright, Doesn’t Try to Express Her Personality by Wearing Odd-Looking Draperies – Her Clothes Suggest the Smartest Shops, but Her Poems Would Have Puzzled Grandma.”4 What do you think of that one? 4 Adapted from Evening Sun profile, 10.

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gives SAGE an ironic glance and chews idly on her cigarette holder.

MINA

sage So, let’s get to the point: what is this “modern woman”? mina The modern – (pauses as she adds a detail to the painting) the modern flings herself at life and lets herself feel what she does feel; then upon the very tick of the second she snatches the images of life that fly through the brain.5 sage I … see. Well, what about your poetry, then? Your poems are the kind that people keep around for months and then dig out of corners to read to each other.6 mina Spawn of Fantasies Silting the appraisable Pig Cupid his rosy snout Rooting erotic garbage …7 (Looking at SAGE ) Are you blushing? (Studying SAGE carefully) Vermilion. sage What? loy Not crimson, cardinal, cerise, or scarlet. Your cheeks are vermilion.

5 Adapted from ibid., 11. 6 Adapted from ibid., 12. 7 Excerpted from “Songs to Joannes” in The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 53, first published in Others as “Love Songs” in 1915.

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sage Well, ya gotta admit, Miz Loy – your poems are rather frank. mina But of course that’s the modern way … if you are very frank with yourself and don’t mind how ridiculous anything that comes to you may seem, you will have a chance of capturing the symbol of your direct reaction.8 sage Sounds a bit Freudian. Something to do with childhood, I suppose? mina Oh, undoubtedly. sage How’s that? mina I don’t think anything biographical would be cheerful.9 sage Come now. mina (Shrugs) If you like. Two black and white photos appear on the projection screen as though on a newsreel – one of MINA ’s father, one of her mother, both very Victorian. MINA stands in front of the screen and gestures to each in turn.

8 Evening Sun, 11. 9 Loy, The Last Lunar Baedeker, lxviii.

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My father: Exodus10 The highest paid tailor’s cutter in the City Exodus Lord Israel nicknamed from his consummate bearing his coaly eye challenging the unrevealed universe speaking fluently “business English” to the sartorial world jabbering stock exchange quotations and conundrums of finance to which unlettered immigrants are instantly initiate11 My mother: Early English everlasting12 quadrate Rose paradox-Imperial trimmed with some travestied flesh tinted with bloodless duties dewed with Lipton’s teas […] Rose of arrested impulses self-pruned of the primordial attributes 10 Modelled on Loy’s father, Sigmund Löwy (1848–1917), a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant to England. 11 Excerpted from “Anglo Mongrels and the Rose,” The Last Lunar Baedeker, 115. It should be noted that the poem was not composed until 1923–25, and in this sense its placement here is anachronistic, if useful in revealing Loy’s adult perspectives on her childhood, which she would also explore in her prose writings. 12 Modelled on Loy’s mother, Julia (Bryan) Löwy (1860–1942), an English protestant.

The Mina Loy Interviews

a tepid heart inhibiting with tactful terrorism13 [… ] She simpering in her ideological pink He Loaded with Mosaic passions that amass like money

implores her to take pity upon him and come and be a “Lady in the City”14 […] Oh God that men and women having undertaken to vanquish one another should be allowed to shut themselves up in hot boxes and breed15

MINA

returns to her easel and begins a sketch.

mina Despite this Victorian beginning, art school, at least. First London. british art school teacher (voice) There, Miss Lowy. More shading. We want it to appear much like the object itself. 13 “Anglo Mongrels and the Rose,” 121. 14 Ibid., 124. 15 Ibid., 143.

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Image of St John’s Wood16 style of drawing appears on the screen. mina Then Munich, for a year …17 Images of Jugendstil embroideries appear on the screen. mina Then back to London for more art school …18 Then Paris for art school …19 Image of one of MINA ’s nude model photos appears on the screen. mina These were the days of the dark-haired little dwarf … my first husband, Stephen Haweis.20 He had a famous name from his parents.21 I, of course, made my own name … Löwy to Loy. That was the difference between us. MINA ’s

sketch of Haweis appears on the screen.

mina I believe Stephen must have hypnotized me … and I found myself pregnant. My parents were delighted. 16 St John’s Wood Art School, aka “The Wood,” subsequently the Anglo-French Art Centre (1878–1951). 17 Loy studied at the Society for Female Artists’ School in Munich under Angelo Jank in 1900. 18 Loy studied with Augustus John. 19 Loy studied at Académie Colarossi, founded by Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi. 20 Stephen Haweis (1878–1969), English artist. Loy and Haweis first met in art class in London and deepened their relationship in Paris. Loy and Haweis married in 1903. 21 Loy, quoted in Becoming Modern, 68.

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The photograph of MINA ’s parents reappears, with animated hands clapping. Thus it came about that I, this weakened creature, actually united in wedlock to the being on earth whom I would have least chosen.22 (She picks up a paintbrush and turns to another project) Stephen found unexpected success photographing Rodin sculptures in Paris. Snapshots of Rodin appear on the screen. I spent my confinement drawing and painting in our basement studio until the birth … MINA puts her legs up on the table, simulating labour. “Parturition” is projected on the screen and over MINA ’s body.

Stir of incipient life Precipitating into me The contents of the universe Mother I am Identical With infinite Maternity Indivisible Acutely I am absorbed Into The was – is – ever – shall – be Of cosmic reproductivity23 MINA ’s

legs drop to the floor.

22 Quoted in ibid., 85. 23 “Parturition,” The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 6–7.

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mina (More seriously) Oda was a beautiful baby. She had a way of making shadows dance upon the wall by turning the exquisite wrists of her outspread hands (extending her arms) – watching them gravely as if to time them to some eternally remembered measure.24 (Arms drop to her sides) She died of meningitis two days after her first birthday.25 MINA returns to sketching in a concentrated, almost frenetic fashion. A dark composition begins to appear on the projection screen, followed by MINA ’s work L’amour dorloté par les belles dames.

mina Of course no one paid much attention to me. All of Paris was abuzz with scandal. The scandal of Les Fauves at the Salon D’Automne … Les Fauves paintings appear on the screen. … The scandal that was Picasso … Picasso images from 1905 to 1906 appear on the screen. mina While our home life was … unconventional, when I found myself pregnant again Stephen and I left Paris for Florence. A daughter, Joella.26 A son, Giles, two years later.27 Really, my conceptions of life evolved while … stirring baby food on spirit lamps … and my best

24 Loy, quoted in Becoming Modern, 98. 25 In June 1905. Loy nearly went mad with grief and felt Haweis used the baby’s death against her to control their marriage. 26 Joella Synara Haweis (1907–2004). 27 John Giles Stephen Musgrove Haweis (1909–1923).

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drawings behind a stove to the accompaniment of a line of children’s clothes hanging round it to dry.28 sage You met a great number of artists and writers in Florence, though? mina In Florence, the expatriates gathered at Mabel Dodge’s Villa Curonia. Mabel is the most ample woman-personality alive29 – and my son’s godmother. A newsreel of DODGE in front of Villa Curonia runs on the screen. dodge (film) (Holding baby Giles) I’ve opened up my Florence home to artistexpatriates. It is a place where I can be both majestic and careless, spontaneous and picturesque, and yet always framed and supported by a secure and beautiful authenticity of background.30 Here, too, I have had installed a rope ladder so that my husband Edwin might descend into my bedroom from the floor above … but he is too matter of fact to use it. (To the baby) Isn’t he, Giles? Yes he is. Yes he is. mina Everyone gathered at Mabel’s. And it was at Mabel’s we finally met Gertrude Stein. A newsreel of STEIN runs on the screen.

28 Loy, Last Lunar Baedeker, lxvi. Some commentators feel that Loy exaggerated her role in her children’s lives as she often had domestic help and sometimes left the children (for at times lengthy periods) in the care of others. The fact that this is a debate in Loy studies is an interesting comment on gender. 29 Loy, quoted in Barnet, 136. 30 Dodge Luhan, quoted in Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds, 33.

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stein (film) Both Haweis and Mina were among the very earliest to be interested in the work of Gertrude Stein. Haweis had been fascinated with what he had read in manuscript of The Making of Americans. He did however plead for commas. Gertrude Stein said commas were unnecessary, the sense should be intrinsic and not have to be explained by commas and otherwise commas were only a sign that we should pause and take breath but one should know for oneself when one wanted to pause and take breath. However, as she liked Haweis very much and he had given her a delightful painting for a fan, she gave him two commas. It must however be added that on rereading the manuscript she took the commas out. Mina Loy equally interested was able to understand without the commas. She has always been able to understand.31 mina Gertrude was Curie of the laboratory of vocabulary she crushed the tonnage of consciousness congealed to phrases to extract a radium of the word32 sage But, Miz Loy, the Anglo-Americans weren’t your only influences in Florence. We’ve all heard about the Italian futurists, and Mr Filippo Marinetti in particular.

31 Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 132. 32 Loy, “Gertrude Stein,” The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 94.

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mina Yes, but it was Giovanni Papini, the movement’s philosopher, I saw first … his portrait, I mean, when we first moved to Florence … Newsreel of PAPINI , framed in a portrait. mina … “the ugliest man in Florence,” they said. But I knew we would get along. I asked him to sit for me and did my own portrait of him … The portrait is silent for a moment, then begins to speak. papini (film) My own ugliness pleases me. To it I owe the encounter with my wildness, the greater isolation and the sense of superiority of the solitary spirit.33 Newsreel fades. mina (Picking up notebook, dating a letter, then speaking to audience) Dear Mabel, I am rather blue. I have seen Papini again and I’m frightfully in love – and he hates me – with a voluptuous and exotic frigidity – I do want to run away and come to New York – But there is no way financially at present of settling the children – and at present no war! to put an end to the daily passions of life.34 Stephen has left for the South Seas so I am without a husband, such as he is, thank God … (To SAGE ) Marinetti was entirely different. “The caffeine of Europe,” he called himself.

33 Papini, quoted in Becoming Modern, 162. 34 Adapted from letter from Loy to Mabel Dodge, Box 24 f 664, Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers.

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A newsreel of MARINETTI runs on the screen. Futurist art is projected on the stage in a high-velocity immersion into futurist aesthetics. marinetti (film) We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness! The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity, and revolt! We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed! We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism, and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice! We want to glorify war – the only cure for the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman!35 (Seeing MINA ) You, beautiful woman – give yourself to me. You and I!!! I see our natures are identical. Each one of us has a cemetery within ourselves. That cemetery must be reduced to a minimum – a minimum! Bah, what’s the use of talking to you with the mists of romanticism rising in your eyes. mina Oh, I understand all you say – but I can’t make out where you are going. marinetti (film) We’re not such cowards as to ask where we are going – we’re brave enough to go! You should see me in a vermilion car – exceeding the speed limit – no lamps – no mudguards – paroxysmally into ditches. That is the futurists’36 way of life!37 35 Excerpted from F.T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” 251. 36 In drafts of “Brontolivido,” Loy uses the transparent and satirical pseudonym “The Flabbergasts.” 37 Adapted from “Brontolivido,” unpublished manuscript, Box 1 f1., Mina Loy Papers.

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mina (Looking bored, writes a letter) Dear Mabel, I am in the throes of conversion to futurism, but I shall never convince myself. There is no hope in any system that “combat le mal avec le mal” … and that is really Marinetti’s philosophy … though he is one of the most satisfying personalities I have ever come into contact with.38 marinetti (film) (To MINA ) Why write in your little book? Education is wasted on woman. Come, let me possess you. mina One can never possess another human being. marinetti (film) I know. mina Then why, in your reconstruction of the universe, leave woman out? marinetti (film) Woman is never going to change. mina Then the side of you that responds to the feminine element is never going to develop – you’re held down. marinetti (film) The futurist will finish her off. mina She will rot in your propensities.

38 Letter from Loy to Mabel Dodge, Box 24 f 664, Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers.

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marinetti (film) Dear lady, it would be so much more interesting to be talking about you. mina I am. marinetti (film) I mean to talk about you the way I want to. mina The way you want me to be. marinetti (film) Just as you are. mina That, I have never found out.

39

MARINETTI film cuts out abruptly. Still portraits of MARINETTI and PAPINI appear side by side. MINA rises and gives a ringmaster’s performance of “Lions’ Jaws.”

mina Raminetti cracked the whip of the circus-master astride a prismatic locomotive ramping the tottering platform of the Arts of which this conjuring commercial traveller imported some novelties from Paris in his pocket . . .

39 “Come, let me” to “found out” adapted from “Brontolivido.”

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souvenirs for his disciples to flaunt at his dynamic carnival (Gestures to PAPINI ’s photo) The erudite Bapini experimenting in auto-hypnotic God-head on a mountain rolls off as Raminetti’s plastic velocity explodes his crust of library dust … Raminetti gets short sentences for obstructing public thoroughfares Bapini is popular in “Vanity Fair” As for Imna Oly40 (Gestures to herself and vamps) I agree with Mrs Krar Standing Hail She is not quite a lady.41 sage You have said, though, Miz Loy, that you give credit to Marinetti for waking you up. mina Oh yes, he did do that. “Feminist Manifesto” appears on the screen. MINA delivers the manifesto to the audience. 40 One of several pseudonyms/anagrams by which Loy referred to herself. 41 Excerpted from “Lions’ Jaws,” The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 48–50.

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mina The feminist movement as at present instituted is

Inadequate. Women if you want to realize yourselves – you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval – all your pet illusions must be unmasked – the lies of centuries have got to go – are you prepared for the Wrench –? There is no half-measure – NO scratching on the surface of the rubbish heap of tradition, will bring about Reform, the only method is – Absolute Demolition42 Manifesto fades. mina (Laughs) You have to admit, it has a certain power behind it, no? sage I’d have to say you’re already halfway through the door into To-morrow.43 mina I’m halfway through the door into New York. MINA gives a cue into the air. Music of the 1910s comes on accompanied by projected images of the New York skyline at this time, ship entering the harbour, interspersed with footage of a dancing Isadora Duncan. MINA pulls out a new project, a lampshade, and begins working on it as she speaks.

42 “Feminist Manifesto,” ibid., 153. 43 Adapted from the Evening Sun, 13.

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mina No one who has not lived in New York has lived in the modern world.44 It’s why I left Italy. And the modern world meets at the Arensbergs’ salon …45 I’ve met a great number of people there and elsewhere. Marcel Duchamp.46 A newsreel shows DUCHAMP in the vein of a mugshot. Images of his art cut in and out of the picture. duchamp (film) (Nonchalantly) I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste. Take this fountain I submitted to the Society of Independent Artists. It is signed, dated, with the correct fee included. Who is to say that it is not art? A picture of PICABIA and PICABIA ’s works appear on the screen. mina Francis Picabia.47 A similar shot of PICABIA plays, interspersed with images of some of his works. picabia (film) Good taste is as tiring as good company. If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as your shirt, Marcel. An image of CRAVAN follows. 44 Ibid. 45 Walter Conrad Arensberg (1878–1954) and Louise (Stevens) Arensberg (1879–1953) were American art collectors and patrons who hosted salons for artists and writers at their New York apartment, 33 West Sixty-Seventh St. 46 Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), French-American artist and writer. 47 Francis Picabia (1879–1953), French artist and typographer.

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mina Arthur Cravan, the boxer-poet. He claims to be Oscar Wilde’s relative – Wilde’s wife was, in fact, his aunt – and entertains the avantgarde with stories of “Uncle Oscar” even though they never met – and published at least one poem to which he signed Wilde’s name.49 As a boxer-poet he became a symbol of toughness for the moderns and lectured at the Grand Central Palace. 48

A newsreel of DUCHAMP , PICABIA , and CRAVAN runs. duchamp (film) Drink this, Cravan, it will give you courage. picabia (film) Yes, Arthur, have another. A reel runs of CRAVAN speaking at the Grand Central Palace. A banner reads “The Independent Artists of France and America.” CRAVAN gets up to speak, very drunk. He hits the table, takes off his coat, vest, collar, and suspenders, and starts shouting obscenities. He is jumped by four officers, handcuffed, and taken to the police station. duchamp (film) (To audience) What a wonderful lecture.50

48 Arthur Cravan, born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd (1887–1918?), English writer and boxer. 49 Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Irish writer. Wilde’s wife, Constance Lloyd (1859–1898), was Cravan’s father’s sister. 50 As told in Larry Witham’s Picasso and the Chess Player, 125, and Burke’s Becoming Modern, 238.

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mina I didn’t really want to know Cravan, this boxer-poet, and when I first met him in the Arsenbergs’ salon he looked like a farmer, a husband, a… A reel runs of the Arensbergs’ salon. DUCHAMP and CRAVAN loll on a divan, drawing their fingers along the stockings of a BLONDE COUNTESS stretched among the cushions.51 CRAVAN rises, sits next to MINA , and tilts the brim of her hat onto the tip of her nose to cover her eyes. She tilts the hat back up and there is a long look between CRAVAN and MINA . The film fades. MINA shakes herself free of the memory, puts the finishing touch on the lampshade she has been working on. mina (To SAGE ) There. Do you like it? sage What is it? mina It’s a lampshade. I am going into business, you know. sage Miz Loy, it’s been an education. mina Yes, thank you very much. sage Thank – 51 Description from Burke, Becoming Modern, 107.

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A fire alarm sounds. MINA and SAGE look around in confusion. Lights out on the apartment. Lights up on the archive. GERTRUDE is sitting at her desk; on hearing the alarm she jumps up and retrieves a fluorescent traffic vest from a box beside her desk along with a fluorescent traffic wand. gertrude Fire drill. Everyone out! LLOYD

hurries in S.R.

gertrude Lloyd: fire drill. You know what to do. Clear everyone out of the basement. nods and leaves, almost bumping into NEVA on the way out.

LLOYD

neva What’s going on? gertrude Fire drill. Immediate evacuation. neva But if it’s only a drill …? I’m in the middle of something. gertrude Young woman, I am the fire marshal. neva You’re the archivist.

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gertrude This is a federal building. Every federal building has a fire marshal. That’s me. Let’s go. herds NEVA “outside” to a corner downstage.

GERTRUDE

gertrude I’ve got to check the other fire exits. Stay here! LLOYD

emerges down S.R.

neva Wow. She takes this pretty seriously. lloyd Yeah. She likes fire drill day. neva All of my notes are just sitting on the table. lloyd How’s it going? neva Good. Okay. I mean, I found the interview and a bunch of drafts of Loy’s assorted poems. But it’s all fragments. I wish I could make it cohere, somehow … Still, she’s really amazing. Here’s this woman who grew up in a Victorian household, decides she’s going to be an artist, goes off to Paris, lives in Florence, meets all the expats there, ends up involved in the craziest of the avantgarde movements, starts writing poetry – but not just poetry – really racy, really daring poems, stuff almost no one would write now – runs away to New York, becomes the centre of New York Dada …

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lloyd Right place, right time kinda thing. neva Partly, maybe. But she also made it happen. She could have just sat at home, like she was supposed to. But it wasn’t enough. Even to say that at that time, that it wasn’t enough. And that’s not even the end of the story. In New York she meets this boxer-poet named Arthur Cravan. This guy’s a real tough guy who happens to write poetry … He’s like a legend with Dada. And he and Mina fall in love – lloyd Did it work out? neva – And she wrote this autobiographical novel about being with Cravan – “Colossus” – that’s what she called him. And no one has a copy of this book.52 I mean, like, no one but her editor. And this archive has her drafts. And they’re just sitting on my desk right now. While we’re in the middle of a fake fire exercise. It’s killing me. lloyd Sounds like you take it pretty serious. neva Pardon me? lloyd Nothing. neva Tell me. 52 “Colossus” is the holy grail of Loy studies. An excerpt from the memoir was published in Rudolf Kuenzli, ed., New York Dada, 1986. However, this excerpt is considered unreliable by Loy’s editor, Roger Conover, and consequently is not available for reprinting. The passages from “Colossus” that are quoted in the play are those confirmed by scholars who have seen the original, notably Burke in Becoming Modern.

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lloyd It’s just – neva What? lloyd All you people come in here and get all fired up about this stuff – and it’s just, you know – old. neva Old. lloyd Yeah. Like you don’t care about life. You’re just messing around with dead stuff. Like – grave robbers. neva Grave robbers. lloyd Yeah. Exactly. Like there’s a whole world out here you don’t even notice. All sorts of stuff you don’t even notice. neva Like what? lloyd What do you mean? neva All this great stuff I apparently don’t notice? lloyd Well – there’s … uh.

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stares for a beat. LLOYD looks uncomfortable. lloyd

Gold panning. neva Gold panning. lloyd Yeah. My uncle Dean used to take me. You go out on the river, and you’re outside with the sun on your face, and when you find something it’s like – it’s really worth something, you know? It’s not just paper. GERTRUDE

enters S.R., still in her fire vest.

gertrude Everyone may return to the building. neva (To LLOYD ) Excuse me. NEVA

exits S.R. LLOYD watches her go. gertrude

Lloyd. lloyd (Pulling his attention away from NEVA ) Uh – yeah. gertrude I hope you have not become distracted from your responsibilities. lloyd Uh – no, Gertrude.

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gertrude These young academics are so full of wiles. LLOYD

focuses on GERTRUDE for the first time.

gertrude High heels in the archive! … One must be diligent and focus on the work at hand. Do you understand what I am saying? lloyd Yeah, I got it. gertrude Good, then let us return. We’re expecting a delivery from Central this afternoon. and LLOYD exit S.R. Lights up on MINA ’s New York apartment. MINA is painting a lampshade. The phone rings and a film of CRAVAN appears on the screen. MINA answers the phone. GERTRUDE

mina Hello. cravan (film) What are you up to, then? mina Oh, hello. A reporter’s just been here … from the Evening Sun. cravan (film) Did you run circles around him? mina Yes. Yes, I think so. I read him some poems.

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cravan (film) Well done. Every great artist must have a sense of provocation. mina Do you think so? cravan (film) Darling, forget about all that. We’re lovers! mina Is that what happened? cravan (film) … do you regret it? mina I never regret wasted time. MINA

and CRAVAN laugh.

cravan (film) Good. I’ll see you later, then. Film fades. mina (Returning to her lampshades and speaking to the audience) In New York, Cravan and I wandered everywhere … A montage of New York in the 1920s is projected onstage. CRAVAN sits in his apartment downstage left, which is bare except for a desk and bed.

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cravan You had better come and live with me in a taxicab. We can keep a cat.53 mina (To audience) He must have hated the Great War more than anyone in Europe … cravan Conscientious objector? … But I don’t object! They may all allow themselves to be murdered for aught I care, only they need not expect me to follow suit …54 mina (To audience) Colossus immediately left any country that declared war, and when Wilson announced the end of American neutrality he left for Canada. After a time in Newfoundland, finding the Canadians no more sympathetic than the Americans, he escaped to Mexico. The light changes to show CRAVAN ’s apartment is now in Mexico. cravan (Writing a letter) Please, my love, come to Mexico so that we can marry. Send me a lock of your hair. Better yet, come with all your hair.55 mina In New York we were together, but joining him in Mexico … Play was over. Looking for love and all its catastrophes is a less risky experience than finding it.56

53 Cravan, quoted in Becoming Modern, 239. 54 Adapted from ibid., 244. 55 Cravan, quoted in ibid., 251. 56 Loy, “Notes on Existence 1914–1919,” 332.

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picks up a suitcase and the lights fade on the apartment. A train chugs over the speakers. The lighting becomes pink, as though in the Mexican desert, and shadows of cacti and other tropical vegetation appear on the projection screen. The projections end in the simulated light and projected images of a street scene in Mexico City. CRAVAN sees MINA , hugs her, and puts the suitcase in the apartment. They link arms. MINA

mina Of course we both wanted to “really” marry in a rosy Mexican cathedral, spill our excessive delight in receptive aisles splashed with the wine and gold of stained-glass windows (lighting shift reflects this fantasy), but the money ran short of this fantasy and we were married by the mayor … (colour drains out). I was so convinced of the mere formality of Mexican ceremonies that after the vows Colossus had to nudge me.57 CRAVAN

elbows MINA . mina

I will!58 and CRAVAN embrace then move to the bare apartment S.L. CRAVAN lolls on the bed. MINA makes coffee with old grounds and orange peels. MINA

mina (Carefully) Is there no more work at the boxing school, then? cravan No. Not much. Or not enough, anyhow … What’s that you’re making for breakfast? 57 Cravan and Loy were married on 25 January 1918. 58 Adapted from account in Burke, Becoming Modern, 256.

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mina You forget we’re eating breakfast every second day now. cravan Hash with bangers and eggs, you say? Marvellous. brings two battered coffee mugs to the bed and slides in beside CRAVAN . MINA

mina Coffee, anyway. takes one of the cups from her and has a sip. He makes a face. CRAVAN

mina Old grounds flavoured with orange peels, I’m afraid. cravan Oh come now, you couldn’t make coffee even when we could afford it. mina That’s true. cravan (Putting the mug aside) It doesn’t matter. You’re beautiful. I’ll feast on that. CRAVAN

pulls MINA toward him. MINA laughs.

mina I’m not beautiful. I’m skinny. A man looks better than a woman when he’s starving. cravan Not to me.

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mina Colossus. cravan Mmmm? mina What will we do? CRAVAN

sighs and leans back on the pillows.

mina When there’s nothing left, I mean. cravan There’ll be nothing left to do. We’ll have to kill ourselves. MINA

can’t tell if he is serious and half-smiles. mina

No, really. shrugs. MINA sobers and lays her head on his shoulder. CRAVAN

mina No, my love. How can we die when we haven’t finished talking? CRAVAN

pulls MINA closer. They are silent. cravan

Buenos Aires, then. mina We haven’t money for the journey.

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cravan Salina Cruz first. We’ll use the last bit of the insurance money from your father. There are writers and artists in Salina Cruz. Expats. We’ll have friends there. mina All right. and CRAVAN lie in tableau for a moment. MINA rises and walks downstage centre, speaking to the audience. She is in spotlight and the rest of the stage is dark. MINA

mina Eventually we made it to Salina Cruz. Our friends Bob Brown59 and his wife, Rose,60 saved us from starving, and we had a good time with them.61 A newsreel of BROWN appears on the screen. brown (film) At the end of the rainy season, Cravan lurked around the docks until he found a boat. Because of a hole stove in its hull, he bought it cheap. Each day Cravan would go down to the pier and fit the boat for the voyage while Mina cooked the meals and sewed the sail. Mina and Cravan, separated by a strip of sunny beach, worked out a primitive system of signals to keep in close communion throughout their hours of work.62 During the description MINA walks to the front of the stage and sits. She has tucked a pillow from the bed under her 59 Robert (Bob) Carlton Brown (1886–1959), American writer. 60 Rose Johnston Brown (1883–1952), American writer. 61 Adapted from Burke, Becoming Modern, 264. 62 Bob Brown, You Gotta Live, 249. In the roman à clef about expatriate life in Mexico, Loy appears as Rita and Cravan as Rex.

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shirt to look like mid-stage pregnancy. She bangs on the floor with a metal spoon and waits a moment, and over the speakers we hear a signal in response. MINA pounds with the spoon again and we again hear a response. MINA laughs. mina A test sail? Already? (She hits the floor with her spoon) Bon voyage, my love! Come back soon! MINA stands and waves to a departing CRAVAN . The lights change to suggest the passing of day into night, night into day. The light sequence repeats. MINA becomes increasingly worried and desperate, finally withdrawn, sitting on the stage.

brown (film) Mina, you must come in the house. It’s not good for the baby. MINA

pounds on the stage with her spoon. There is no response.

brown (film) (To audience) We didn’t know what to do other than stick with the plan we had made with Cravan. We put Mina on a Japanese ship bound for Chile and met up with her in Valparaiso. From there we travelled over the Andes together and made our way to Buenos Aires. When we got there, still no Cravan. He’d disappeared, though there was no end to the rumours … he’d been murdered, he’d drowned, he’d run off …63 MINA is still motionless on the stage. Images/sound from the Buenos Aires general strike of 9 January 1919 and then Mardi Gras appear on the newsreel. A

63 Extrapolated from You Gotta Live.

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steamship is projected on the screen, and pictures of London. A baby’s cry is heard.64 Gradually the scene changes to Paris and a jazz café. Footage and sound of jazz musicians playing at a club in the twenties plays behind MINA . The jazz music rises in volume and intensity and then stops suddenly. The visual footage continues to play with no sound. MINA stands. As she recites, “The Widow’s Jazz” is projected over the stage, across the jazz footage and MINA herself. MINA recites in a whispery voice.65 mina Cravan colossal absentee the substitute dark rolls to the incandescent memory of love’s survivor on this rich suttee seared by the flames of sound the widowed urn holds impotently your murdered laughter Husband how secretly you cuckold me with death …66

64 Loy and Cravan’s daughter, Fabi (Jemima Fabienne Cravan [Lloyd], 1919– 1997), was born in London on 5 April. 65 As Loy is reported to have recited the poem at one of Natalie Barney’s salons. Natalie Clifford Barney (1876–1972) was an American writer. Barney’s salons were famous in Paris and Loy was a frequent attendee. 66 “The Widow’s Jazz,” The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 95. Loy returned to Paris in 1923, when she was forty-one, after a peripatetic few years trying to find some kind of stability and searching for Cravan.

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act ii Next morning in the archive. A tape recorder and headphones have been added to the researcher’s desk to simulate an audio archive. GERTRUDE sits at her desk doing a variety of tasks. NEVA enters S.R., looks around for LLOYD , and approaches GERTRUDE ’s desk. neva Good morning. gertrude Good morning. neva Have my Loy tapes arrived by any chance? gertrude (Looking on the shelf behind her desk and finding the tapes) Yes. Here they are. When I finish here, I’ll take you to the audio area. pointedly finishes up some paperwork while NEVA waits. NEVA is exasperated but tries to be patient and inconspicuous as she looks around for LLOYD . Eventually, GERTRUDE stops her work and leads NEVA to the researcher’s desk. GERTRUDE opens up the tape machine and hands NEVA the earphones. GERTRUDE begins to adjust the dials. GERTRUDE

neva (Talking to fill the silence) This is an interview that Loy did in 1965 in Aspen. There was a writers’ festival and a couple of the poets thought it would be a good idea to tape record her –

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gertrude She always did have broad appeal. It was her class, I think. (Looking at NEVA pointedly) It drew people in. neva Well, she certainly was charismatic. gertrude I’ll never forget her in Libeled Lady,67 sitting on the garden wall with William Powell. The scene from the 1936 Myrna Loy film plays in the background silently. GERTRUDE ’s voicing of Myrna Loy’s line is in sync with the film. gertrude Her character thinks Powell will never get around to asking, or that he might be engaged to someone else, so she finally says, “It’s the most important question I’ll ever ask. Just answer yes or no. But don’t explain. If it’s no, don’t explain.” And then she says: “Bill, have you been proposed to much? You know. Proposed to. Your hand in marriage.” And then she just straight out and says it. “I’m asking you to marry me. Will you marry me? Will you?” And then she says “Now. I mean now. Tonight. Will you, Bill? We’ll take the car and drive.” And he says … “To the moon.” The film clip ends. gertrude (Shaking it off) Well, it’s about time a book came out about her. She’s due. neva Myrna Loy. 67 1936 romantic comedy, dir. Jack Conway.

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gertrude Yes, of course. turns to leave but then turns to face NEVA again.

GERTRUDE

gertrude You don’t think it’s possible, do you? neva What’s that? gertrude That you and I have something in common. You think you’re so different. neva Well, I – gertrude I see the way you feel about these records. The way you hold them. The way you want to protect them, despite your lack of training. You’re not so different. neva Well, I think we have different material in mind and different approaches – gertrude You know what, honey? – Give it forty years. neva For – gertrude They’ll listen to you now because you’re young. Because your approach is “fresh.” You won’t stop caring but first they’ll stop

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watching … and then they’ll stop listening. Just stop. For no reason, really, not any you can tell. You’ll still have interesting things to say, you think. You’ll still have opinions. Only no one’s listening. It will be you and the files. neva Ah – gertrude And stop looking around for him. He doesn’t come in until one on Wednesdays. marches back to her desk. closes her eyes and takes a breath.

GERTRUDE NEVA

neva Well, okay then. exhales, then puts the headphones on. She tries to press play but fumbles the button.

NEVA

neva Damnit! presses play again, more smoothly. Lights up on C.S.: Aspen in August of 1965.68 MINA ’s New York apartment has been replaced with LOY ’s Aspen home. The furniture is plain and mostly wooden. LOY sits C.S., slightly nervous. Some files and a copy of Lunar Baedeker sit on the end table beside her along with a short glass of water. NEVA

68 Loy moved to Aspen in 1953 to be near her daughters. Joella married her second husband, the Bauhaus architect Herbert Bayer, in 1944. Together with Fabienne and her husband, Fritz Benedict, the couple became active in the development of Aspen as a resort and cultural destination.

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The doorbell rings. JOELLA and BLACKBURN 69 can he heard talking offstage. LOY alternately listens, smooths her skirt, and pats the cover of Lunar Baedeker. Dimly, behind LOY , we can see a filmed version of the scene between MINA and CRAVAN in the apartment in Mexico. joella (offstage) I think she’ll be okay today. There are ups and downs, of course. blackburn (offstage) This is a nice house. joella (offstage) Typical Aspen style, or what we’re hoping will be. My husband is an architect. blackburn (offstage) It’s been a great spot for the writers’ festival. joella (offstage) Well, that’s what we’re praying for … that eventually it will be a haven for these sorts of things – both arts and recreational, I mean. and BLACKBURN enter. looks up. The film fades.

JOELLA LOY

joella Mother, this is Paul Blackburn. The poet who has come to talk to you about your writing. LOY

nods.

69 Paul Blackburn (1926–1971), American writer. For the actual interview, Robert Vas Dias (1931–), British-American writer, was also present. Vas Dias’s presence has been omitted for practical reasons in staging and as it would seem Blackburn did most of the talking during the interview.

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blackburn Ms Loy, it’s a real privilege. begins setting up the tape recorder. turns to help LOY with her dentures.

BLACKBURN JOELLA

loy Take them out? Don’t put them in here … No, then they’ll look at me. joella They don’t look at you! They look away. (Giggles) blackburn Let’s see how – figures out the tape recorder and there is a click. JOELLA watches for a moment and then exits.

BLACKBURN

loy I never had any teeth all my life.

blackburn Hmmmm. loy Did I tell you the story of my teeth? (Laughs) There’s a fine way to start an interview. blackburn No! loy It’s very wonderful. My life was very – ah – unpredictable. When I was, oh, I suppose in my very early teens, I went to a dentist. Oh dear. (Laughs)

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blackburn Fine! loy I went to a dentist to have a tooth stopped, they called it, you know – filled, and he began drilling this nerve of the tooth out. blackburn That’s painful. loy Yes, it was, it had never been heard of … So there I was in the chair with the perspiration streaming down my face, and when I tried to get out of his clutches, I found that I was bound to the chair with some kind of heavy metal fixture, I couldn’t get out, and the nurse – blackburn It’s like a nightmare! loy Oh, it was simply terrible, because I wasn’t a coward, I was … And I sat there while he drilled the whole nerve out of this tooth, it needn’t have been drilled out at all. blackburn Oh God, it’s terrible. loy … And had the tooth pulled out, and this went on and on and when I was very young I hadn’t any teeth of my own, but when I told people about this to find out why they did it, everybody laughed and they thought I’d gone mad. They’d never heard of such a thing. There wasn’t such a dentist. And when I was in my latest teens, I think, or perhaps over twenty, I met one man, somebody or some-

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where among intellectuals, and he had either come across or heard of this dentist, he really existed, because there wasn’t another one in the world!70 BLACKBURN

and LOY laugh.

loy Oh yes … That’s been my life … Everything happens to me like that. I married a man who was, well, once when I met him, a French celebrity. My husband was English but he lived in France and … he disappeared and we hadn’t quarrelled, and I was the only person he would speak to, he used to snub everybody, which made him very famous (laughs with interviewer) and was a poet – he was a poet. I don’t know, did I tell you this story before? blackburn No. loy You said yes, I did. blackburn No! loy No? I thought you said yes. Well anyhow, I never saw that husband again, after he left for South America on a sailboat. And then at last I found out, through the Christian Scientist71 – which was very funny, they always seem to put you right – I went to a Christian Scientist, and I told this story, and she had just met a man who had told her that the most wonderful man he had ever met in his life he’d met down in Mexico, which is where we went, when we were starving. 70 Adapted from “Mina Loy Interview with Paul Blackburn and Robert Vas Dias,” 209–10. 71 Loy converted to Christian Science during her years in Florence, when a practitioner saved Joella from a childhood disease.

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He said he was the most wonderful man he had ever met, and he was murdered; it was such a pity. (Laughs) So I found out that he hadn’t tried to shove me off, I didn’t think he had, because we were the only people who could talk to each other. There was no question about getting out, if he’d wanted something else beside a wife I wouldn’t have bothered very much but … he was dead. They had murdered him to get this little bit of money out of his pocket that he got from my – oh, the money that came to me from England,72 there was just a little left after the war … And that’s what we were going out to Buenos Aires on, and start a new life.73 blackburn Would you like to try to read some of the poems now? loy All right. Now what am I to read to you … “Lunar Baedeker” – is that all right? blackburn Fine. loy (Reads) A silver Lucifer serves cocaine in cornucopia To some somnambulists of adolescent thighs draped in satirical draperies … I don’t think I … 72 From Loy’s father’s pension. 73 “Mina Loy Interview,” 210–11.

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blackburn Try! loy (Recites) Peris in livery prepare Lethe for posthumous parvenus74 Can I smoke? blackburn Naturally! Certainly, of course. Let me help you here.75 picks up a cigarette and leans forward to accept a light from BLACKBURN .

LOY

loy Yes, you may, thank you. But you have no idea how surprised I was that you didn’t shriek and run away when I read you that stuff that I read before … I always feel I’m going to blush when I read my poems, because when I first … because I’m getting old, you see, it was a long time ago … Somebody, some female poet, said that I was the most immoral creature that ever lived … I suppose I sounded as though I was rather pugnacious, you know, I wasn’t at all .. and I’d only written these things for the sake of the sounds of the words. It was like making jewelry or something. Just seems …76 (Looks down and shuffles through some papers) “Pig Cupid,” oh, that’s very famous. 74 “Lunar Baedeker,” quoted in ibid., 212. 75 Excerpted from “Mina Loy Interview,” 212–13. 76 Excerpted from ibid., 213–14.

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blackburn Could you read it? As LOY reads, the poem is projected across the room. loy Spawn of Fantasies Sifting the appraisable Pig Cupid his rosy snout Rooting erotic garbage “Once upon a time” Pulls a weed white star-stopped star-topped Among wild oats sewn in mucous membranes. That’s clever! blackburn That’s very good, yes. loy I would an eye in a Bengal light Eternity in a sky-rocket Constellations in an ocean Whose rivers run no fresher Than a trickle of saliva Yes, that’s quite good, isn’t it. But that’s why they said I was so frightfully immoral. Fancy talking about a “trickle of saliva.” These

are suspect places

I must live in my lantern Trimming subliminal flicker Virginal to the bellows Of Experience77 77 The verses are from “Love Songs” or “Songs to Joannes,” which Loy calls “Pig Cupid,” quoted in ibid., 219–20.

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Coloured glass (Laughs) Wasn’t I funny? blackburn Well, you’re beautiful. Magnificent. You’re very funny. loy (Flattered, looks up and smiles) Yes, but I never, I never discussed anything about doing writing in any particular way, modern or more contemporary. It must have been something I lived in – I learned in a former life. I certainly did have some subconscious memories of a former existence.78 looks away and the lights fade. A short film based on Robert McAlmon’s79 account in “Post-Adolescence” runs on the projection screen.80 BARNES and WALTERS are sitting at a table in a New York café.81 LOY

barnes (film) She is commonly what is known as brilliant, isn’t she? walters (film) People don’t grasp her meanings; naturally they think she’s intellectual. She has a romantic soul underneath sophistication, which is painful to herself, I suspect.

78 Excerpted from ibid., 221. 79 Robert McAlmon (1895–1956), American writer and publisher. 80 “Post-Adolescence” is an autobiographical short story by Robert McAlmon about his experience among the modernists of Greenwich Village. Mina Loy appears as Gusta Rolph. 81 While it seems highly likely that Djuna Barnes is the character in “PostAdolescence” that McAlmon calls “Beryl Marks,” there is no critical consensus on the identity of “Walters.”

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barnes (film) Well, for God’s sake, all I have to say is I wish she’d show up, then. I’ve got to have a bright flash in my life soon. walters (film) She’s been down on her luck lately and feeling miserable; unhappy about a dead husband, or lover, or some such thing. barnes (film) Ah, that; who in hell is happy anyway? There’s too much said about that. Does she write anything worth looking at? walters (film) Her ideas and style are unique, unusual to her. She writes brittlely about ideas, insistent in her ideas on irony. Maybe that’s second-rate. Something alive in her work, though … Her attempt to believe in her own writing is too obvious a sham for her own wit, but in some way she seems to still expect adventure or romance – after what she’s seen. barnes (film) She doesn’t sound a hell of a lot different from the rest of us, except I suppose she’s more of a lady than I am. I’m so lacking in culture, they all tell me. What is it, and where do you get it so I can qualify? walters (film) You’d better keep rough, Djuna, so at least there’s someone around to express a sort of protest. “This generation! This civilization!” MINA

enters the café and joins the table.

mina (film) I intended going out this afternoon to see if I couldn’t get some fashion design work to do, but my will seems paralyzed for the time being. What’s the use of any kind of movement? Don’t mind me. I’m not up to anything but wearing on your nerves at the moment until I get a cup of coffee within me. My mind will keep wondering about

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that husband of mine – whether he’s really drowned or not. If it had only been my first husband so he couldn’t pester me about the children. barnes (film) You have children – and in the plural – were they accidents? mina (film) No, not quite. The third, who is only two, I wanted because I liked her father so much. The other two I rather wanted because I detested their father so much, and thought they’d keep me from reflecting on that all the time. I married so young that it took me some years to have sense enough to break away, and we lived in a horrible conventional English environment in Florence. One got to thinking there might be nothing else in the world. barnes (film) My children ain’t. I took well care to see that they weren’t, though one operation nearly did me in. And there’s some tell me I’m all mother and should have seventeen, but who’d keep them? I, like a poor boon, have spent most of my young life supporting men, brothers, one husband, and lovers through some periods. I’ve no luck at all. mina (film) We’ll have to form a union of women to show the men up, and make ourselves exhibits A and B of horrible examples. walters (film) The poor cusses. But I don’t think they’re really the seat of the trouble with the world. barnes (film) What, then? walters (film) Say sex; it’s an answer; or morality; or capital; or the weather …

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mina (film) What people we are; what a party we are. To change the awful trend of thought tell me, how does one make a living? Of course, though, that’s the worst possible question … I must go back to England. barnes (film) Oh no, you must not. Everyone likes you so well here. mina (film) Yes, people never quite dislike a person if she is finished. barnes (film) Have you seen … mina (film) Don’t please ask me what I’ve seen. I’m bored to death with seeing, and with the necessity of being interested in anything: plays, music, books, painting, what not. Really I’m not fit to talk tonight. Don’t be courteous and stay to talk to me, for I’m going to simply sit here for hours. Please go; I know neither of you can want to talk with me as I am now. Another time. BARNES

and WALTERS get up to leave.

mina (film) Good night. Don’t let my bad humour annoy you. barnes (film) Hell, I’ve just begun to like you because you showed real emotion in wanting us to go to the devil for boring you. We’ll see each other again. I’m not always so down and out as I am tonight; I’ve had a run of hellish luck myself. WALTERS and BARNES depart. MINA plays with her coffee cup and looks hungrily around the restaurant. MCALMON enters and joins her.

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mcalmon (film) You sit looking at your cup as if you haven’t eaten yet. mina (film) (Evasively) Oh yes, I’ve eaten. mcalmon (film) Have a chop or something with me. It won’t flounder you, and I like company when I’m eating so you won’t watch my jaws going and make me self-conscious. Bad for the digestion, that. mina (film) May I have lamb chops? mcalmon (film) Sure, anything you want. I’m flush tonight, with almost two dollars on me, and the prospect of getting a few more tomorrow. That’s wealth in this neighbourhood. mina (film) How do you survive and make money? Employers always treat me with much respect and think the position I’m after not quite big enough for me. mcalmon (film) I do it irregularly, and at about eighty different kinds of work. They don’t treat me too respectfully, but I don’t them either. It’s do and get paid. I’ve done a five-day hunger siege once, but one gets a little panicky after the first three days, and loses all ideas of romantic suicide. The hunger protest condemns one to life and battle. mina (film) You’re feeling dull tonight too, Bob. Don’t. mcalmon (film) Let’s go somewhere, do something, hear some music or see a show. We need to have our imaginations livened up a bit.

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mina (film) Tuts, what are you suggesting to me, that I lack imagination? That’s an awful crime these days. Your implication is unbearable, and I with a vengeful nature. mcalmon (film) I said we. To the divil with your vengeful nature. Let’s snap out of it and get out on the street anyway, or we’ll be talking about art, or life, before we know it, and I’m not up to that. At any rate we can look up some place to have a whisky, and in that illicit naughtiness find solace.82 The film fades. LOY returns to the present. loy Well, that was the way Robert McAlmon told it, anyway. When we were in New York he was poor like we all were. But then he married a millionheiress83 – for a short time, anyway – and was wealthy as could be. That’s where he got the money to publish my poems, in Paris, when we all lived in Paris.84 blackburn Do you have some others that you like particularly? loy Hm? No. I think I’m getting hungry.

82 Adapted from Robert McAlmon’s “Post-Adolescence,” 14–21 in Post-Adolescence. 83 Loy’s word for someone who inherited substantial money was “millionheir.” 84 The “milllionheiress” is Bryher Ellerman, who married McAlmon in 1921 while still involved with H.D., likely to gain financial independence from her father. Some (notably William Carlos Williams) have argued McAlmon thought the marriage was in good faith, while others have suggested it was, mutually, a marriage of convenience. Ellerman supplied McAlmon with a substantial allowance while they were married and a settlement when they divorced, causing McAlmon to be known as “McAlimony” in some circles. McAlmon used most of this money to help other writers and to subsidize his Contact Press, which published a number of avant-garde writers including Loy and H.D.

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There is a click. Lights down on the interview. Lights up on the archive. neva Hungry. takes off her earphones and pulls a brown paper lunch sack out of her bag. She gets up from her desk, takes her lunch outside down S.R., and sits on the bench. She opens the bag, takes out a sandwich, and has a bite. She is clearly enjoying the sun after the cold of the archive. She takes another bite of sandwich. Just as she does, LLOYD enters S.R. He is wearing a backpack. He sees NEVA and hesitates, then walks toward her. NEVA

lloyd Hi. neva (Chewing, covering her mouth and gesturing, putting the sandwich back in the bag) Hi. lloyd Can I sit down? NEVA

moves over and LLOYD sits on the bench. lloyd

Having lunch? neva (Swallows) Yeah. Seemed safer than the cafeteria. lloyd Probably. (Pause) Listen. I’m sorry about yesterday. I didn’t mean –

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neva No. It’s fine. It’s okay. lloyd How’s it going in there? neva Good. Well, sort of. I’m listening to an interview Loy did when she was older – in Aspen. Almost no one focuses on that time. It’s always Loy when she was young and glamorous in New York or Loy when she was in Paris between the wars. Anyway, in this interview, she’s still got it, she’s still very acute mostly … but she’s sad. Like she never got over … lloyd (Only half-listening, looking around) Listen. I got something for you. neva What? looks around again. He pulls a file out of his backpack and hands it to NEVA .

LLOYD

neva Oh my God! You made copies of Loy’s drafts of “Colossus”! lloyd Uh – it’s not a copy. neva These are the originals?! From the archive? lloyd Yeah. I got them for you. Last night. neva You took them?

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lloyd Well – neva But people are going to think I stole them! Are you crazy? lloyd No. You signed that box back in. People will just think they … went missing. Things go missing all the time. neva They do? lloyd Sometimes. neva Oh my God. NEVA

runs her hands over the sheets of paper.

lloyd So. I was reading some last night. This Mina. She was really smart. And this Cravan guy was – well, kinda tough, right? But they still ended up in Mexico together. neva (Dazed) For a while. lloyd So, I was thinking. Maybe we could have dinner. neva This is just – lloyd Like, Mexican even. There’s this spot over on Third –

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neva – the most amazing – lloyd (Encouraged) – and who knows, right? neva – most insane, highly illegal thing anyone has ever done for me. runs her hands over the sheets one last time and gives them back to LLOYD .

NEVA

neva Thank you. Really. But you have to put them back.

lloyd What? Why? neva Because – lloyd But what about Mina? neva What about Mina? lloyd It worked out for her. And Cravan. neva How far did you get in the book? lloyd (Pause) Not that far.

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neva Well, it didn’t. It didn’t work out. It doesn’t work out. Not in real life. All you can do is try and get at some of the complexity of why not. Like Mina’s work does. puts her lunch back in her bag and gathers her things.

NEVA

neva Look. I need to get back, okay? This is my last day in the archive. Gertrude is going to flip out if she sees I’ve left those tapes just sitting there. nods slowly. NEVA hurries back to her table in the archive. She puts her face in her hands for a moment, then puts on the earphones and presses play.

LLOYD

The lights rise C.S. LOY finishes some yoghurt and puts the bowl aside. loy That’s better. blackburn Good. Now, do you have other poems there that you like particularly? loy Other – ? blackburn Poems – that you like particularly? loy No, I just really can’t remember them.

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blackburn What is the next one there? loy (Looking down) “Three Italian Pictures.” This is when I lived on the hillside in Florence. (Begins reading poem) We English … (Looks up from poem) I was thinking, why do we call ourselves English in England? Why is it called England when it’s spelled E-N-G? And I was wondering what the original word was. blackburn Anglo. loy Well, that isn’t English … blackburn The Angles and the Jutes. They were Danes, I believe, originally. loy Angles and whats? blackburn Jutes! Jutes! loy The ankles and the jukes? blackburn Jutes! loy What’s the juice?

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blackburn Jutes! loy Jews?85 blackburn JUTE!!

86

A click is heard over the speakers. loy Did you just stop the recording? blackburn Er – yes. But I’ll start it again. Shall we hear the poem? loy (Acidly) Ah yes, the poem. Well we English make a tepid blot On the messiness Of the passionate Italian life-traffic Throbbing the street up steep Up up to the porta Culminating In the stained fresco of the dragon slayer87 Well – haven’t you heard enough? blackburn Um – are you tired? 85 In her introduction to the interview, Burke speculates that Loy’s mishearing/misunderstanding of “Jews” represents an “unresolved ambivalence about her Jewish ancestry” (207). 86 “Do you have other” to “Jute” adapted from “Mina Loy Interview,” 226. 87 Excerpted from ibid.

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loy (Looks down at the book in her hands) I can’t remember. I can’t remember what the Contact edition looked like. Robert McAlmon published it for me in Paris in 1925.88 After Buenos Aires I was all over the map. But I settled in Paris. That’s how it was then, in Paris in the twenties. Always someone to talk to in a café – Joyce, Pound. Always someone. Eventually I did pull it together and opened up a lampshade shop with my own designs. A short film runs on the projection screen, showing MINA ’s lampshade designs including the illuminated globe, a water lily, and a calla lily. MINA attends to a client in the shop.89 mina Yes, madam, we do sell the Globe Céleste here, 200 francs. joella Mama, it’s a telegram from Papa. mina What does your father want all the way from his extravagant travels in the south seas? Wandering artist, indeed. Kidnapping your brother to wander with him. Is it money? joella No, it’s – mina Joella, what is it?

88 Loy’s work was not republished as a collection until Jonathan Williams brought out Lunar Baedeker & Time-Tables in 1958. 89 Loy moved back to Paris 1923–27. During these years she opened and operated a lampshade and design shop in financial partnership with Peggy Guggenheim.

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joella It’s Giles, Mama. Papa says Giles has died … A cancerous growth in his brain.90 Sound of lamps breaking. Newsreel ends. loy Eventually everyone left Paris – the threat of the war, the stock exchange. People started stealing my designs. There was nothing to do, in the end, but close the shop. Well, after that I became a kind of art agent for my son-in-law, well, the first one, Julien Levy …91 Such a nice-looking boy. Have you heard of surrealism? blackburn Surrealism – yes! loy Well, of course, I knew them all in Paris and then helped Julien acquire many of their paintings. We had so many beautiful paintings then. Do you know the one about memory? Images of the paintings appear on the screen. blackburn The Persistence of Memory?92 loy Yes, my son-in-law bought that one and so many others … Max Ernst,93 de Chirico,94 Kahlo …95 Oh dear. 90 Giles Haweis died in the Bahamas in 1923 at the age of fourteen. 91 Julien Levy (1906–1981), American curator and art dealer. Levy and Loy’s daughter Joella were married from 1927 to 1942. Loy worked for Levy in Paris, finding artworks for his collection. 92 1931 painting by Spanish painter Salvador Dalí (1904–1989). 93 Max Ernst (1891–1976), German artist. 94 Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), Italian artist. 95 Frida Kahlo (1907–1954), Mexican artist.

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blackburn You getting tired? loy What was life all about, anyway? The paintings fade out. blackburn Well, are you tired? Should I read to you now?96 loy I don’t think it matters how many poems you wrote … blackburn No. loy … do you? blackburn Not necessarily, no.

97

loy No. I did paint too. Well, when the war threat became real, my daughters insisted I come to New York. I lived in the Bowery, where all the street people lived. A newsreel runs showing a derelict street in New York. MINA is seen picking up pieces of refuse and putting them in her pockets.98

96 “Mina Loy Interview,” 237. 97 Ibid., 239. 98 Loy created a series of “constructions” out of found materials during her later New York years (1937–1953), some of which were exhibited at the Bodley Gallery in 1959.

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The screen shows an application of materials that overlays this scene, ending in a complete picture of one of LOY ’s montages. loy “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 other aromas through the monstrous air of this red-lit thoroughfare.99 (Silence.) Cravan … Everything’s been funny in my life. But it wasn’t funny losing him, we got on wonderfully. He and I used to talk quite – happily.100 Well, I get along all right here in Aspen with my daughters. They are planning some kind of utopian village here. That’s what it is to be young, though, isn’t it? Build kingdoms in the sky? I know we did. Yes, we did … Shall I read you one last poem? 99 “On Third Avenue,” The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 109. 100 “Mina Loy Interview,” 241.

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blackburn Oh yes. loy I like this one, you know. Though it never did have a title – There is no Life or Death, Only activity And in the absolute Is no declivity. There is no Love or Lust Only propensity Who would possess Is a nonentity. There is no First or Last Only equality And who would rule Joins the majority. There is no Space or Time Only intensity, And tame things Have no immensity.101 The tape recorder clicks. Lights down C.S. In the archive, NEVA takes the tape out of the recorder and returns it to its case. neva Only intensity. (Half-smiles to herself) slowly packs her things and walks over to GERTRUDE ’s desk. She waits for a moment at the empty desk. GERTRUDE enters and takes her seat.

NEVA

101 “Untitled,” The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 3.

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gertrude Finished? neva Yes. gertrude Will you need these tapes again tomorrow? neva No. I’m going home tomorrow. It was just a two-day trip. gertrude I see. neva Well, goodbye then. And – thanks. removes NEVA ’s pen from her drawer and passes it to NEVA , who nods and pockets it.

GERTRUDE

gertrude So that’s it, then. neva Yes … gertrude You know he’s just lurking in the basement (jerks her head S.L., in the direction of the basement) trying to find a moment to put that file back. neva (Carefully) You know about that?

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gertrude Sweetie, I know about everything that’s happened in this archive. Even in the sixties. neva Rea-lly. gertrude (Nodding) So? neva I’m leaving tomorrow. It would just be dinner. gertrude Honey, can I give you some advice? neva Sure. I mean, yes. gertrude Speaking as you, forty years from now … the archives tell you something. It’s mostly fragments, in the end. There aren’t a lot of stories, not complete ones. stands there, looking uncertain. GERTRUDE begins putting files away. NEVA turns and walks decisively toward the basement, in the direction GERTRUDE indicated. Left alone, GERTRUDE turns on her laptop. We see a scene of Myrna Loy and Clark Gable together in Test Pilot.102 GERTRUDE laughs. As the house lights come up, the audience departs to an overlapping soundtrack of MINA ’s and LOY ’s voices reading from The Lost Lunar Baedeker. NEVA

102 1938 drama, dir. Victor Fleming.

Nancy Cunard and the Heterotopic Stage

In 2011, the Gucci fashion house announced Nancy Cunard as the inspiration for its “Hard Deco” collection. The clothing line played off Cunard’s preferences for geometric designs, fitted lines, and kohl eye makeup, causing a New York Times columnist to comment on the ubiquity of the “ghost of Nancy Cunard.” Similarly, Dior’s June show that same year also appropriated Cunard, prompting a Condé Nast writer to suggest that “chunky agate earrings and piled-on Plexiglas cuffs à la Nancy Cunard added a futuristic edge.” In the Dior show the male models, too, were dressed in the androgynous fashions Cunard helped popularize, and the effect was to evoke a small army of angular Cunardian reflections. The runway is a long way from avant-garde coteries or academic circles, yet the fashion industry’s metonymic approach to Cunard, invoking an aspect of her style or an impression of her personality to create a larger image, is strangely familiar. Consistently, the idea of Cunard that circulated in her own time and our own has exceeded the woman in terms of both sensation and circulation, and her motives, activism, and lifestyle have been performed and re-performed on various platforms, referencing her life yet often eliding the autobiographical articulations that might anchor or destabilize these accounts. This is to say that any performance of Nancy Cunard, before it can be crafted into a dramatized account, must first confront the surplus of extant performances created by media, literary culture, and academic profiles alike. An auto/biographical performance of Cunard, moreover, demands particularly careful attention, as it is often the ways Cunard integrated the personal and the political – and how she staged these integrations both on her body and in her writing – that have been especially polarizing.

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Why do so many Nancy Cunards exist, uncollated and seemingly irreconcilable, in both popular and scholarly imaginations? Unlike many modernists (and the list is long and marked by their centrality to the canon), Cunard by and large came down on the right side of history: civil rights, colonial self-determination, anti-fascism. And yet the biographical details of Cunard’s life, the unconventional nature of her activities, and the more glaring paradoxes of her activism have evoked reactions of unusual intensity. This history and the conflicted positions within it are well-rehearsed in modernist studies, yet surprisingly unknown outside of this circle, and therefore are worth revisiting before we consider what a staged intervention might offer. As a one-time wealthy heiress to the Cunard shipping fortune who turned her back on her family – and its money – in order to advocate for democracy and civil rights, she has at once been celebrated as a reformer and declaimed as a dilettante. As a figure of the Dadaist, surrealist circles, as well as the Anglo-American avant-garde, and as a woman who embraced the lifestyle of those groups during the 1920s and ’30s and beyond, she has been variously cast as feminist and promiscuous. As the editor of an 855-page, multi-continent anthology about race, Negro Anthology, she has been named a pioneering intellectual historian of trans-Atlantic black studies (Marcus) and derided for “warped, naïve” thinking that essentializes blackness and exposes the “racist myths” perpetuated by “white liberal thinking” (ArcherStraw 94). As a political organizer, an eyewitness journalist, the editor of the collection Authors Take Sides – which published authors’ stated positions on the Spanish Civil War – and chronicler of the lives of Spanish Republicans in French refugee camps, she has been portrayed as a champion of anti-fascist causes and provoked suspicion or ennui for her “progressive zealotry” (Lawlor 29). Only in Cunard’s own literary writing and publishing has response been relatively neutral, but despite or perhaps because of this neutrality, this work is strangely understudied. And this inattention is odd: though perhaps not prolific or innovative enough to be considered foundational modernist production, the totality of this work is, nonetheless, interesting and revelatory. As the owner, publisher, and printer of the avant-garde Hours Press she published, among others, Laura Riding, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, and Samuel Beckett. As a poet she wrote the collections Outlaws (1921),

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Sublunary (1923), and Parallax (1925), and she wrote the prose memoirs Grand Man: Memories of Norman Douglas (1954), GM : Memories of George Moore (1956), and These Were the Hours: Memories of My Hours Press (published posthumously, 1969). But this body of publishing and writing has been unable to compete with the spectacle of Cunard, notably photographs that dramatically present Cunard’s obsession with race and African aesthetics – and the scenes of her political activism, alternately played out by her polemical writing (Negro Anthology; Black Man and White Ladyship) and photographs of Cunard that display the white, female body working in proximity to black men. As the list above suggests, and as a study of the writing around Cunard reveals, “Nancy” has been staged in a variety of ways, often according to a series of implicit performance tropes and dramatic narratives that have mobilized her image in ways that more standard historical or literary analysis could not. The heterogeneity of opinion, activities, and structures within Cunard’s own life and surrounding it challenge the structures of narrative drama. Yet within the theatre are unique opportunities to bring together the disparate materials and ideas that are the marker of Cunard studies. As Erika Fischer-Lichte notes, theatre “can be defined as a performing art that unfolds in different kinds of spaces using heterogeneous materials such as the human body, voice, various kinds of objects, light, music, language, and sounds to create the theatrical performance as its product of work” (13). This emphasis on the component parts of the theatrical event highlights some of the possibilities of pairing divergent representations of Cunard in their various material formats: photographs of Cunard by Man Ray and Barbara Ker-Seymer juxtaposed with her journalism and written memories, for example, or the language of her political pamphlets voiced by actors embodying racial difference. Just as the simultaneity of theatre, in working on H.D., provides the possibility of realizing the “image” and her palimpsestic imagination, and in Loy offers an avenue for the literal enactment of her visual sensibility and writing belied by “subconscious archives,” so in Cunard the juxtapositional possibilities of the stage enable a confrontation between the spectacular Cunard and the autobiographical one. To see Cunard’s public performances as intertwined with more measured autobiographical writing is to engage in a mode of analysis

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exemplified by Green, who writes: “Both spectacular writings and writings on spectacle reveal how public acts and private responses, how the realm of the visible and the autobiographical utterance, are necessarily and intimately connected when the feminist body is at stake […] Locating the common performative nature of feminism’s spectacles and its confessions highlights the interrelatedness of these strategies while maintaining their differences” (7). While Cunard’s causes were not in themselves feminist ones, the tension between the spectacular and the autobiographical is keenly felt in examining her work, and the strategy of contrasting the public display with the written word can be unusually well-accommodated by the theatre’s inhabitation of the juncture of act and utterance. Green’s emphasis on the “common performative nature” of spectacles and confessions, moreover, points to the usefulness of performative inquiry in probing this intersection through simultaneous realization. If the central juxtaposition of autobiographical and spectacular performance can be accommodated onstage, it is only one of many, which speaks to how the fundamental issue of range – both the range of opinion within Cunard studies and the breadth of Cunard’s own activities and geographical trajectory – can be encompassed through dramatization. It is on this point of juxtaposition and heterogeneity that a play about Cunard benefits from the “heterotopic” qualities of the stage that Foucault identifies in “Of Other Spaces.” One of the most frequently cited of Foucault’s examples of the heterotopia is the garden that is its own place and at the same time incorporates other environments through plants from across the globe. Yet the very first example Foucault provides in elaborating the heterotopia’s accommodative powers is the theatre: “the theatre brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another” (6). As Joanne Tompkins sets forth in Theatre’s Heterotopias, the theatre is explicitly heterotopic in that it is always an “alternative space” set in contrast to the real world even while it “resonates” with it. In Cunard’s case, Foucault’s emphasis on visiting a series of foreign places is literally important: the stage allows us to travel to the many and varied locations of her activities. But it is also true that in its heterotopic dimensions the stage can accommodate materials (film, projections, soundscapes) and ideological perspectives that are “foreign”

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to each other. A heterotopic understanding of the theatre, therefore, seems to be the most useful in conceptualizing a dramatized approach to Cunard and in bringing Cunard’s myriad representations – spectacular, confessional, and beyond – into active play within a single multimedia location: an “alternative space” that is at once distinct from but representative of varied ideologies and geographies. Additionally, the “topos” element contained within the heterotopia reminds us of the theatre’s fundamentally spatial interrogation of ideas. As Benjamin Wihstutz writes, “the founding of theatre studies […] implied a change of perspective which, in the place of the analysis of two-dimensional dramatic texts, established the three-dimensional performance space as the central object of investigation” (1). While this may seem selfevident – the stage is an actual space while the text is largely a metaphorical one – this topological shift is an important aspect of what the theatre can give in revisiting a life like Cunard’s, which was fundamentally caught up in social boundaries and inhabited stances. The socio-spatial and contradictory elements of Cunard are undoubtedly at their most concentrated in Cunard’s engagements with race, particularly her editorship of Negro Anthology and the consequent cultural and critical discourse around it.1 If reception to the volume was mixed in its time,2 subsequent commentary has been equally divided, from the suggestion that the project is “weirdly dissociative” (North 191) with a “method of organization [that] is simultaneously heavy-handed and hopelessly lax” (193) to the view that Cunard’s methods are a precursor to the “multidisciplinary approach of Black Studies” (Montefiore 112). Most polarized of all, however, have been understandings of Cunard herself in relation to the project. Negative analysis has tended to underline the essentializing rhetoric of Cunard’s celebration of black people as “spontaneous,” “vital,” and “joyful” (Lemke, Archer-Straw), particularly in Cunard’s writings on Harlem. Other assessments of Cunard’s editorship have stressed the anti-essentializing qualities of Cunard’s overall methodology in Negro. Maroula Joannou writes: Cunard’s major contribution to the black British archive was to present a white readership with documentation in the form of Negro Anthology which called into question the homogenous

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conceptualization of the African and people of African descent as a totalized non-differentiated mass, denying their history, culture and heterogeneity. In so doing, she rendered problematic the imaging of black people as essentially different from those of white descent and as fixed embodiments of a Eurocentric sense of reality. (143–4) A dramatized portrait of Cunard should likely not try to reconcile these differences of opinion: both sides have been fairly well-documented and critically defended. Rather, what dramatized inquiry can do is accommodate and probe the contradictions. As noted, this is made possible through the juxtaposition of materials: within These Were the Hours, the Man Ray and Ker-Seymer prints appear, but so too do Cunard’s writings on Scottsboro and the African dimensions of the Spanish Civil War. Cunard’s essentializing views on blackness are included, but they confront her more nuanced meditations on institutionalized forms of racism. Perhaps more crucially, and to return to the arguments made in the introductory chapter, drama’s strength is in showing people and situations, which offers the opportunity to return to and intervene in representations of events that have been portrayed in one light or another. In theoretical recitations of Cunard’s motives for publishing Black Man and White Ladyship, for example, the narratives tend to be quite binary. Lemke argues that the tract was grounded in familial defiance: “Nancy Cunard’s revolt against racism – and the white establishment condoning it – was a rebellion against her family and the silver-spoon society in which she had grown up” (140). Conversely, those sympathetic to Cunard’s political efforts have read the tract within the socio-historical context of its day – including ideas propounded by the surrealists with whom Cunard was closely associated – and see Cunard’s calling out of the hypocrisies of her family as a blow to the system of institutionalized racism: “She broke with her mother to break with empire” (Young, “Nancy Cunard’s Black Man and White Ladyship as Surrealist Tract” 168). Within the frame of the heterotopic stage, these divergent perspectives are brought together with Cunard’s documented articulations. Undoubtedly, the theatre excels in allowing audiences to see the multiple and at times conflicting motives of the individual. The play explores varied motiva-

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tions through Cunard’s dialogue about the pamphlet with Henry Crowder, a scenario that permits a psychological, political, and emotional consideration of the pressures at work. In addition to the representational capacities of dramatization, the theatre also allows for an embodied exploration of the ways in which performance itself has been key to – and, therefore, key to unlocking – what has made Cunard so controversial. Green’s comment on the performative nature of spectacularity and confession leads to productive considerations of the link, in Cunard, between the transgressive and the performance of race. While certainly undertaken with more empathy and cultural appreciation than blackface, Cunard’s appropriation of African visual aesthetics – notably the multiple ivories that were her “signature” – her emotional identifications with black people, and her performance of this identification have been perceived as a decadeslong self-miscasting. In probing these contradictions in rehearsal, the performative model is not just metaphor. Rather, in taking on the identity of the other, and in costuming it accordingly, Cunard was engaged in fundamentally performative processes that have been dismissed, at least in part, because of their overt theatricality. As a result, the theatre at once permits a visual and thematic exploration of the juncture of race/spectacle/autobiography, but also, as it is implicated both in the processes of Cunard’s identifications and in the ways they have been received, allows for an applied, practice-based immersion in the psychology of identification and cultural backlash to the inappropriate or insensitive performance. Finally, performative inquiry into Cunard’s life and historical moment can interrogate – and make manifest – the spectacularity of racial history within its time. A good example of this within the play is the juxtaposition of Cunard’s experience in Harlem with the events of the Scottsboro affair. It is perhaps in Harlem that Cunard’s experience with racial conflict was at its most intense. Harlem also shows Cunard at her most transgressive – she is pursuing an intellectual project that crosses the line for acceptable forms of writing and publication; she is doing it in the company of Henry Crowder, her black lover; and she has based herself in a neighbourhood that defines the idea of black apartness. In the scene examining this event, based on actual transcripts, reporters surround the hotel and the questions Cunard fields are mostly about

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the body, notably about a presumed sexual relationship with Paul Robeson, also staying at the hotel and a recognizable symbol of black masculinity. Fundamentally, the historical moment and the scene on which it is based are at once about space – who goes where and why – as well as about the presumption of illicit interracial sex. Similarly, Scottsboro is about space – who goes where on the train, who travels with whom and how – and also about presumptive sex and the law’s assumption that nine black young men riding the rails with two young white women, all having illegally entered the same part of the train, could not have done so without some kind of sexual and/or violent act taking place. Likewise, the media frenzy that surrounded and to a certain extent created the conditions of Cunard’s Harlem visit was also central to Scottsboro, as was the public fury ignited by the news. Within the play, juxtaposing Cunard’s time in Harlem with her writing on Scottsboro, and incorporating documentary footage of the courtroom drama, highlights the performativity of race, justice, and controversy not just in the American South but as it animated discussion about civil rights worldwide. As James Miller writes, Scottsboro reminds us of this still “explosive alchemy of race, sex, and violence in American life” (2), a mix that was to have potent ramifications for Cunard. If, as Green argues, the female body is often equated with the civic body, Cunard’s image, which frequently acted as a matrix for sex, race, and class warfare, provides a very stark – if useful – contrast to Scottsboro in considering how these elements combined and played out in the public imagination of the 1930s. The history of the Scottsboro Boys – including their incarceration and social humiliation – has been dramatized in various ways, most notably through the 2010 musical The Scottsboro Boys. By contrast, a dramatization of Cunard’s story speaks not only to the privilege that protected her from the law but also to the social punishments – meted out by friends, family, and the press – for Cunard’s personal and political involvements. If dramatized inquiry intrinsically allows for a consideration of the body’s role in public life, it is also implicated in a process whereby the body can usurp the image of itself not just through its ability to speak – and, therefore, to challenge the photograph with articulation – but also through its muscular ability to act. This is to say that in a play

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about Cunard, the body brings into focus a dimension lost not just through transmission of the image, but also in various textual and intellectual accounts: the unyieldingly physical nature of many of Cunard’s commitments. In her memoir, Cunard describes the running of the press as an intensely physical project, an aspect that by definition can be more viscerally demonstrated onstage. Similarly, dramatizing Cunard’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War, notably as a field reporter for the Manchester Guardian, provides an opportunity to explore the physical exigencies of this role. Contrastingly, in directly addressing Cunard’s multiple romantic relationships, which have often been divested of their emotional and intellectual content in a singular insistence on the imperatives of the body, the dialogue highlights how some of these relationships were also profoundly influential sites of intellectual and ideological exchange. In this sense, materializing the physical body onstage and providing it with the power of articulation allows for a multifold response to the one-dimensionality of the image. It was the spectacular, autobiographical, performative, and physical elements that first drove the investigation into a dramatization of Cunard. However, in conceptualizing and workshopping various drafts, it became clear that the stage also provided an entry point into spatializing the aesthetics of Cunard’s poetry – the three-dimensional “change of perspective” that Wihstutz suggests is key to what theatre can offer. Attracted by the mystical and multilayered topographies of the surrealists, Cunard was also deeply influenced by Pound’s emphasis on historical overlay – not quite the historical fusion that H.D. brings about in her work, and which the stage can literalize through the recreation of the palimpsest, but a temporal sensibility in which various historical times, particularly within the individual life, exist simultaneously: “The years are sewn together with thread of the same story” (Poems of Nancy Cunard from the Bodleian Library, 30); “This is the day / And the night / And the dawn / And the tear” (49); “Living in the past and the future / I see barrages and heart breakings” (39); “At one time, Montparnasse, / And all night’s gloss, / Splendour of shadow on shadow […] Sense of what zones, what simultaneous time sense?” (32). This topography of memory, which was central to Cunard’s early poetic work, would be eerily echoed by her return to Le Puits Carré, her home in La Chapelle Réanville, Normandy, in spring of 1945. After

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several years abroad, Cunard returned to find the farmhouse ransacked by the Germans and French reservists, as well as her own neighbours. This scene of return to a space that had been ransacked, looted, and vandalized loomed large for Cunard and recurs in several of her autobiographical accounts as well as in the writing of her contemporaries as a turning point in Cunard’s life, one that marked a decline into increasing paranoia and addiction. As Cunard’s friend Kay Boyle notes, the loss of Le Puits Carré and the items within it had both material and symbolic dimensions: The ivory bracelets, some intricately and handsomely carved, some plain as horn, had been taken from her ransacked house in La Chapelle-Réanville (either by the French or by the Germans), during the Occupation. In the years immediately after the war, Nancy had searched for them through the museums of Europe […] She had even made enquiries in South America, as if finding the armor of our youth would signal the restitution of many usurped things. (79) In this sense, the landscape of rubble is at once a real, tangible sign of the destruction of war and a symbolic landscape where the forces of fascism, so vivid in Cunard’s mind, literally trammel the most intimate aspects of her home life. Onstage, the materialization of this scene permits an exploration of the intersection of the personal and the political, particularly as Cunard begins to sort through the wreckage of indiscriminately mixed mementos from her early life, the physical vestiges of the avant-garde years in Paris, the collection of documents for Negro, her articles on the Spanish Civil War, photographs, letters, and various other aide-memoires. The ruin is at once a battlefield (quite literally of the Second World War, and symbolically of the conflict in Spain) and, on the other hand, a potent topography of reminiscence. Consequently, this scene mirrors this sense of overlapping realities in her poetry, an almost dreamlike space that corresponds with the way Cunard describes her mental and emotional states on returning to Réanville: “Even now I cannot analyze my strange feeling. It was ‘a discovery of something entirely new, bound up with something entirely past.’ In a dream I wandered alone through the shell of my home. And

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it was, at first, with the sense of touching the possessions of another” (Hours 201–2). This materialization, in the final scene of These Were the Hours, allows us to understand the import and impact of this event from a biographical perspective, and also allows for an exteriorization of the mnemonic landscape of Cunard’s imagination in its heightened, dreamlike dimensions. Anchored at Le Puits Carré, the play nonetheless, and in keeping with its heterotopic intent, moves through a series of locations representative of Cunard’s peripatetic existence. Venice, a place where Cunard spent much of her youth and which remained throughout her life a point of aesthetic inspiration, appears in the moment when Cunard first meets Henry Crowder. Similarly, it also seemed important to set at least one scene in America, where Cunard confronted some of the most violent and venomous opposition to Negro, as well as in Spain, where she became committed to the Republican cause. Cunard’s reception in the Caribbean, where she was largely celebrated, was an important point of contrast with her experience in New York, and is here dramatized through an encounter with Hemingway in Havana that Cunard describes in These Were the Hours. Again, because of the suspension of disbelief in the theatre space, there is the possibility of moving across time and among geographies in ways that might be more difficult to accomplish through other modes of representation. It should be noted that Cunard’s autobiographical writing, which has been the basis for this performative investigation of Cunard’s life and work, is quite different from Loy’s and H.D.’s. Cunard’s scrapbooks, housed at the Harry Ransom Research Center in Austin, Texas, include photographs, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, and various mementos, but the impulse to record her life never extended as far as a freestanding volume of autobiographical writing. Cunard biographer Lois Gordon notes that Cunard wrote: “The thought of settling down to ‘A life’ is unthinkable” (423) and for more reasons than one: “A book of that kind would bring in too many people … who’ve let me down as well as loved me. [They] might be pleased to read what I’d made of them … Others perhaps [might] bring libel actions! No! The choice lies between writing the thing fully, in detail, no holds barred – especially where I myself am concerned – or not writing at all. I choose that” (334). Ford suggests that Cunard’s reluctance to set herself down

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in writing may well have stemmed from a lingering anxiety about the press after the “ridicule and harassment” of Harlem in 1932 (Nancy Cunard x). Despite the fact that no single volume of autobiography exists, Cunard, nonetheless, includes several autobiographical passages in her “memories” of British writer Norman Douglas (Grand Man: Memories of Norman Douglas, 1954) and Irish writer and long-time family friend George Moore (GM: Memories of George Moore, 1956). When pressed to convince Cunard to write her memoirs (for which there was substantial interest and money available at a time when Cunard was certainly in need of it), Anthony Thorne writes that he replied: “Well, I think she’s doing so – as she prefers it – in writing the biographies of others”; an answer, he reports, that gained Cunard’s approval (304). In addition to these autobiographies between the lines, Cunard also wrote These Were the Hours: Memories of My Hours Press, Réanville and Paris, 1928–1931, an “informal history” of the publishing venture. Together, and combined with Cunard’s mostly unpublished letters, journalism, and archival miscellany, these sources create an intriguing tapestry of autobiographical writing, what Ford has called “conspicuous and welcome lapses” (Nancy Cunard viii) from Cunard’s stated opposition to a written self-rendering. The first draft of the script of These Were the Hours was knitted out of these autobiographical passages with a particular emphasis on the memoir of the press. In its original form, the play was a one-woman dramatic monologue delivered by Cunard that quite diligently adhered to the descriptions of events provided by her own writing and, in this sense, was adapted in a manner similar to The Tree. The key difference between H.D. and Cunard, however, in addition to matters of form, is that most of the drama in H.D.’s work stems from internal conflict and psychological revisitation. While one could argue that Cunard also experienced a great deal of psychological upheaval, her autobiographical writing largely does not reflect this, as it is mostly written in a measured, descriptive tone that gives a strong sense of event but not of experience. Rather, the intrinsic interest of Cunard’s story – and the dramatic conflict – is rooted in the way she frequently pitted herself against a variety of political and ideological forces – racism, fascism, and, in many ways, the daily structures of conventional life. Also, while I had a strong desire to include Cunard’s autobiographical writing, my

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interest in heterotopic representation, key to representing the complexity of Cunard studies, required a bridging of Cunard’s writing and critical work around it. As a result, the dramatic and critical imperatives of Cunard’s story seemed to necessitate a different formal approach. In the version of These Were the Hours that appears here, the dialogue is frequently extrapolated from Cunard’s writing and other critical and documentary sources. Time is telescoped. Some scenes have been imaginatively extrapolated beyond what we know (e.g., it is unlikely the mayor visited Cunard though we know of his reputed involvement in the destruction in her home and Cunard’s attempted lawsuit against him). In this sense, the working method in These Were the Hours presents another possibility for dramatized literary inquiry – the speculative drama or play of ideas – which immerses itself in scholarship and quotes selectively even while it relies on more imaginative structures. As a result, These Were the Hours represents a departure from the more heavily quotation-based stagings of H.D. and Loy. However, in the sense that informed invention often makes for more effective dramatic transmission and, indeed, more closely resembles other well-known biographical dramas (of Wilde, Pound, Thoreau, etc.), this form – in both its possibilities and its critical limitations – is worth exploring as another platform for the broader dissemination of literary histories. In the end, the stage in These Were the Hours operates as intersecting space, a place that can contain and support overlapping realities, geographies, memories, and ideas. It is here that we can examine the relationship between Cunardian spectacle and autobiographical speech, between the avant-garde images produced by others and the words of the subject that undercut them, between the appellations of racist and race reformer that have encircled Cunard and the paradoxical motivations and utterances through which Cunard engaged in her personal and political involvements. Onstage we can not only hear the words Cunard used to explicate herself and her life, but also have a representative body through which we can better understand the physical nature of her commitments, be they controversial sartorial symbols of identification with African aesthetics, or the embodied processes of publishing and on-the-ground political involvement and reporting, or the physical choices that challenged definitions of female behaviour

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and sexuality. In the sense that Cunard’s story is ultimately about the individual attempting to navigate and intervene, sometimes productively, sometimes not, in a world of racial tensions, oppressive politics, and uncertain outcomes, it also resonates with the idea of the heterotopic theatre as an alternative space that stands outside of the contemporary world even while it evokes it.

note s 1 A four-year project beginning in 1930 and ending with private publication of a thousand copies in 1934, the anthology includes contributions on race from the United States, South America, Africa, Europe, and the West Indies. Approximately two-thirds of the contributors to the original collection were black and one third white. The project was to be “documentary” (Negro xvii): a compilation of letters, photographs, poems, musical compositions, ethnographic documents, political and sociological tracts, letters (including the hate mail Cunard received while in Harlem), and essays, the aim of which was to be “as inclusive as possible.” The resulting tome included approximately 250 written entries plus 385 illustrations. Almost two-thirds of the book documented the black American experience, with 60 pages on Europe and 315 on Africa. This is to say that Negro was in itself quite wildly heterotopic, making this approach central to Cunard’s life but also to her editorial practice. 2 Langston Hughes, an important contributor, was enthusiastic about the finished volume, and novelist William Plomer praised Cunard as “passionately serious” and her work as of “great political importance” (quoted in Ford, Negro: An Anthology 126). Alain Locke, editor of the anthology The New Negro, dismissed Negro Anthology as propaganda, and it was banned as seditious in several West African colonies and the British West Indies.

These Were the Hours

nancy

Nancy Cunard, British author, publisher, activist

bill

Bill Bird, American publisher and writer

aragon

Louis Aragon, French writer

georgette

Georgette Goasgüen, a Normandy neighbour

lévy

Typesetter, printer at the Hours Press

mcalmon

Robert McAlmon, American writer and publisher

hemingway

Ernest Hemingway, American writer

ezra

Ezra Pound, American writer

norvale

Edouard Norvale, French police officer (fictional)

mayor

of la Chapelle-Réanville

henry

Henry Crowder, American musician

pablo

Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet and activist

deliveryman 1 and 2

Men who deliver piano to Nancy’s house in France

reporter 1, 2, and 3

American newspaper men in New York

waiter

At café in Havana

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pre-recorded voice male american

Threatens Cunard in New York by phone

Note on actors: It is suggested that actors with smaller parts play multiple roles – with costume changes and some voice alteration – in the following ways: the actor playing bill also plays the voice of the male american; mcalmon, hemingway, and ezra also play reporter 1, 2, and 3; norvale and pablo also play the delivery man 1 and 2. Additional character multiplications can be made if production requires a smaller cast. Note on character names: Character names (i.e. first or last) have been assigned according to how Cunard most often refers to these people in her writing or as she was known to call them.

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act i Scene 1. Le Puits Carré, Normandy, 1928. The barn of the old farmhouse is gradually being turned into a press. There is a desk and shelving and a space for the press as well as books and several boxes partially unpacked. The Eugene McCown1 painting of NANCY sits on top of a bookshelf S.R. There are a few pieces of African sculpture on the shelves and on top of the boxes. BILL 2 and ARAGON 3 push the bulky Mathieu press4 onto the stage. NANCY follows. nancy Almost there! Push! bill It was a mistake – nancy Now over against the wall. aragon I’ll never make it – nancy Come on!

1 (William) Eugene McCown (1898–1966), American painter. McCown painted Portrait of Nancy Cunard in Her Father’s Riding Habit in Paris in 1923. 2 William Bird (1888–1963), American journalist and publisher. Bird set up his printing press in Paris on the quai d’Anjou in 1922. In 1923, Ezra Pound convinced Bird that he should be printing modernist writing. Bird agreed and appointed Pound editor of his Three Mountains Press. They went on to publish works including Pound’s A Draft of XVI Cantos, Hemingway’s In Our Time, and Robert McAlmon’s Distinguished Air. On selling the press to Cunard, Bird supervised its transportation to Réanville. 3 Louis (Andrieux) Aragon (1897–1982), French writer and surrealist. 4 The seventeenth-century Belgian hand press purchased by Cunard in 1928.

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bill – always a mistake to leave Paris. nancy Now, really – aragon To survive the Germans only to die by Belgian printing press – nancy Bill, watch out for the – ! BILL

trips on a box of books. bill

Uh! aragon (Huffing) Somewhere in the world, it’s cocktail hour in Montmartre. bill Ow. aragon Right now, Dalí5 is drinking champagne out of a woman’s shoe – nancy Aragon, push. aragon Breton6 is breathing absurdities into the ear of an incipient muse – nancy Now over to left – 5 Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), Spanish painter affiliated with the surrealist circle. 6 André Breton (1896–1966), French writer and surrealist.

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bill Always the left! aragon And I have become a siren’s captive. steps in and lends a hand. The press slides into place C.S.

NANCY

nancy (Brushing her hands against her skirt) Well done, boys! aragon And so I return to my role as effete avant-gardist. leans against the press for a moment, then turns to one of the boxes.

ARAGON

bill Here with Nancy the slave-driver? aragon All in the past, she tells me! (Pulling a bottle of cognac out of the box) The press is to be a communist utopia. pulls three glasses out of the box and pours the cognac.

ARAGON

bill Never trust the wealthy. aragon Yes, quite right. Eat the rich. Ask questions later. (Makes as if to take a bite of NANCY ’s arm) nancy Bill, you are absolutely sure you are willing to part with press?

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passes glasses to NANCY and BILL . aragon

A bit late. bill Three Mountains is done, Nancy. What are your plans for the old boy? nancy Mainly contemporary poetry of an experimental kind – always very modern things, short pieces of fine quality that might have difficulty in finding commercial publishers willing to take a chance on them.7 bill You’ll never make any money on just poetry. aragon What’s money when you’re a Cunard? nancy Mother is not pleased with this new venture.8 aragon She’ll come round. nancy Don’t count on it. We’ll have to be practical. At least, by way of compromise, everything produced should be contemporary.9 George 7 Adapted from Hours, 8. 8 Maud Alice Burke (later Emerald) Cunard (1872–1948), London-based American society hostess and Nancy Cunard’s mother. Nancy Cunard’s father was Sir Bache Cunard (1851–1925), grandson of Nova Scotia–born Samuel Cunard (1787–1865), founder of the Cunard shipping line. Bache and Maud married in 1895. Nancy, their only child, was born in 1896. Nancy derived most of her income, at this time, from an allowance controlled by her mother. 9 Adapted from Hours, 8.

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Moore10 has promised us something. And Richard.11 There is the possibility of running a contest – bill Got a name yet? nancy The Hours Press. The Hours. For the hours that go into writing a book. aragon Or the hours drinking, while you’re thinking about your book. (Looking at Nancy) Or – nancy (Firmly) The Hours. bill (Picking up one of the African statues) Settling in, I see. nancy Mmmmm … yes. We’ve been scouring antiquities markets in Marseille. Aragon thinks we’ll find the fetish that will open up another sphere of consciousness. aragon And for the price Nancy paid, the vendor thought he would open another realm of credit.

10 George Moore (1852–1933), Irish writer. Moore was a long-time family friend. Cunard printed Moore’s Peronnik the Fool in 1928 and the prose poem The Talking Pine in 1931. 11 Richard Aldington (1892–1962), British writer. Cunard printed Aldington’s Hark the Herald in 1928, The Eaten Heart in 1929, and Last Straws in 1931.

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nancy Now you laugh. You should have heard how enraptured he was when we bought her, Bill. “Those smooth curves and almond eyes that drew me into a primal land of desert mirage …” aragon Did I say that? That’s quite good. (Looks around for something to write with) bill Well, I wish you both a lot of luck. Not sure why you chose the wilds of Normandy over Paris, but it’s a nice place as far as backwaters go. nancy It’s a wonderful place, Bill. I’ve called the house Le Puits Carré – the Square Well. There’s a lovely couple next door, Jean and Georgette.12 We’ve met most of the neighbours, actually. They have the French spirit of equality minted on their souls. aragon More like provincial conservatism branded on their stomachs – nancy No, no, Louis. You misunderstand them. It’s just the place for a press. And it’s not as though we’ve given up on Paris – bill God forbid. (Looking at the McCown) There wouldn’t be any new paintings if you weren’t there to inspire them. nancy (Kissing BILL on the cheek) You’ve been awfully good, Bill. Thank you for bringing the Mathieu.

12 Jean and Georgette Goasgüen (dates unknown), Cunard’s neighbours in Normandy.

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bill Bonne chance, Nancy. Louis – BILL

turns to ARAGON . They shake hands.

aragon Don’t forget me in my indentured state – nancy (Dryly) What was that book you wrote on French wines, Bill?13 bill I’m well out of it. I’ll bring Hem and Bob and Ezra ’round another time. They’ll want to see – (BILL looks around the barn) well, they should see this. Exit BILL S.L. nancy And so it begins! (Taking a printer’s apron off a peg on the wall) Should we print something? aragon Écoutes, Nan – Now that Bill’s gone – nancy (Putting on the printer’s apron) Look at this! I’ll admit the life of a printer is something of a divorce from my former self. What would Iris14 say? A far cry from the society balls we grew up with, the gallivanting around London – even Paris and its rollicking avant-gardism.15 NANCY

drags a case of type over to the press.

13 Bird published his own A Practical Guide to French Wines with Three Mountains in 1922. 14 Iris Tree (1897–1968), English poet, actor, model. 15 Adapted from Hours, 9.

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nancy Of course, we have the support of most of our friends. But not Leonard and Virginia! Can you believe it with Hogarth steadily growing in importance!16 But no – they are somewhat otherwise. “Your hands will always be covered with ink!”17 aragon Nan – nancy Come on, Aragon. (Smelling a pot of the printer’s ink) Look at this beautiful freshness of the glistening pigment! There is no other black or red like it!18 aragon (Taking NANCY ’s hands) Nancy – nancy Paris is fine with all of the dancing and cafés and painting and poetry. But I feel like the press is my chance to do something. aragon Your chance? nancy Ours, of course. aragon Just ours? Just us? NANCY

looks at ARAGON .

16 Leonard Woolf (1880–1969) and Virgina Woolf (1882–1941), both British writers associated with the Bloomsbury group, began Hogarth Press out of their house in Richmond in 1917. They hand-printed books before turning to commercial printers. 17 Adapted from Hours, 8 18 Hours, 9.

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nancy (Lightly) If I were a man, you wouldn’t ask me that. aragon If you were a man, it’s unlikely I’d be here at all. nancy In the end, all you avant-gardists want an unconventional life with a conventional wife. aragon Come on, Nan – nothing bourgeois. But I’ve left Paris to do this and I want to feel like we’re in this together. nancy Of course we’re in it together! We are going to print the most marvellous experimental work. Nothing commercial. All sprung from the imagination. The engine of a revolution! ARAGON

looks unconvinced.

nancy Look, Aragon, this – you, Le Puits Carré, the press, the good people, and the French countryside – it’s an ideal. How many people get that chance? All we have to do is maintain it. aragon Bien. That’s all I’m asking. Conventional love? ARAGON

jumps on a chair and recites. aragon

Let us spit if you want On what we have loved together Let us spit on love On our unmade beds

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On our silence and on the stammered words On the stars even if they were GEORGETTE

enters S.L. georgette

Allo? nancy Georgette! (To ARAGON , affectionately) Come down from there, you fool. jumps down from the chair and addresses NANCY and GEORGETTE in a loud, grand manner.

ARAGON

aragon Your eyes On the sun even if it were nancy Aragon, enough! aragon Your teeth On eternity even if it were your mouth ARAGON

sings the last lines. And on our love Even if it were your love Let us …19

(Jumping down) I am underappreciated outside of Paris. 19 Aragon, “Poème à crier dans les ruines,” trans. Lois Gordon, in Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist, 113–14. The Gordon biography, along with Anne Chisholm’s Nancy Cunard, provides invaluable biographical context.

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nancy Georgette, I apologize for the surrealist serenade. aragon Never apologize! georgette Non, non. Madame Cunard – nancy Nancy, please. georgette I am sorry, Nancy. I did not mean to interrupt your – er – to interrupt you and Monsieur Aragon. I just wanted to – to invite you to dinner at the house this Friday with some friends. nancy That would be lovely. aragon Wonderful! All poetry lovers, I assume? nancy Never mind. We’ll see you Friday. georgette Around seven, perhaps? nancy Yes, of course. Thank you so much. georgette Bien. À tout à l’heure. GEORGETTE

exits S.L.

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nancy (To ARAGON ) Were you trying to frighten her off? She’s a very nice woman. And you so cynical about the neighbours. aragon Yes, very nice, very nice. I’ll be sure to stay awake through the soup course until the conversation turns to breeding nice white children and tending gardens. nancy Don’t be ridiculous. We’ll fit in just fine. aragon It’s almost touching that you think so. Perhaps you could print some nice floral stationery upon which to write your invitations to the church picnic. nancy It will so be nice, very nice, you’ll see. But we should print something. A letter – aragon A letter? To whom? nancy Lévy! aragon Who? nancy Bill’s printer. He’s coming next week to teach us. Surely we can figure out the basics ahead of that. NANCY

sets some type. ARAGON unpacks.

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aragon (Rifling in a box) It’s so quiet here. In Paris someone’s always yelling insults outside your window. (Pulls out a stuffed bird with yellow feathers; examines it; sets it aside) There is the wretched sound of the city’s renovation. (Pulls out a bottle and a tennis ball and begins to make an arrangement on the desk) Drunken prostitutes scream at each other in the streets. It’s very soothing. pulls a sheet off the press and hands it to ARAGON .

NANCY

nancy There! aragon (Reading the print) RIS RAED …? nancy Damnit! It’s backwards. Nancy sets the type again. ARAGON pulls some photographs out of the box and looks at them. One of the Man Ray photographs is projected onstage. aragon Man Ray should photograph you like this. (Compares the photos with NANCY ) No, really, you look much wilder now, in a dishevelled, I-just-pushed-my-printing-press-across-a-barn sort of way. He’d love it. You know how he goes crazy for anything in its primal state. nancy I’ve been told success is staying ahead of one’s image. Now if I could only – The letter appears on the screen, replacing the picture.

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Dear Sir, I believe that it’s next Saturday that you will be coming. As you can see we have started to print …20 nancy Ha! aragon Ha? Is that the language of idealism? nancy (Kissing him) Indeed, it is. Scene 2. Le Puits Carré the next week. ARAGON works at the Mathieu. NANCY stands nearby. LÉVY 21 paces in front. lévy Madame Cunard. I feel obliged to tell you again: In France, one can’t be a printer unless one has worked a long time. nancy Really, Monsieur Lévy. How long? lévy Seven years. nancy Oh! And what is all that stretch filled with? lévy Well, first of all you are made to sweep the floor and pick up fallen type and pieces. You’re only a lad, they shouldn’t let you get your hands on composing. You keep the place tidy, run errands, and so 20 Translated from the French and abridged from Hours, 9. 21 M. Lévy (dates unknown), experienced French typesetter and printer.

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on. Then, little by little, you’re permitted to learn to set type, and all the rest comes later. It depends – nancy Depends on? lévy On your intelligence! It’s a lengthy job. nancy Thank goodness there’s none of that here, Monsieur Lévy! We are going to forge ahead. My intention is to learn from you everything I possibly can as quickly as may be, so as to be able to work without you as well as with you, do you see? I like this beginning very much. lévy And then, you and Monsieur Aragon are about to fly in the face of accepted conventions and long-established rules, all of them! (Picking up a stack of papers and examining the top one) This projected layout of yours is not at all in conformity with – nancy (Interrupting) Monsieur Lévy, consider this an experimental place whenever you are going to think of conventional rules. Taste, Monsieur Lévy, taste! Not so often does one find it in purely commercial printing. I want innovations! A new vision, no matter how nonconformist!22 lévy Madame Cunard, you know, I myself am an ex-anarchist! nancy Really, Monsieur Lévy? How interesting.

22 “In France, one can’t” to “nonconformist!” adapted from Hours, 12–13.

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lévy Bien sûr. I was a member in good standing of the Fédération anarchiste Communiste.23 I shook Louis Lecoin’s24 hand myself. A good man – a former proofreader at a printing press. Do you know what was the problem with the Fédération? nancy No. lévy Individualists! nancy Individualists? lévy Oui. A radical group, intent on following their own path, no matter what the cost. nancy Monsieur Lévy, I don’t – lévy What I am saying, Madame Cunard, is that the slope is – how do you say? Sloppery. It is a sloppery slope. One minute, you are experimenting with typography “just for the nice look of things” as you say. The next you are shooting out of the side of an automobile with the Bonnot Gang.25 You understand? nancy Only in the most peripheral of ways, Monsieur Lévy. At the same time, I must insist on the experimental imperative of the Press. Your job is to assist, Monsieur Lévy, and assist you must. 23 First national French anarchist organization, 1910–14. 24 Louis Lecoin (1888–1971), French political organizer. 25 French criminal group operating in France 1911–12.

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lévy Assist? I? In the destruction of the great traditions of French typography? Non. I must refuse. nancy You will be very helpful to us, Monsieur Lévy. What of a 10 per cent increase in salary? lévy Still, I must refuse. At least until after lunch. Principles are at stake, Madame Cunard. nancy Yes, I do understand. Until after lunch, then. LÉVY

nods stiffly and departs. ARAGON laughs. returns to her ledger.

NANCY

nancy It’s nothing to laugh about. aragon You do your industrialist heritage proud in these moments, ma chère. Profits up? Distribution sound? nancy As it happens, there is a great deal to be said about doing things oneself, by one’s system.26 aragon Not all systems represent the surrender of the soul. nancy Why do I feel a recitation of Das Kapital27 coming on? 26 Quoted in Gordon, Nancy Cunard, 143. 27 Marx, Capital.

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aragon It’s a point, Nan. We have the press. We could do something more radical. nancy We’ll be liberating imaginations. Surely that’s enough? aragon I used to think so – I used to think the imagination unbounded would be enough to free people from their capitalist stupor, the chains they love so much. nancy And now? aragon It feels as though we’ll need to fight harder than that. As though ideas without action won’t be enough – nancy What do you propose? Marching in the streets? aragon Perhaps. For a start. nancy Come on, Aragon. We’re intellectuals, not radicals. There’s a difference. aragon It’s easy for you to say. nancy No, it’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one who will have her face splashed across the tabloids of London.

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aragon Yes, the burdens of fame and wealth while the underclass starve in happy misfortune. nancy Louis – (sighs) ARAGON exits S.L. NANCY looks after him for a beat, then, hearing some noise outside, smooths her hair and skirt. There is a knock and then BILL , HEMINGWAY ,28 and MCALMON 29 enter S.R. HEMINGWAY wears a bandage over his forehead and one eye.

mcalmon Allo? Allo? The animals have arrived for the barn party. nancy Bob! Hem! Bill! bill (Bringing up the rear) Sorry, Nancy. I couldn’t hold them back. There’s no glamour in Paris without you. The lights of the ChampsÉlysées have all gone out. The Seine is grey. Montmartre in mourning. So we all got in Hem’s car and came out to see you. Where’s Louis? nancy In the house. He’ll be out later. hemingway They told me we were going to the track. mcalmon We’ve brought one bird and one bull as you can see – 28 Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), American writer. 29 Robert McAlmon (1895–1956), American writer and publisher.

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hemingway And one Nancy-boy for her Ladyship. bill Come now, Hem. We’re all Nancy’s boys. nancy Where’s Ezra? Surely he’s with you? 30

bill He’s got some papers in the trunk. BILL

begins tinkering with the press. mcalmon

Is there cognac, Nan? nancy Yes, on the shelf there, Bob. You pour. (To HEMINGWAY ) Good Lord, Hem. What happened to you? Did you hurt yourself boxing? hemingway Something like that. mcalmon Don’t listen to him. He was wrestling with the skylight in his bathroom. The skylight won. hemingway Have you ever tried a real fight, Bob? mcalmon Try not to caricature yourself, Ernest. Others do it so well already.

30 Ezra Pound (1885–1972), American writer.

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bill Now, boys – hemingway No, I mean it. (Looking around) It’s a good space for it. nancy What about your book, Hem? hemingway One sentence after the next. You know how it goes. You writing much? nancy Mostly we’re up to our ears with the publishing. But I love it. The smell of the ink … everything – MCALMON

hands NANCY a glass of cognac. mcalmon

Lady Brett31 – hemingway For the love of God, McAlmon. Would you dry up? mcalmon (Handing a glass to HEMINGWAY ) I would. But left in your company Nancy might die a slow death of short sentences and inarticulate masculinity. Whad’ya think, Nan? Is it a fatal case? hemingway I could show you – 31 There were rumours that Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises was modelled on Cunard, though the more popular view (borne out by naming in Hemingway’s drafts) is that she was inspired by Lady Duff Twysden (1892–1938).

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mcalmon (Takes a large swig of cognac, then in falsetto) But first you have to catch me – makes a run for the door followed by HEMINGWAY . They nearly run into EZRA , who is on the way in. BILL sighs and follows MCALMON and HEMINGWAY out. EZRA watches the men go, then turns to NANCY . MCALMON

ezra Nancy! nancy Hello, Ezra. It seems you’ve cleared the room. Or I have. What have you got for me, there? ezra A manuscript. And free advice, free advice. nancy Do I need to ask? ezra Wouldn’t much matter and it’s all the same anyhow. I’ve been rereading your Parallax.32 It’s good stuff. (Opening the book) This one: In Aix what’s remembered of Cézanne? A house to let (with studio) in a garden. Meanwhile “help yourself to these ripe figs, profitez, And if it doesn’t suit, we Agence Sextus, will find you another just as good.” The years are sewn together with thread of the same story …33 32 Cunard’s collection of poetry Parallax was published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press in 1925. 33 “Two Sequences from ‘Parallax,’” Poems of Nancy Cunard, 30.

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All image. Just right. But some of this other work you’ve sent me – this one – Why the devil do you write in that obsolete dialect and with the cadences of the late Alfred Tennyson.34 It is damned hard to get the order of words in a poem as simple and natural as that of speech. Iambic pentameter is a snare because it constantly lets one in for dead phrases like “in the midnight hour.” Damn it all, midnight is midnight, it is not “this midnight hour.” Also you twist the tense for the sake of rhyme. And lots, lots of words that do not add anything to the presentation, but tell the reader nothing he wouldn’t know if you had left them out!35 nancy Is that all? ezra No. As a reward for listening, I offer you the gift of XXX Cantos – or at least, the first drafts of them. Turn to the part on Venice. I’ve marked it for you – nancy And at night they sang in the gondolas And in the barche with lanthorns; The prows rose silver on silver taking light in the darkness36 Well, that’s beautiful, Ezra. You write beautifully. But it’s been a long time since we were in Venice. ezra Eternal is the city of the doges.

34 Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892), British writer. Tennyson’s Victorianism was the kind of writing Pound encouraged modernists to break with. 35 Adapted from a letter from Ezra Pound to Nancy Cunard, Box 17 f10, Nancy Cunard Collection. 36 Ezra Pound, “Canto XXVI” in A Draft of XXX Cantos, 121.

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nancy I’ll tell you what. Let us print these for you, when this batch is done. We’ll do two hundred copies in stout beige linen boards with the title stamped in red. And ten special copies in vermilion leather, with the same lettering. ezra It’s good work you’re doing here, Nancy. There’s no use writing anything modern and experimental if no one will print it. BILL

pops his head in.

bill Nancy – the boys need distraction out here. Can they juggle your bangles or what? nancy There’s a place in town. Let’s go out. I’ll get Aragon. He’s down about the state of the world. ezra There’s no getting out of the state of the world. It’s a damned mess. nancy Is that what you think, too, Ezra? ezra Is there any doubting it? nancy So what’s to be done? ezra Drinks and verse, obviously. nancy And?

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ezra Acorns into oak. Something strong and resilient out of all of this softness and blather. nancy (Lightly) Well, that’s one advantage of country living. Acorns everywhere. Aragon? Louis! Come on – we’re going out! Scene 3. Next morning. ARAGON works at the press, a black smudge on his cheek. NANCY enters S.R., moving slowly. ARAGON does not look up. nancy Is that the Snark cover you’re working on?38 37

ARAGON

does not respond.

nancy You know Lévy doesn’t understand Caroll39 at all. He thinks the Jabberwocky is an English monarch. comes around behind ARAGON and puts her arms around his shoulders. NANCY

nancy Do you know I think Bob and Ezra and Hem must be sleeping in Hem’s car – 37 A French translation of The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Caroll (La Chasse au Snark) was the third edition published by the Hours Press in 1929 and was translated by Aragon. The poem was first published in English by MacMillan in 1876. 38 Aragon designed the cover: “One night, after a solitary, all night session in the printery what should [Aragon] bring me but three or four different version of a design which might be used as the printed cover of Lewis Caroll’s Snark. The precision of these small black arabesque motifs, all perfectly set together, gave the impression of a pattern carried out in black iron lace, and one of the versions was subsequently used for the cover” (Hours, 47). 39 Lewis Caroll, pen name of Charles Dodgson (1832–1898), English writer.

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shrugs off NANCY ’s embrace and examines the print that has come through. ARAGON

nancy (Stepping back) Come now, it was no worse than a surrealist soirée. aragon Do you know you shattered an entire table full of glasses? nancy It was just a night out, Louis. aragon Is that what the waiter thought, too? nancy Don’t be petty. It’s the morning and there’s lots of work to do. And you with ink on your face already – wipes his face with her fingers and realizes the mark is a bruise.

NANCY

nancy (Embarrassed) You shouldn’t confront me when I’m drinking – aragon When should I confront you, Nan? Not when you’re drinking. Not when you’re working. Not when you’ve run off with some two-bit waiter – nancy That’s entirely enough. I want to go through these proofs and Lévy will be here any moment. aragon To hell with Lévy!

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nancy Here he comes now. You can tell him yourself. The MAYOR and NORVALE enter S.R. norvale Madame Nancy Cunard? We have a warrant for your arrest. ARAGON

stands.

aragon Don’t be ridiculous. For what? norvale (Reading from the warrant) Disturbing the peace. Public drunkenness. Destruction of property. aragon Oh come, on. Half the pub was in on that – mayor But it speaks to incitement. Mademoiselle Cunard, I do not think we have properly met since you arrived here. I am Biveau, the mayor, and this is Norvale, with the local police. nancy Monsieur Maire, I apologize for last night’s commotion. But I’m glad you’ve come. I feel the work of the press could be an important part of La Chapelle Réanville and its cultural work more generally. mayor Yes, I have been wanting to speak with you about the press. nancy Good. Then we are in agreement about its role here. As you may be aware, many of our books are in English, but we are also doing some important translations into French.

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mayor We have heard reports of the type of work that takes place here. nancy Excellent. Then you’ll understand the crucial role a press has to play in advancing modern aesthetics – mayor Your printer may be skilled, Mademoiselle Cunard. But he is not discreet. The village pub has heard many stories of the exploits that take place here. nancy I do not believe in gossip, sir – mayor Really? That is good to know when you are at the centre of so much of it. Now, what I would like to suggest is you keep a more traditional focus in mind. nancy Traditional? mayor Perhaps the work of Edmond Rostand.40 aragon We’ve done nothing wrong here. mayor But again, it speaks to incitement, doesn’t it? Modern ideas have a way of … spreading. (Picks up one of NANCY ’s bangles from the bookshelf) A curious object. (Holding it up to the light) Wild negro art, I suppose. 40 Edmond Rostand (1868–1918), French writer of poetry and popular bourgeois dramas.

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nancy Monsieur Maire, you will put down my property. mayor (Looking speculatively at the bracelet and the mark on ARAGON ’s face) Worn by a wild white negress, it would seem. (Returns the bracelet to the shelf) As a neighbourly gesture, Mademoiselle Cunard, we will call this a warning. (Nods to NORVALE and they move toward the door) Perhaps Monsieur Aragon will know my meaning and see that you heed it. NORVALE

and MAYOR exit S.L.

nancy Outrageous! Who knew the mayor of Réanville was a leader of the Jeunesses Patriotes?41 aragon He’s not the only one. There’s a mood in France. nancy Come on, Louis. You can’t honestly believe someone like that – such a bully – stands in for all the rest. aragon No. The rest are not as smart, though just as ruthless, in their way. You’ll be all right, Nan. You’ll find a way around him. You always do. nancy What do you mean, I? We! Louis. Ours, remember? This is exactly your sort of fight. aragon No, Nan. The press is your stage. 41 Fascist-inspired youth group founded in France in 1924.

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picks up a suitcase that is tucked in the corner. nancy

Louis – aragon And my exit was always an early one. Bonne chance, Nan. Exit ARAGON . Scene 4. Venice, 1928. The balcony S.R. has been made to look like a Venetian terrace with light reflecting off the water. NANCY steps out on the balcony, smoking in an agitated manner. Faintly, Eddie South and his Alabamians’42 “Two Guitars”43 is heard along with the sound of club noise and voices. nancy (Aggressively) And at night they sang in the gondolas. The music and club noise grow louder. Two shadows appear, dancing intensely to the jazz music. When the music ends HENRY 44 steps out on the balcony S.L., stretching his arms and shoulders. NANCY watches him for a moment, throws her cigarette in the canal, and exits. Scene 5. Le Puits Carré 1928. Two DELIVERYMEN push a piano onstage. There is a certain amount of grunting and cursing in French. 42 Eddie South (1904–1962), American musician. In 1927, South started his own band, Eddie South and his Alabamians, named after the Alabam club where they played in Chicago. 43 Jazz composition recorded by Eddie South and his Alabamians in Paris in 1929. 44 Henry Crowder (1890–1955), American musician. Crowder toured with

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deliveryman 1 Allo? deliveryman 2 Laisse-le ici. Il n’y a personne. deliveryman 1 Bonjour! Il y a quelqu’un? deliveryman 2 Allons-y. and HENRY appear S.R. NANCY is wearing a housecoat. HENRY is shirtless. NANCY

deliveryman 2 Tiens! Ils ne sont pas de la même couleur! deliveryman 1 Taber – The two DELIVERYMEN run off S.L. nancy Oh, good! The piano’s arrived. HENRY

looks out the window at the departing figures.

nancy Though why they brought it to the printery, I’m not sure. How will we ever get it in the house from here? henry Do you think they’re getting someone? nancy No. I think they’ve dropped it and left. Quite inconvenient.

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henry I mean, do you think they’re telling someone? nancy Who would they tell? henry The police. The town council. In the States there’d be a lynch mob around this house in less than ten minutes. nancy Don’t be ridiculous, Henry. I can’t imagine there’s much that would shock the French. And Americans can’t be that naïve. henry Not naïve. Brutal. nancy What? henry I once saw the body of a black man in Washington after he was found with a white woman. He was hanging from a tree and they’d cut off his … they’d cut him and put his parts in his own mouth. nancy Surely the perpetrators were held accountable by the law – henry The perpetrators were the law. nancy But that’s insane. henry No, Nancy. That’s America.

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nancy Well, my mother’s American – henry Your mother’s white American. And rich. When you’re black and poor you see all kinds of things. I’ve seen a black man set on fire for trying to buy food for his family from the wrong store. I’ve seen a black woman whipped for spilling coffee on the rug of a white woman’s house. I’ve seen shacks burned down with black babies inside ’em. nancy What did you do? henry I came here! You can almost forget about colour until something like those men walking in. Then bam! I’m right back in Georgia. nancy But surely it could be changed – henry Be like trying to scoop up an ocean with a spoon. nancy I simply can’t accept that, Henry. I can’t think about the world that way. HENRY

embraces NANCY . henry

Then don’t think about it. nancy Will you stay?

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henry Mmmm? nancy Have I told you how glad I am that you’ve come to help me with the press? You must have been sick to death of night hours, of all the drinks sent to you at your piano, of the fatigue attendant on the adulation – first Venice, then Montmartre.45 Now you can play right here, for me. henry The piano’s a beaut, Nan. And the car. I never drove anything like that, so silvery and blue. I can’t believe that fellow smashed into us and marked up the side. nancy That was his fault, Henry, not yours. Never mind about the car. They’ll fix it up or we’ll get another. Try the piano! Play something. Play “Rhapsody in Blue.”46 sits down at the keys and begins a gentle version of “Rhapsody in Blue.” NANCY stands beside HENRY , looking pensive. HENRY stops playing. HENRY

henry What is it? nancy Nothing. You play very well. henry Nancy, I’ve been playing in clubs all across America and Europe – for years. I can tell when no one’s feeling the music. 45 Adapted from Cunard, Grand Man: Memories of Norman Douglas, 86. 46 1924 jazz composition by George Gershwin. Cunard references Crowder’s playing this song and its place in her memory in Hours, 138.

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nancy I just wondered if you could put a bit more of yourself into it. henry Myself? nancy Yes … Couldn’t you play it in a way that’s more tribal? henry Tribal? nancy You know – more African. henry It’s Gershwin.47 nancy I know it’s Gershwin. But it should be a reflection of you as well. henry I’ve just been telling you about life in America. nancy But your soul is African, I can feel it. Just as I can feel my own. From the time I was a small girl I have felt some affinity … Brancusi48 once sculpted me as the white negress. Doesn’t that seem right to you? henry Honey, I don’t know about your soul, but I keep telling you – mine’s from Gainesville.

47 George Gershwin b. Jacob Gershowitz (1898–1937), American composer. 48 Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957), Romanian sculptor.

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nancy Just play, Henry. HENRY begins to play again, more rhythmically this time. NANCY dances on her own. She is quite graceful and very good.

henry There we go! takes down one of the African masks off the shelf. First she dances with it as if with a partner and then she puts it over her face.

NANCY

henry There’s a girl! finishes playing with a flourish. collapses on a stool, laughing, and pushes the mask up on top of her head.

HENRY

NANCY

nancy I haven’t danced like that since – since Bricktop’s.49 But come on, I’ll show you how the press works. We’ve got a new Minerva50 in addition to the Mathieu. And we’ve received the most beautiful green marble paper for Aldington’s The Eaten Heart. henry Sounds fine. 49 Bricktop, born Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith (1894– 1984), American entertainer and nightclub owner. In Paris in 1926 she opened the first of many Bricktop’s nightclubs, hosting many modernists and international celebrities. Bricktop was the inspiration for Cole Porter’s “Miss Otis Regrets” and is rumoured to have taught the soon-to-abdicate Prince of Wales how to dance the Charleston. 50 Cunard added a Minerva press to the existing Mathieu to keep up with the demands of printing.

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nancy And I should get dressed properly. Monsieur Lévy will be here any moment. There are footsteps at the door. NANCY pulls the mask off her head. nancy Oh, dear. There he is already. There is a rap at the door. NANCY looks puzzled and opens it. NORVALE enters. henry Sweet Jesus – nancy Not you again. norvale Madame Cunard, I have a subpoena for a Monsieur Henri Crowder. nancy Don’t be ridiculous. This is France. norvale Pardon? nancy Let me ask you something. You were here before – months ago – with the mayor. Norvale, yes? norvale Oui, Madame.

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nancy And now, suddenly, one must testify in court if one has spent the night? NANCY

snatches the subpoena from NORVALE .

norvale Of course not. This is France. The courts would be overrun. nancy Then why are you here? norvale It is about the accident with the car that took place in town last week.51 nancy But the officer at the scene said it was entirely the other man’s fault. norvale Euh – oui. nancy And then? norvale And then the mayor reviewed the case and decided that perhaps things were not quite so simple as they appear. nancy Perhaps not. And what do you think?

51 The actual historical circumstances of the case are that a driver hit Cunard and Crowder head-on. It was the court at Évreux that held Crowder responsible, sentencing him to one month in jail and a 1,000-franc fine, though in the end Crowder was only obliged to pay the fine. The scene has been transposed to Réanville, here, to concentrate and personalize the tensions between Cunard and the French authorities.

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norvale I? nancy Yes, you’re of sound mind and judgment. Do you think the mayor’s actions are entirely impartial? norvale Well – there may be the small matter of Monsieur Crowder’s – er – tan. Monsieur Maire has been a little – anxious since he appeared. nancy And does that seem just to you? Does that seem in keeping with the laws and institutions that are yours to safeguard? norvale They do not pay me to think much, Madame. nancy I see. sighs and takes some money out of a pot on the shelf.

NANCY

nancy Take this, Norvale. Have a pint at the pub with your lunch. norvale Thank you, Madame Cunard! It is a long day without some refreshment. nancy Indeed, it is. Goodbye, Norvale. norvale Goodbye, Madame Cunard. (Looking over at HENRY ) Euh – au revoir.

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Exit NORVALE . henry Well, how about that. Why’n the hell you give him that money? nancy He’s just the messenger, Henry. It’s not his fault. henry Half the trouble in the world is caused by messengers, Nancy. nancy We’ll have to leave the work with Lévy today. Of all the outrageous things! We can go into Paris and see my solicitor about this court business. We can make a weekend out of it, at least. henry Fine. Seems as though you should drive, though. nancy Quite the contrary! We won’t be intimidated. You drive. As it happens we can speed right past the mayor’s house on the way out of town – snatches the keys off a hook on the wall and runs off S.L., laughing. HENRY follows, chuckling.

NANCY

henry (Calling after her) Damn if you aren’t one crazy kind of girl. Exit HENRY . A black and white film montage plays, illustrating Paris in the period of 1928–30, including clips of clubs in Pigalle and film of Josephine Baker. The film finishes with a photograph of NANCY and HENRY walking arm in arm in Paris.

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Scene 6. Le Puits Carré.52 NANCY works at the press. HENRY stands behind her. nancy Back-breaking as well as wrist-breaking is typesetting.53 So the thing I’ve learned is to use a stool, like this. (Nancy pulls a stool up to the press) Greasy black hands do not matter when one is at the proofing stage, but an immaculate touch is most important in handling the fair sheet when one has reached the pulling stage. This is part of the craft: to achieve impeccably clean things with fingers grease-laden – else there will be a distressing “printer’s thumb” in ink on the finished article.54 “It’s always twice as long as you think” is what I would say. However, the work can become quite engrossing, turning into fourteen or fifteen hours a day.55 Now, here, you try. and NANCY change positions. tries setting the type. NANCY watches and makes a couple of corrections with her hands.

HENRY HENRY

nancy Good. You’ve got it now. puts her arms around HENRY ’s neck. The moment lasts a beat and then HENRY fumbles some type. NANCY

henry Son of a – ! Not easy, is it? nancy No. But worth it. Wait until you hold the first bound volume of a new book. It’s tremendous to see it come into the world … Wait. Someone’s coming. 52 This scene telescopes time 1928–1930. 53 Adapted from Hours, 16. 54 Ibid., 9. 55 Adapted from ibid.

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henry As long as it’s not the police again. nancy I think they would have had quite enough of us. enters S.L. He pauses, then, eyeing HENRY warily, begins shuffling and working around the printery. NANCY gives HENRY a small smile and tilts her head indicating “give us a minute.” HENRY quietly exits. LÉVY

nancy Good day, Monsieur Lévy. LÉVY

grunts and continues working.

nancy You have noticed, the last while, that Henry has come to help with the press. LÉVY

grunts again.

nancy I cannot help but observe that you have not … warmed to him. But I must tell you, Monsieur Lévy, that Henry has been entirely helpful and inspiring. He has changed my thinking already, telling me the most amazing things about the life of the American negro … I begin to think Henry himself has become a great turning point in my own. strokes a Kenyan hand-carved bust that is sitting on one of the printing tables.56

NANCY

56 See, for example, Cunard’s comments in Grand Man: “Of course my feeling for things African began years ago with sculpture, and something of these anonymous old statues had now, it seemed, materialized in the personality of a man partly of that race” (85).

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(Turning back to LÉVY ) And now, now, I begin to think about what could be done, what work could be published to show the negro cause in an entirely different light. lévy Hmmmph. nancy Have you not long told me, Monsieur Lévy, that black is the most noble colour of ink? Could it not be the same with people? lévy Eh bien? nancy Really, Monsieur Lévy, on the whole France is so enlightened where matters of race are concerned. Why, in Paris, whites and coloured people mix quite freely. lévy Ah! You think I have difficulties with Monsieur Crowder because he is negro? nancy I entirely understand the prejudices one grows up with, Monsieur Lévy. But here at the Hours we must do what we can to change our perceptions. lévy You forget my sympathies, Madame Cunard. I am ex-anarchistecommuniste, still believing in the liberation of all people suffering oppression. nancy But you dislike Henry?

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lévy Not because he is black. Because he is musician! nancy A musician? lévy Yes, of course! First Monsieur Aragon, the surgeon-poet. Poetry all the time. Then Monsieur Crowder, jazz all the time. Piano day and night! I have no peace! These people are not skilled. Do they learn the lesson of printing over many years? Non! They come in and splatter ink all over the place. Monsieur Crowder, I have seen, blends different colours of ink together! What kind of monstrosity is that? nancy Invention? lévy Sacrilege! nancy (Stifling a smile) Bien, Monsieur Lévy. I will take up your concerns with Henry. In the meantime, I want you to know that your efforts are valued here. We have done very well, in our first eighteen months, Monsieur Lévy. Very well indeed. Good authors – in several cases very famous ones – hard work, luck, and ignorance of the usual complexities of publishing were certainly the three pillars of the Hours during its first year.57 But you have helped enormously. lévy Of course. It takes training! Hard work! nancy Yes, of course. Which is why I am leaving you in charge when Henry and I go to England. 57 Adapted from ibid. The Hours published A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1930.

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lévy Eh? England? An abominable place. nancy I tend to agree, Monsieur Lévy. Yet one must visit one’s family sometimes. lévy Of course. My own maman had six children and worked every day of her life as a washerwoman. Never too much love, only tenderness, God bless her soul. nancy Yes, well, my mother isn’t like that, exactly. The situation is … well, never mind. The important thing is to keep the press going. Ezra Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos will be coming out as well as the long poem that won our poetry contest, Whoroscope by that nice young poet, Samuel Beckett.58 lévy (Reading from a proof) In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg. Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?59 Mon – what does it mean?! Why these chickens are in with the bacons and the eggs? nancy Well, I suppose the point is that it doesn’t have to mean anything, precisely.

58 Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), Irish writer. 59 Excerpted from “Whoroscope” in Beckett, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, 83. Beckett submitted the poem to a 1930 contest at the Hours Press, devised by Nancy Cunard and Richard Aldington, to find the best poem under one hundred lines. As the winner, the young and unknown Beckett received ten British pounds, and 300 pamphlets of the poem were published by the Hours.

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lévy (Sighs) As long as the layout is just so – nancy Yes, of course, Monsieur Lévy. I leave it in your capable hands. lévy While you are away, Madame Cunard? nancy Yes, Monsieur Lévy? lévy My friend Norvale – the police officer, you know? He may come by time to time for some cider after working? His wife doesn’t like us at his house, you see. I am not sure she likes him at his house, in fact, and – nancy Yes, of course, Monsieur Lévy. Only – lévy Oui? nancy Don’t let him look at the recent proofs. He is close with the mayor, who I suspect would not approve of the bacon and eggs. lévy Do not fear! Your chickens, they will be safe with me. nancy I know they will be. Thank you, Monsieur Lévy. Au revoir. kisses LÉVY on the cheek and turns to exit S.L. NANCY

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lévy (Gruffly) Au revoir, Madame Cunard. (Shouting after her) Watch out for individualists! I hear England is full of them. Scene 7. Le Puits Carré, 1931. NANCY storms in S.L. with an armful of pamphlets. Some are already stuffed into addressed envelopes. NANCY stuffs the rest of the envelopes, addressing and stamping them as she goes. nancy Does anyone know a negro! continues to stuff the envelopes, becoming increasingly agitated.

NANCY

nancy Does anyone know a negro! HENRY enters S.L with several suitcases. He leans them against the press.

henry Nancy – NANCY

glances up, but continues with her work.

henry Nancy, don’t mail those pamphlets. Not to all of you mother’s friends. nancy Black Man and White Ladyship is a political pamphlet, Henry. And it’s aimed exactly at my mother and my mother’s friends. henry But it’s you being angry with your mother in public.

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nancy That’s exactly what she said, Henry. About us! She said that we were dirty laundry. She tried to have you extradited from England! She sent private detectives to prowl around our hotel! And it’s not just Mother. It was everyone in England. You remember George Moore? His was the first book we published at the press and he was a friend to me when I was a girl. And when I asked him if he had had any coloured friends, he said: “No, I think none, but the subject has never come my way. You see, I’ve never known anyone of colour, not even an Indian. I have met neither a brown man, nor yet a black man. I do not believe I could get on well with a black man, my dear. I think the best I could manage would perhaps be a yellow man.”60 henry Well, you gotta start somewhere. nancy How can you laugh? The bigotry, the utter unfairness – henry What else am I going to do, Nancy? nancy Rage! Throw something. Write something. henry We are writing something, the antholo – nancy (Unheeding) And the thing is … it started as a society rivalry. Lady Asquith61 asking Mother of me: “Well, Maud, what is it now? Drink, Drugs, or Niggers?” And Mother, confronted by the press: “Do you 60 This exchange made a profound impression on Cunard and she repeats it several times in her writing, notably in Black Man and White Ladyship (Gender of Modernism, 72). 61 Margot Asquith, Lady Oxford (1864–1945).

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mean to say my daughter actually knows a negro?” You see? It’s not even about race. It’s about class. henry You make that pretty clear in the pamphlet. nancy Yes, to change the class system. We must reform the system as a whole and the only way to do that is to speak out! henry If I spoke like that to my mama, she’d slap me. nancy Oh, she’ll slap back, all right. With her money and her privilege. Well, that’s fine. It’s not money I want, not money that’s tainted in that way. She’s always been like this. She always – henry Give her some time. nancy The time is now, Henry. It’s 1931, for God’s sake. How long can this go on? After everything you’ve told me about race in America. After everything you’ve suffered – there’s no other way to look at it. Those who oppose us are enemies. henry Calm down, Nancy. nancy (Looking out the window) Look, there’s Georgette on her way into town. I’ll ask her to mail these for me. leaves quickly with her envelopes. HENRY looks at the remaining pamphlets and envelopes. NANCY returns S.L. NANCY

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henry She took them? nancy Yes, you know Georgette. Never too much trouble. looks at the pamphlets and the stacks of articles and photographs gathered for the anthology.

NANCY

nancy Do you know when I told my English friends of our idea to create an anthology of negro and negro-sympathetic writing from around the world, to show people the humanity of people of every colour, half of my friends – more than half of them – said they won’t speak to me if the anthology appears. These are intelligent people, Henry. Educated. Philanthropic. People I would have said are good people. henry It doesn’t – nancy And Mother – the hysteria caused by a difference of pigmentation!62 … (Looking around) We’ve resolved things here. People have accepted us here. Yes, there have been small incidents … of course the mayor … but mostly people are good to us. Why can’t it be that way in England? henry Lots of reasons, Nancy. None of them are going to change in a hurry. nancy But we must call out race prejudice where we see it. Isn’t that right? henry I don’t know, Nan. When it helps, I guess. 62 “Black Man and White Ladyship,” 69.

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nancy Why – do you think I’ve done the wrong thing, Henry? Was it wrong to have called out all of her snobbisms, race and class? henry Georgette’s already halfway to the post office by now, Nancy. nancy But I don’t see how else I would break down those barriers. It must be a full assault! henry You want my advice? Give it some space. You’d only be throwing gasoline on the fire now. nancy No. I’ll write her a letter. So that she understands why I did it. So that she knows I only want to break with those insidious ideas – stands at the desk and scrawls a hasty letter. She seals it and hands it to HENRY .

NANCY

nancy Will you take it into town and mail it, Henry? henry Nancy – nancy Please, Henry. It’s important. presses the letter into HENRY ’s hands. HENRY nods.

NANCY

nancy Thank you. I’ll unpack a little. Clean myself up. What a journey – and there’s still so much to be done on the anthology and now it’s

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imperative that we go to New York. Well, we can talk about all of that later – though how we’ll keep up with the press I don’t know. Research, travel, writing cannot go with printing and publishing …63 And England only made it clearer that we must continue our work on race. That we must gather hundreds of contributors from around the world to show the diversity of the coloured experience. That Harlem will be a central piece in that. That we must take this fight not only to England but to America. henry Go rest, Nan. nancy You’ll mail the letter to Mother? henry I’ll go out now. exits S.R. HENRY waits a moment, then tears the letter in three and throws it into the trash. HENRY exits S.L.

NANCY

Scene 8. A hotel in Harlem, April 1932.64 The front of the hotel is projected onto an outcropping of S.R. On what amounts to the fourth floor, there is a platform that represents NANCY ’s hotel room. NANCY hurries past at stage level, and is accosted by the reporters who are standing in the front row of the audience. reporter 1 Nancy! Nancy! What’s an heiress doing in Harlem anyway?

63 Adapted from Hours, 195. 64 This scene condenses the events of Cunard’s two visits to Harlem, the first in 1931 and the second in 1932.

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reporter 2 Miss Cunard, what about these reports of negro men coming and going from your hotel at all hours? reporter 3 Hey – Miss Cunard, what’s your mother think about you seeing a negro movie star? Is that why you’re both staying at this hotel? looks as though she is going to flee into the hotel, but then turns to make a statement.

NANCY

nancy I have one thing to say, and that is to deny the printed allegation of my involvement with Paul Robeson.65 He is a very fine actor. I admire his work. Beyond that, I have only met him once at a club in Paris, Le Boeuf sur le Toit, in 1926. That is all. reporter 1 Nancy! Are you saying your affair with Robeson started back in Paris? reporter 3 What other bohemian activities can you tell us about? nancy And now after your interest in my private affairs (I hope I have sufficiently satisfied this) I want something in return. Why are you Americans so uneasy of the Negro race? This question is the epitome of the whole colour question as it strikes a plain English person such as myself. Who’ll write me the best answer to this? I’ll print it in my book on colour.66 reporter 1 Nancy – is the book a pretext for coming to America? 65 Paul Robeson (1898–1976), American actor and civil rights activist. 66 Quoted in Chisholm, Nancy Cunard: A Biography, 195.

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reporter 2 Nancy! Hey, Nancy. reporter 3 Are you planning to star in a film with Mr Robeson? exits stage into the hotel and re-emerges on the fourth-floor platform. Books and papers are scattered on the desk and the bed. As the neon hotel sign flashes, so too do we see flashes from the pages of Negro Anthology – photographs, text, music scores. The red light and the images play on the room and on NANCY . NANCY removes her coat and scarf and sits down at the desk.

NANCY

nancy (Taking a breath) Right. Back to work. Scottsboro. begins to write and then looks up as she narrates her article. During her description, we see photographs and film footage from the Scottsboro case on the wall of the hotel.

NANCY

On March 25, 1931, black and white hoboes were “riding the rails,” hidden up and down the length of a freight train going from Chattanooga to Memphis, Tennessee. No money, no fares, setting out to look for work. Travelling in this manner is a frequent occurrence in America. But such is the race hatred that white tramps even will object to the presence of Negro hoboes in the same wagon. Not for nothing has the white ruling class for decades been teaching the “poor white” that he can always look down on the Negro worker, no matter how wretched his own economic condition may be. So the white boys started a row and tried to throw the “niggers” off. The negroes resisted them, and the whites did not get the best of it. All but one jumped off and telephoned the station-master at Stephenson to arrest the “niggers” who’d dared to fight with them.

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The train had already gone through this station, so was stopped at Paint Rock. Here sheriffs and excited citizens took nine Negro boys and three white boys out of separate parts of the train. At first all were charged with vagrancy and told to get out of that county as quick as possible. And then suddenly, while all were being searched, two of the white boys were discovered to be girls in men’s overalls. So the sheriff got an idea; it wasn’t possible for Negroes and white girls to be on the same train, in the same car maybe, without the question of rape coming in. The boys protested they had not even seen any girls; some of them had seen a fight, that was all. But some of the crowd were for an immediate lynching; authorities assured them the “niggers” would be properly dealt with and should not escape “justice.” All were promptly locked up, the Negroes to be brutally beaten, the girls to be put through the third degree and forced into saying they had been repeatedly raped by the boys. Both girls were known to be prostitutes; Victoria Price had a prison record and impressed on Ruby Bates the utter necessity, now, of falling in with the authorities’ views so that they might themselves escape the law’s punishment.67 The phone rings. NANCY answers it abstractedly. male american (voice) I don’t know what they call your kind in England but here in America they call them plain nigger fuckers or prostitutes of the lowest kind …68 is startled and hangs up the phone. She walks over to the bar and pours herself a drink. She takes a drink, steadies herself, then returns to her narration with projections.

NANCY

nancy The trial date was first of all fixed for April 1, but postponed till April 6, a fair-day in Scottsboro, one which would assure the largest crowd possible and enable the mob to witness the condemnation of 67 Adapted from “Scottsboro – and Other Scottsboros,” box 8, f8, Nancy Cunard Collection, Harry Ransom Research Center. 68 Anon. letter to Cunard, quoted in Winkiel, “Nancy Cunard’s Negro,” 512.

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what the local papers called “the Negro fiends.” Scottsboro is described as a sleepy little town of some 10,000 inhabitants in the northern part of Alabama, but on trial day the presence of the military who had been called in to make a show of quelling the lynch spirit made it look like an armed camp. The authorities had deemed it necessary to send 118 soldiers to bring the nine boys in to the town from Gadsden jail, where they had been held since arrest. Armed soldiers were on guard inside and outside the court house, to which only persons holding special permits were allowed entry after having been searched. Already by 8 a.m. thousands had gathered from all over the neighbourhood, and by 10 o’clock the crowd was estimated at 10,000. The lynch spirit had been whipped up to such a point by the authorities that statements were going around saying that the “horrible black brutes had chewed off one of the girls’ breasts.” The doctor’s evidence – and this is the most important part – on his examination of the girls immediately after they were taken from the train, showing they were unscathed, and which was public knowledge, meant nothing to the people of Scottsboro. The local newspapers tried to whitewash the presence of the agitated mob by saying the crowd was “curious, not furious,” and maintained it had gathered out of mere curiosity. The trial began on the 6th and was all over on the 8th of April, 1931 – three days to convict and sentence to death nine Negro boys all under twenty years old, two of them thirteen and fourteen respectively, one boy with a sexually transmitted infection so severe he could not possibly have participated in any rape. There were no workers on this jury, not white nor black. It was composed of local businessmen and neighbouring well-to-do farmers. Just before the proceedings began, Wembley, the legal advisor to the Scottsboro Electric Company, which controls the town, had walked through the mob and told them that “everything would be all right in a few days,” and that his company had enough power to “burn up the niggers.” In court, the boys had a lawyer who had not, on his own statement, studied nor prepared the case and told them to plead guilty.

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The boys were tried without having been allowed to communicate with parents, relatives, or friends, yet maintained their innocence.69 HENRY

hurries by the reporters on his way into the hotel.

reporter 1 Hey, Henry! Give us a quote. reporter 2 Mr Crowder, what’s it like sharing Miss Cunard’s attention? HENRY enters the hotel room with a handful of letters. He throws off his hat and puts the mail on the desk.

henry Those reporters – nancy I know. They won’t give up. It’s sordid. Why won’t they get behind our cause instead? They could be shedding light on the cultural accomplishments of a people. What could be a better use of journalism than that? henry (Taking off his coat) That’s the fabric of this place, Nancy. There’s a lot of hate. nancy What’s come in the mail, then? HENRY picks up the letters and sits down on the bed, sorting through the mail.

69 Adapted from “Scottsboro – and Other Scottsboros.”

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henry Oh, the usual, more threats. Damn if those people aren’t crazy enough to follow through. nancy You can’t listen to them. henry Can’t afford not to listen. This press storm’s gone berserk. Someone’s going to do something. nancy We can’t quit, Henry. We already have over five hundred pages collected. And the additions on Harlem will add a whole new dimension. I’ve been writing notes on the vitality of the children here … What else ? henry Letter from a Scottsboro mother, thanking you for the money. HENRY

hands NANCY the letter. She skims it.

nancy I’m working on that article now – HENRY opens another envelope and looks at the enclosed photographs.

henry Lord knows those boys need all the help they can get. Here’s a contribution from Lawrence Gellert70 called “Negro Songs of Protest.” nancy I’ve been waiting for that. 70 Lawrence Gellert b. Laslow Grünbaum (1898–1979?), Hungarian-American writer and music collector.

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henry And Michelet has sent a draft of “African Empires and Civilisations.” 71

nancy Wonderful. henry Huh. Prints from Barbara Ker-Seymer.72 (Checks the postage) Guess they’ve been following us around in the mail. nancy Oh! How do they look? henry (Sorting through the photographs) Some are real good. This one with you in the veil. The solarized photograph of NANCY appears on the screen. henry But this one where the negative’s been used to make your skin look black – Nancy, what were you thinking? nancy (Taking the photograph and admiring it) It was Barbara’s idea. It’s a new technique called solarization. Really quite remarkable. henry But it looks like your skin’s black and those pearls around your throat are choking you. Like you’re being lynched. Don’t you have any idea what this looks like to a black man?

71 Raymond Michelet, Cunard’s collaborator on Negro: An Anthology. 72 Barbara Ker-Seymer (1905–1993), British photographer.

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nancy Henry, you of all people should know. It’s an identification. An expression of solidarity. Photo fades. henry It’s two little girls playing with film. nancy Playing! henry Bright Young Things. Is that what they called you? The Corrupt Coterie?74 You think because these photographs make your skin look black that you know? Do you understand what kind of danger you’ve put me in here? 73

nancy (Taking a breath) Henry, I realize the pressures are extreme – henry You play at lynching, but this is real life for me, Nancy. It’s not a cause or a … a romantic infatuation. nancy Is that what you think it is for me? After all of the work, the hours … reporter 1 (Yelling up) Nancy. Hey – Nancy – Just yell something down. Is it true or ain’t it?

73 Tabloid nickname for a group of bohemian young people in London during the 1920s, including Barbara Ker-Seymer. While peripherally associated with the group, Cunard spent most of the twenties in Paris. 74 Group of aristocratic young people in London during the 1910s, including Cunard, known for their extravagant parties.

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calms herself, steps over to the window, and looks down.

NANCY

nancy They think I slept with Paul Robeson – they’ve printed it. HENRY

is silent.

nancy Oh, come on. The accusation is ludicrous. henry I know you are infinitely capable of living three or four lives at once. nancy I belong to you, Henry. You’ve made me. All of my ambitions. henry If you belong to me you also belong to a whole hell of a lot of others. The phone rings. HENRY looks at it suspiciously, NANCY with trepidation. HENRY ’s look challenges NANCY to answer it. She does, slowly. nancy Hello. male american (voice) Mrs Nancy Cunard, take this as a solemn warning, your number is up. You’re going for a ride shortly. You are a disgrace to the white race. You can’t carry on in this country. We will give you until May 15th. Either give up sleeping with a nigger or take the consequences. That is final. P.S. – We will not only take you but we’ll take your nigger lover with you.75 75 Quoted in Nancy Cunard, “The American Moron and the American of Sense – Letters on the Negro,” in Negro: An Anthology, 121.

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Staging Modernist Lives NANCY

hangs up the phone. henry

Who was that? nancy I don’t know. Men have been calling. henry (Sarcastically) Have they? HENRY

grabs his coat and hat. nancy

Don’t – exits, slamming the door. NANCY stares a moment, then slowly sits at her desk and continues her narration with projections. HENRY

nancy In appeal upon appeal those boys were convicted and sentenced to death or life imprisonment, even when Ruby Bates came out and repudiated the rape lie. Victoria Price’s testimony was full of gaps and contradictions but that did not matter to the juries. And so they remain imprisoned, most waiting to die, for a lie, for a terrible lie, for a crime the evidence itself says they did not commit. Such is justice for the American negro today.76 Blackout except for the flashing neon images from Negro. During the intermission, a reel of news footage and still photos plays, a silent depiction of the political events of the 1930s: hunger 76 Adapted from “Scottsboro – and Other Scottsboros.”

These Were the Hours

marches, Haile Selassie, Communist rallies, Scottsboro marches, Hitler’s speeches in Germany, outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, war footage. The reel plays in a loop and ends with the depictions of the war in Spain as the second act begins.

273

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act ii Scene 1. Madrid, 1936. The S.R. balcony has been made to look like the terrace at Pablo Neruda’s77 Casa de las Flores78 with potted geraniums along the sides. NANCY stands on the terrace, drink in hand, looking out at the city. PABLO enters onto the terrace behind her. pablo Nancy! I wondered where you’d gotten to. Everyone’s inside. Come in – Alberti79 is here and I want you to meet him – nancy It’s so tranquil out here, Pablo – you wouldn’t even know about the war, not really.80 Not about Franco81 or the tanks or the planes. Just the flowers and the city. pablo Sometimes the most exotic flowers grow in strange conditions. Look at Madrid. Since the Republicans have taken over it has in some ways become the ideal city – class distinctions abolished, everyone working cooperatively.

77 Pablo Neruda b. Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto (1904–1973), Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician. 78 Neruda’s apartment in western Madrid, on the fifth floor in a block of the Calle de Rodríguez San Pedro. 79 Rafael Alberti (1902–1999), Spanish poet. 80 Spanish Civil War (1936–39). In 1936, the leftist Popular Front won democratically held elections in Spain. Military conservatives staged a partially successful coup, which triggered the three-year-long war in which at least half a million people died, with a further 200,000 to 400,000 dead in concentration camps where left-wing survivors were incarcerated after the war. The leftist forces were called “Republicans” and the right-wing forces “Nationalists.” 81 Francisco Franco Bahamonde (1892–1975). The only right-wing general to survive the war, Franco was dictator of Spain until 1975. He restored the monarchy, which had been abolished in 1931. Ironically, after Franco’s death, it was King Juan Carlos I who led the transition to democracy in Spain.

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nancy And Franco at the gate. pablo Certainly. But is it partly that pressure that brought about transformation? Look at me, a poet, a diplomat from Chile. Now I am a political organizer on the way to the front. My poems are for the people. nancy And me, a disinherited heiress, reviled in London, now the Manchester Guardian’s only eyewitness reporter in Spain. Still, there’s so much that’s terrible in it. Soldiers practically children. The Moroccans pressed into a war that isn’t theirs in the first place.82 pablo You feel the African involvement intensely. nancy Yes, of course. Another exploitative example in a long history. pablo Then that’s why we must fight it. Sound of laughter from inside the apartment. pablo Come in, Nancy. Délano is telling his story about dressing up as a woman to get past a Nationalist guard. 83

82 In 1912, France and Spain divided Morocco into protectorates. The Moroccan unit of the Spanish Army was mobilized against the Republicans by the Nationalists in the coup of 1936. On 18 July 1936, Franco assumed command of the unit. 83 Luis Enrique Délano (1907–1985), Chilean writer. Délano and Neruda fled Madrid together in November 1936 when Franco’s forces were approaching and they both faced execution.

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nancy (Not noticing) Things in Spain, Pablo, have taken hold of me entirely. And I have been thinking: Would it not be good to send out a questionnaire to writers in Britain to see how they feel about it?84 “Writers must take sides. To-day the struggle is Spain. Tomorrow it may be in other countries – our own. This is the question we are asking you: Are you for, or against, the legal Government and the People of Republican Spain? Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism?”85 pablo Yes, good, Nancy. Of course you must do it. nancy And poems, like the ones you’ve passed out at the front to inspire the soldiers. Pamphlets. We could do that too. I still have the press in Normandy. pablo Yes, of course. But first we must eat and drink and talk. nancy I doubt they’re having dinner on the front. pablo Nancy, those soldiers are Spanish, not English, and it’s early days. I assure you both sides will stop for dinner – whatever they can find – and no matter what Franco says. nancy I so want us to win. We need to win. There’s no alternative. pablo Winning takes imagination. They have the priests, but we have the poets.

84 Adapted from Grand Man, 106–7. 85 Excerpted from Cunard’s introduction to Authors Take Sides, i.

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nancy And poets are better soldiers? pablo Yes, of course. Better dinner guests, too. Come in, Nancy. and PABLO exit. A documentary film of war footage runs across the balcony set.

NANCY

Scene 2. Le Puits Carré, winter, 1937. NANCY runs the press. She is thorough and accomplished in her work, and we see projected images of her prints. PABLO enters S.R. with a stack of proofs. nancy Tzara, Aragon, Langston Hughes, Garcia Lorca.87 Should we put them together or separately? International Poets for the Spanish Republicans or The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People?88 86

pablo (Looking at one of the proofs) It might be the poetry of the world defending itself from Pablo Neruda. This is the third proof I’ve ruined. nancy (Looking at the proof) It takes time. This is fine. (Laughing) Except here. You’ve transposed your p’s and d’s and made párpados – that’s heavily lidded, isn’t it? – “dárdapos.” pablo (Sighing and wandering away from the press) I must be the world’s worst typesetter. 86 Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), Romanian and French writer and performance artist, founding member of European Dadaism. 87 Garcia Lorca (1898–1936), Spanish writer. Lorca was killed by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the war. His death mobilized the participation of many artists and writers in Republican causes. 88 Cunard published five plaquettes of war resistance poetry. The pamphlets were sold to raise money for food for Republican families.

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continues printing.

nancy Not the worst, darling Dárdapos. Certainly not the worst. Do you know Auden’s sent us the most wonderful poem on Spain, essentially saying there’s only one moral stand one can take. I can’t quite believe he had the gumption to do it. PABLO

rifles through books on the desk.

nancy That pamphlet will sell out in days, I’m sure, and all that money for food for those poor families from Badajos.89 pablo (Picking up an oversized book on the desk) Is this your famous Negro Anthology, then? It’s incredibly heavy. nancy Yes, over eight pounds! That’s what happens when you have 150 contributors. pablo How did you ever afford to have it printed? nancy A funny story, actually. An English newspaper printed a libellous story about me and Paul Robeson. I sued and came out with £1,500 – exactly the amount it cost to have the book printed by Wishart Press! pablo Poetic. (Flipping to the front of the book) This Henry, in the dedication. “My first negro friend.” 89 Capital of the province of Badajos (now Badajoz) in Spain near the Portuguese border. Early in the war it was taken by the Nationalists and over four thousand people were indiscriminately killed after the battle.

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nancy Yes. pablo Where is he now? nancy Washington, last I heard. pablo And that’s difficult for you. NANCY

pauses.

pablo Don’t worry about me. You know I believe it completely possible to love many at once. nancy And you frequently do. pablo Yes. Frequently. I am more alive for it. And a better poet. nancy A better poet. And the women in your life think so too? pablo They do and they stay or they don’t and they leave. nancy One person can make you feel so alone in the dark. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. PABLO

presses a hand against NANCY ’s face.

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pablo I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz, or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off. I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul90 NANCY

pauses a beat, then looks away.

nancy Yes, it seems it does make you a better poet. pablo If only Auden knew my secret he would write ten good poems on Spain. nancy Auden has secrets of his own. pablo Yes, I suppose he does. nancy Yet still I feel he finds more measure of acceptance, in some places, anyway, than a woman who takes too many lovers. pablo You won’t be imprisoned. nancy No. But not accepted either. pablo Does it matter? 90 “Sonnet XVII” in 100 Love Sonnets, 39. Neruda is said to have written the sonnet for Cunard.

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nancy. No, of course not. Not like other things matter. (Turning back to the poems) Once we have the first two plaquettes done I think we should start the third with the Guillén91 or the Alberti. PABLO spreads a horse blanket on the ground. He sits on one side, leaving room for NANCY .

pablo Time for a break. nancy No, Pablo. We’ve only just started – pablo Three hours ago. It’s very quiet here. Last night I went for a walk – extends his hand to NANCY . Reluctantly, she comes and sits down.

PABLO

pablo It was night and the moon was out. The snow and the moonlight fluttered like a curtain around the estate. I was filled with excitement. On the way back, the snowflakes swirled around my head with chilly insistence. I lost my bearings completely and had to grope my way through the whiteness.92 nancy Yes, there’s something about Réanville in the winter. Some quiet beauty. pablo Like Santiago. Which is very far away. 91 Nicolás Guillén (1902–1989), Cuban poet. 92 Adapted from quotation in Gordon, 264.

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nancy And warmer – pablo Warmer, yes. And the sea like blue crystals for swimming and the good bread and the wine – nancy I dream about Réanville when I’m in Spain. pablo And yet you continue to return there. nancy (Looking away) Yes. neruda We still have the cities, mostly. Madrid, Valencia, Bilbao, Barcelona … Spotlight on NANCY . NANCY stands S.R. Footage of the Spanish Civil war continues to play, projected on both NANCY and the screen behind. nancy Headed for the Cordoba front, events now came so fast that I had only reached Perpignan the day Barcelona fell. The refugees were starting to pour in over the frontier from Spain to France. Up at seven. On the road in a car by 8:30, or by train, to the frontiers at Le Perthus and Cerbère, and even to Bourg Madame in the snow. Over, on foot, several miles to the first Spanish village. Scenes of horror along the way. Questioning, noting, talking to hundreds of people in Spanish, memorizing things to describe. Often no lunch, from lack of time. Back, come dark, to the unheated, freezing, dingy room in a horrible hotel where, by the worst light imaginable, exhausted and shivering, I would try to make consecutive sense in writing out of the facts and impressions of the day. The three- or four-page airmail

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dispatch then had to go off to the Manchester Guardian. The first real meal and rest came generally about 10:00 p.m., when, between mouthfuls, one would be discussing events with some of the other journalists. An occasional alternative was afforded by those hourlong waits in the crowded Préfecture, preliminary to obstinate arguings and pleadings with angry officials and the grudging stamping of permits.93 A documentary film shows bombing and the Republican retreat. In the black and white light of the film, PABLO stands, folds the blanket, puts it aside. He and NANCY turn to each other and, arm’s-length apart, clench hands, the knowledge that the war has been lost on both their faces. As in a silent film, she mouths the words “Goodbye, Dárdapos,” and these words run along the bottom of the film screen behind her. PABLO mouths “Santiago?” which also appears on the screen. NANCY hesitates, then responds, “France, first.” NANCY and PABLO look at each other a moment, then he runs S.L. and she S.R. There is a final shot of Republicans in French refugee centres and the film ends. Scene 3. Cuba, 1941. The balcony set S.R. has been done up as a café in Havana. Salsa music is heard in the background. HEMINGWAY sits at the café table, reading a newspaper which shields his face. A fly (sound heard over speakers) buzzes around his head. HEMINGWAY shakes his paper. The fly sounds continue. HEMINGWAY shakes his paper again, more violently, and a hand swats at the air. The fly noise stops. HEMINGWAY straightens the paper in front of his face and continues to read. The fly noise begins again as NANCY steps onto the balcony.

hemingway (Dropping the paper and leaping up) For crying out – NANCY

jumps, surprised.

93 Adapted from Grand Man, 157–8.

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nancy Hem! What are you –? hemingway (Laughing, embracing her) I’d ask you the same thing, Miss Cunard, but I’m reading about it in the paper. Greeted as a hero in Trinidad, eh? nancy Yes, well, unusual, I can tell you. I can’t believe you’re here. They both sit at the table. HEMINGWAY signals for a waiter and begins to speak but NANCY cuts in. nancy We want two Anis del Toro – with water. hemingway (Playing along) Is it good with water? nancy It’s all right. It tastes like licorice. Like everything you’ve waited so long for – 94 NANCY

and HEMINGWAY laugh.

nancy It was a good line, Hem. I often think about it … What are you doing in Cuba? hemingway Martha and I bought a house here last year. You should come and – 95

94 Nancy and Hemingway are quoting, loosely, from Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927). 95 Martha Gellhorn (1908–1998), American journalist and Hemingway’s wife at this time.

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The WAITER emerges and deposits two glasses on the table. NANCY nods her thanks. nancy I haven’t seen Martha since we were all reporting in the mountains in Spain. I’ll never forget how cold I was – or you warming my feet by the fire. hemingway I wouldn’t bring that up with Martha. nancy Don’t be ridiculous. We were all so exhausted – you kept my toes from falling off. Anyway, I’m leaving for New York tomorrow. I’m desperate to get back to England – and to Réanville, eventually. hemingway You should stay, Nan. I keep telling Martha not to go – Europe’s not fit – nancy No, I feel England’s come down on the right side for once. I’ve got a friend working as a translator for the Allies. If I can, I’ll do the same when I get there. hemingway Not sure it will change much. nancy I can’t believe that, Hem. Not really. Anyway, you should be encouraging American intervention – hemingway (Shrugs, takes another drink) What happened to you, anyway? I lost track of you after Madrid.

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nancy When Barcelona fell I went over the border into France, with the refugees. Then South America – Chile, Mexico, and the Antilles – half the world between me and home. But now that France has collapsed … I still can’t believe that we lost in Spain. It’s unfathomable. And now Hitler – (abruptly) have you heard from Ezra? hemingway Go easy on him, Nan. nancy Do you know when I was over the border in France, when the war ended, I voluntarily imprisoned myself at the Fort of Collioure, where they were keeping some of the most important of the Republican leaders. Those running the refugee camps – in France, no less – were pro-fascist. The Republican refugees who had been put in “Special” were left out in the rain … These men’s eyes are no longer human. The look in them is like that of hunted beasts. They seemed to have lost all notion of ordinary things; they were brutalized by the sadistic treatment of which they were daily the victims. They received only three slices of bread per day and had only water to drink. The foulest insults were hurled at them. They were morally tortured by being told that they were going to be given up at any moment to Franco.96 One would have thought that, to someone so hypersensitive, the very vulgarity of fascism would be repugnant, even leaving out entirely its fundamental principles.97 And Ezra’s making pro-Mussolini radio broadcasts in Rome. He’s speaking for the fascists. One of us. He is – fascist. hemingway Not really, Nan. No, not really.

96 “In France: A Fascist Jail,” Nancy Cunard Collection, Harry Ransom Research Center. 97 Adapted from Hours, 127–8.

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nancy Then what? hemingway This is what you got to understand about Ez, Nan. He was ridiculed and paid no attention to in the States. Then in England, there wasn’t enough respect for his work and ideas, and more or less the same when he went to live in France. But in Italy – well, he’s a figure there, perhaps even “a great man.”98 nancy The correct word for a fascist is “scoundrel.”99 hemingway Sure – but Europe’s full of ’em right now. nancy That’s no excuse. It’s never an excuse. Racist is racist. Fascist is fascist. Why do people insist on making excuses? hemingway (Chuckling) I don’t know, Nan. Things aren’t always clear. nancy What about Bob, then? And Bill? hemingway McAlmon made it out through Lisbon. Back in the States – Texas or somewhere he’ll be equally miserable. Bill’s still wandering Spain somewhere. nancy I still feel I should have stayed. In Spain or in France, possibly shot, or taken the humiliating but necessary road to Bordeaux.100 98 Ibid. 99 Letters to Ezra Pound, Box 10 f6, Nancy Cunard Collection. 100 Adapted from Grand Man, 160.

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hemingway Do you hear that? nancy What? hemingway The music. Know what that is? NANCY

shakes her head.

hemingway Life. Everyone chooses it if he has half a chance. No reason you should be any different. nancy No, I suppose not. hemingway To life, then. To Paris in the twenties, where it all started. nancy The twenties weren’t that great, Hem. hemingway Don’t bust a mythology in the making, Nan. That was always your problem, busting people’s mythologies. nancy I suspect your mythology has served you better than mine. To getting home to my house in Réanville. I’ll be damned if I let fascists keep me from that. HEMINGWAY

bows his head and raises his glass.

nancy (Raising her glass) To the good fight. Always.

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hemingway If that’s what you want to call it. To surviving this bloody mess. and HEMINGWAY toast. The scene goes dark. Documentary footage suggests battle and then Allied victory in Europe.

NANCY

Scene 4. Le Puits Carré, 1945. nancy (voice off stage) I can’t tell you how long I’ve waited for this moment, Georgette. All the time I was in England, how near France was and how agonizingly far.101 georgette (voice off stage) Madame Cunard, you must prepare yourself. Le Puits Carré is not as it was. Il n’ya plus – nancy (voice off stage) Oh, come now, Georgette. The fighting wasn’t even near here. georgette (voice off stage) Nancy, there are no doors, no windows, no furniture left. Books, books, everywhere …102 There is nothing to … nothing you can save. nancy (voice off stage) But that smell, Georgette. What is that smell? georgette (voice off stage) The well. They threw in a sheep to putrefy, books, excrement, an old chintz cover from the sofa, and two rifles.103

101 Quoted in Gordon, Nancy Cunard, 283. 102 Adapted from Hours, 201. 103 Ibid., 205.

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nancy (voice off stage) Why would they –? and GEORGETTE step into a disordered scene of a ransacked and vandalized Le Puits Carré. The stage is a littered mess of books, broken statues, ripped carpet, and torn pages. A bayonet has been thrust through the Eugene McCown portrait of NANCY . NANCY surveys the scene, touching a few broken and torn items.

NANCY

nancy (Pause) The German soldiers did this? georgette Oui. And the French reservists, I am afraid. And – nancy And who, Georgette? georgette It is best to leave it, Madame. nancy Tell me. georgette The mayor was impliqué. nancy The mayor of Réanville? georgette He is not a good man. And a collaborateur en plus. We did not want to give him the keys. He said he would confiscate our land. nancy I want to see him.

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georgette The mayor? Are you crazy? He will not come. And besides – nancy He will come. To gloat if nothing else. georgette Madame, I – nancy Get him! Please. hesitates, then departs S.L. NANCY walks through the rubble, looks up into the sky and through the ruined walls, and fingers a copy of Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos that has been nailed over a window. GEORGETTE

nancy Let me be practical! Let me see – and save – what is left.104 NANCY

begins sorting through a pile of strewn papers.

What’s this? My father’s first letter, torn out of the family album, dated in the early 1850s when my father was around four. (She picks it up out of the rubble and reads from the letter) “I am a good boy. I know my letters.”105 laughs a little caustically and puts the letter on her ledger.

NANCY

This, but all my other letters – gone. All my bracelets … sees the African mask she wore while dancing to HENRY ’s piano playing

NANCY

104 Ibid., 202 105 Adapted from ibid.

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in the rubble. It has been broken in two, and she fits the pieces together for a moment before pulling them apart again and putting the pieces on the printing table. She sees the cover of Negro torn from its binding on the ground, picks it up, and holds it to her chest for a moment before putting it beside the mask. She looks around at the debris and then, as though for the first time, sees the Mathieu with a drop cloth halfway across its length. nancy The venerable iron Mathieu press! (Removing the cloth and inspecting the press) It seems they’ve done nothing, no doubt because its size makes it impossible to move! Solid and intact, if a little rusty.106 My wonderful press. I could start again. We could – The MAYOR enters S.L. mayor You summoned, Madame Cunard? nancy Yes, I wanted to tell you myself of my intention to sue. mayor For what, Madame? You abandoned your house. It was wartime. nancy You allowed the soldiers in here, you – mayor I have a sworn duty, Madame. nancy But you enjoyed it. 106 Hours, 205.

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mayor Yes, I will admit to a certain pleasure. The ideas that have emerged from this house – nancy Oh yes, what could I have seemed to you – I, a foreign woman, actually engaged in printing. Printing! And printing what? A press is very dangerous! It means the dissemination of ideas, obviously very bad ones in this case – foreign, for a start.107 mayor Yes, foreign. They had no place in La Chapelle Réanville. And neither do you. Neither did those negroes or the bohemians and Spanish refugees you stored here. nancy Much has been destroyed. But there is still a court system in France.108 mayor Trust me when I say the magistrates do not look favorably on revolutionary ideas. Nor do they have much taste for spoiled English heiresses. nancy Mr Mayor, I have no taste for your manner or your politics. You are the worst kind of bigot, the small-minded, petty kind who enjoys the suffering of others. But I would never destroy your property. mayor I? I only unlocked the door, Madame. It was the villagers who did most of the damage.

107 Ibid., 199. 108 According to accounts by Cunard’s friends and correspondents, the fact that some of her neighbours participated in the pillage was particularly devastating. Cunard brought a lawsuit against the mayor for his facilitation of the destruction of her home, but it was dismissed for lack of sufficient evidence.

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is silent.

mayor Oh, you didn’t know? The soldiers only did minor damage. It was your neighbours who destroyed the rest. (Casually) How satisfying it must have been for them after years of resentment, of watching you and your friends toss aside all of their values. How they must have hated you to have behaved so ruthlessly, for the destruction to have been so … total. The MAYOR pulls out one of NANCY ’s bracelets from his pocket. mayor Norvale, you do remember Norvale, from the local police? He brought me this souvenir. I like to keep it on my desk, a little reminder of how wild things can be tamed. The MAYOR puts the bracelet back in his pocket. mayor Good day, Mademoiselle Cunard. (Bowing slightly) And welcome home, of course. The MAYOR exits S.L. NANCY wanders through the rubble, touching items here and there. nancy How much I have … how I have thought about the old days and the press. Réanville in the dripping mist, outside the printery; Réanville in the scorch of July; Réanville of all those night hours among the circulars and address books spread over the floor. How I have thought about the way of life in 1928 – Aragon composing designs … where might he be now? Henry’s wafted music – in what country is he at present? My many Spanish friends in France, what is happening to them?109 109 Hours, 198.

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295

runs her hand along the Mathieu.

nancy When finally the war did end, it was impossible to find words for the atmosphere in Paris, the “new ways,” the emotion of it all! What had not died during the years of betrayal and defeat and passion and resurgence?110 And now I am faced with the shambles.111 NANCY

walks C.S. and surveys the ruin.

nancy I have raged. I have raged. And now I find there are only enemies. Enemies, enemies everywhere.

110 Adapted from Grand Man, 205. 111 Adapted from ibid., 206.

Conclusion

This book began as a series of impressions about modernist writing: that some materials invite staged interpretation, that these works gain in staged translation, that dramatized realization can create new perspectives and relationships with the writing. The project was developed with an awareness of a disciplinary moment: survival, in a very real sense, depends on making our research seen and valued beyond the groups modernist scholars have become accustomed to addressing. The project of creating dramas out of scholarly materials contains difficulties, not least of which are that biographical performances risk reducing the writer to the book, that narrative drama can tame the more radical elements of avant-gardism, that two-hour performances will always, inevitably, be selective and reductive. At the same time, all forms have their perils. On many counts, we as academics have become inured to the jeopardies of criticism and, consequently, to the dangers of public invisibility and increasing marginalization. Surely it is better to pursue our work through multiple forms, multiple jeopardies, but also through the multiple rewards resulting from mutually enriching forms that are also, to a certain extent, mutually corrective. If research theatre, insofar as it has been pursued here, has given illustrative strength to one hypothesis, it is this: broader audiences and research progress can be pursued simultaneously. Research-based performance, in which literary materials form the basis of the drama and communicating literary history is the major goal, is not, in the end, incompatible with performance-based research, where performance is a modality and methodology through which literary inquiry is undertaken. Sometimes these methods compete. My experience is that

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communicating literary history to broad general audiences through the research-based drama is often most effectively accomplished through a narrative relaying of auto/biographical writing in a way that is at once compelling and clear. Performance-based research, by contrast, often invites us to explore the outer limits of modernist writing through improvisations and multimedia explorations of avant-garde innovation: stream-of-consciousness, fragmentation, narrative resistance. There can be an uneasiness in accommodating one within the other. By and large, however, this tension is productive in pushing the drama to become something other than a cozy retelling. Here, rehearsal processes, through which the more radical modernist elements can be pursued by means of emotive exploration, physical enactment, multimedia realization, and interpretive play, are particularly important, for it is these elements of discovery that often make for the most effective moments of production. Within this book, three methods for dramatizing modernist structures and materials have been explored: auto/biographical quotation, auto-biographical quotation interlaced with a dramatization of the research environment, and quotation-based invention. As these descriptions imply, what is at play here is the balance between quotation and creation. Equally, the style and substance of the work of each individual writer create challenges and opportunities for both researchbased performance and performance-based research. In The Tree, using H.D.’s autobiographical novels, in particular, allowed her work to be showcased to new audiences. As H.D. writes consistently of her own development as a writer and the figures involved in this trajectory, it is possible to map out a modernist constellation that introduces audiences to important literary/cultural figures and their preoccupations. As H.D.’s novels tend to be serial and episodic, they can be used to illustrate a significant portion of her life, the evolution of her relationships with other modernists, and the development of her work. The difficulty in presenting this work as “autobiographical” is the way in which the characters are slippery avatars for the author herself. To a certain extent, this can be addressed in program notes and in the critical work around the play. Yet one must acknowledge the challenge, even while rehearsal and production create a series of opportunities for research gains on a variety of H.D. themes: the performance of

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gender and selfhood, the fissures in subjectivity as explored through solo performance, the repetitions common to H.D.’s work and the processes of rehearsal, theatricality and embodiment as they exist within H.D.’s prose, and the tension between personality and impersonality in the poetry. In all of these cases, a quotation-based script enables an exploration of the critical themes through an interpretation of the writing and a multimedia environment that permits us to inhabit H.D.’s aesthetics. The Mina Loy Interviews is also woven out of quotation, primarily the two documented interviews as well as published and unpublished autobiographical prose and some of Loy’s more life-reflective poetry. In this play, however, quotation is undercut by the narrative line in the archive, which at once realizes Loy’s view of “subconscious archives” as fundamental to literary production and provides an ironic underlay to the material presented in the drama in a way that is cohesive with Loy’s interest in undermining knowledge structures. Dramatization, in Loy, permits a double performativity: the performance of Loy’s highly unstable, performative self and also the aural and performative elements of her poetry, which gain substantially through vocalized and embodied delivery. The Loy interviews that give us such particular access to her performative style also, in a very real sense, press against the structures and momentum of drama – a gain that is also a presentational difficulty. As in The Tree, there are challenges in presenting autobiographical writing as transparently biographical. In working with Loy materials, this is to a certain extent mitigated through Loy’s own chameleon changes and the crosscutting that can be reflected through the mixed use of theatre and film. The presence of the archival scenes throughout the play, while they genuinely serve to show where research comes from and house an oral history of archival work, also illustrate the selective methods and imaginative identifications inherent in research itself. A dramatic method that seeks to present an author to a wider audience but also undoes the certainty of this knowledge is more theoretically accurate but also, in a very real sense, risks disrupting its own informational project. As a result, staged renditions need to be aware of the line between making audiences feel familiar with Loy and empathize with her as a character and maintaining the lack of certainty that is an important part of understand-

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ing her work. This, it seems to me, is a challenge characteristic of Loy, but also inherent in any quotation-based drama that also presents a self-reflexive portrait of its own making. A writer and activist like Nancy Cunard provides a particular opportunity to work at the intersection of literature and history. As a result, there is a documentary imperative in These Were the Hours that is brought into greater focus than in the other two plays through the use of historical materials and scenes, notably those involving the Spanish Civil War, British and American race relations, and the Second World War. It is interesting that, as a result, the play that is the most historically grounded is also the most imaginatively derived, in the sense that quotation is used more sparingly and invented dialogue is more liberally employed. This may seem like a slippery step and one that is not in keeping with the academic project that drives the book. At the same time, in thinking about dramatizing the lives and works of different authors it is important to realize two things: (1) not every author’s writing will translate directly to the stage even if it is a story worth telling, and (2) most extant, successful biographical dramatizations are imaginative elaborations of events. Cunard is an example of a writer whose work does not stage particularly well. Partly as a result of the public attention she at once courted and shunned, I suspect, her autobiographical prose is deliberately devoid of high emotion or even other people we can understand as characters. This realization about her writing arrived at the same time that a survey of successful literary biographical dramas highlighted the creative structures that largely govern this form. The result is that Cunard became an important case study for probing the ways more imaginative scenes can be linked to scholarly research – or, to put it another way, how academic research can give rise to an imaginative portrait that has a literary and historical foundation. The research-based performance gains of this play are fairly clear: These Were the Hours illustrates the intertwined nature of historical and aesthetic projects; it tells the story of an often unknown figure; it complicates the conventional history of race relations and the easy idea that people are either “tolerant” or “racist” when Cunard’s own interventions, at once courageous and often highly problematic, tell a very different tale. At the same time, the performance-based research benefits of this approach are substantial. From a disciplinary

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perspective, this form tests the limits of acceptance for a creative literary method. It asks how the historical and the biographical can best be intertwined and invites an understanding of how modernism’s heterotopic span can be represented and communicated. In terms of Cunard studies, more specifically, the imaginative method intervenes in a polarized critical environment by examining personal ambiguities and inconsistencies, explores the tension between spectacularity and autobiography in Cunard’s life and work, and examines the complicated and contradictory elements of Cunard’s activism within the context of her life and times. If modernist literary studies genuinely wants to find forms that resonate with audiences – and represent literary culture beyond writing that is immediately stage-transmissible – then researchinformed production is a competitive option. How should these plays be used? As I have argued, there is much to be gained from collaborating with theatre professionals. Actors will very often see new ways into the writing and bring it to imaginative life. In my experience, directors do their research and here, crucially, the literary and historical work to bring modernist worlds accurately and sensitively to the stage, with an eye to how the writing can be made three-dimensional. Set designers, lighting technicians, costume designers, and makeup artists have their own ways of making ideas visible, often in unexpected ways. All of these elements enliven the scripts and create new conversations about modernist lives, aesthetics, and writing. (While it was not undertaken here, one can also imagine how scholars and playwrights might collaborate, each bringing a skill set to the material.) At the same time, professional collaborations often involve time and money that too often are not available in the university setting. I would like to stress that this does not make these scripts unusable. For years I toured scenes from the H.D. play to academic conferences, classrooms, and community settings using only a chair and a bare stage – or the front of a classroom, or a lecture theatre. Similarly, I have filmed scenes from the Mina Loy play using only one actor, as the monologues alone can often be enough to open up an imaginative window in class. The plays are meant to be flexible. To this end, I would particularly encourage their use in classrooms, where readers’ theatre can help students gain familiarity with the writers and their contexts, raise questions, and generate debates that promote interest and further study.

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The plays can also act as models from which students might write their own dramas. In teaching several literature-based writing and performance courses at graduate and undergraduate levels, I have invited students to research, write, and perform their own plays. In turn, these students have generated dramas based on the lives and works of writers and artists including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Natalie Barney, Frida Kahlo, D.H. Lawrence, Morley Callaghan, Dora Maar, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, Hadley and Ernest Hemingway, Georgia O’Keeffe, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Nancy Cunard, and Ezra Pound, among others. Rather than fall into the biographical fallacy, students become invested in discussing its perils and most often create research-based work that sensitively examines modernism and its contexts in the plays and also in the required statements of intent. In my experience, students enjoy making something out of what they know, workshopping their plays as a group, and performing scenes. In contrast with courses with required essays, students rarely begrudge the research despite putting in substantially more work and effort than they might for more traditional assignments. It remains to be seen whether performance-based inquiry will become an accepted literary method. The advances of research-creation and the need for literary studies to reach beyond the academy are for it; traditional modes of academic assessment and a suspicion – as well as some of the practical challenges – of non-textual methodologies against. When scenes from these scripts are staged in academic settings, however, something happens that interests me: one modernist colleague, usually more, will always suggest an idea for another play.

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Index

Aldington, Richard, 28n18, 39, 40, 41, 44n4, 45, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79–83, 88–90, 93, 96, 215, 246, 255n59 anthropology, 6–7, 8, 27n5 anti-theatricality, 9, 31, 40–2 Aragon, Louis, 209, 211–24, 227–9, 235–40, 277, 294 archaeology, 7–8, 27n6 archives, 107, 111, 113–14, 115, 117n7, 298; archival work, 29, 114–15, 117n6, 298 arts-based inquiry, 4–8; in social sciences, 5–9 Asphodel (H.D.), 32, 36, 40 audience: accommodation for, 22, 24; engagement, 4–5, 6, 13–16, 19, 20–1, 26, 30, 42–3n1, 109, 115, 296–8, 300; feedback, 20, 35; interaction with, 6–7, 8, 109. See also spectacle Barnes, Djuna, 119, 175–8 Barney, Natalie, 106, 112, 163n65, 301 Bernstein, Charles, 112–13, 116–17n4

Bid Me to Live (H.D.), 36, 38–40, 42 biographical critique, 14 biographical drama, as genre, 14–19; examples of, 15–19, 27–8n12 Bird, Bill, 211–17, 229–32, 234, 287 Blackburn, Paul, 109, 111, 116n2, 118, 168–75, 185–92 Black Man and White Ladyship (Cunard), 197, 200, 257, 258n60 Brown, Bob, 119, 161 channelling, 23, 32 “Colossus” (Loy), 113, 152n52, 182 Conquergood, Dwight, 5–6, 14 Cravan, Arthur, 102, 111, 118, 147–9, 155–63, 168, 183, 184, 191 Cravens, Margaret, 71–3, 75–6, 78–9 Crowder, Henry, 201, 209, 240– 52, 257–62, 267–72, 278–9 Cunard, Nancy, 24–5, 209–95,

318 299–300; aesthetics, 204–5; autobiographical resistance, 204–5; debate surrounding, 196–7, 199– 201; and spectacle, 198, 199–200 Dadaism, 23, 25, 106, 108, 196. See also futurism; surrealism Dodge, Mabel, 119, 139, 141, 143 Doolittle, Charles, 45, 54, 56–7, 62, 79n91 Doolittle, Helen, 45, 52, 55, 79n91 Duchamp, Marcel, 108, 119, 147–9 Ellerman, Bryher, 28n18, 30, 36, 46, 93–5, 96–9, 101 embodiment, 4, 5, 12–14, 20, 22, 24, 25, 32, 35–6, 39, 107, 108, 109, 112, 201, 207, 298. See also materiality emotion, 12, 14, 16, 29, 37, 41, 116n4; divestment of, 203, 299; and drama, 8, 11, 19, 32, 201, 297 End to Torment (H.D.), 30, 31, 36, 38 fact vs fiction, 18–19, 21 fascism, 43n3, 196, 204, 206 feminism, 23, 196, 198; feminist studies, 15, 28n17. See also gender film, 20, 23, 107, 113–14, 198, 298, 300. See also multimedia Ford, Hugh, 205–6 Freud, Sigmund, 23, 28n18, 46, 99–100. See also psychoanalysis

Index futurism, 12, 23, 25, 106, 108. See also Dadaism; surrealism gender, 11, 23–4, 25, 106, 110; performance of, 30, 34–6, 297– 8; women’s autobiography, 23, 24, 25, 28n17, 42. See also feminism Goasgüen, Georgette, 209, 216, 220–1, 259–60, 289–91 Gray, Cecil, 92–3 Gregg, Frances, 35, 45, 60–2, 70, 96, 101 Haweis, Joella, 118, 138, 167n68, 168–9, 188–9 H.D., 24–5, 29–105, 297–8; and impersonality, 31–3, 42; and palimpsest, 33–4; performance of gender, 34–6; use of dramatic structures, 38–42 Hemingway, Ernest, 205, 209, 211n2, 229–32, 283, 285–9, 301 heterotopia, 198–9, 200, 205, 207 Heydt, Erich, 38, 46, 47–50, 68, 86 high modernism, 9, 23, 39–40, 41 Holmes Pearson, Norman, 36, 39 humanities: integrated with arts, 3–4, 6 humour, 109 Hyppolytus Temporizes (H.D.), 31, 40 impersonality, 9, 25, 30–3, 42, 298 Ker-Seymer, Barbara, 197, 200, 269–70

Index kinesis, 3–4, 7, 108 Lawrence, D.H., 39, 41, 46, 86–7, 88, 90–2, 96 Lawrence, Frieda, 39, 46, 87, 91, 92 layering, 17, 32–4, 107, 203–4; palimpsest, 29, 33–4, 197, 203 Löwy, Julia, 134–5 Löwy, Sigmund, 134–5 Loy, Mina, 118–208, 298–9; and the archive, 114–16; aural interpretation of, 111–13, 116n1; and the body, 108–9; and multimedia, 113–14; and performativity, 107–8, 109 Loy, Myrna, 114, 123n1, 165, 194 Man Ray, 197, 200, 223 Marinetti, Filippo, 12, 108, 119, 129, 140, 142–5 masks, 33, 44n5 materiality, 10, 11, 27n6, 32, 36, 40, 112, 115, 203–5. See also embodiment McAlmon, Robert, 28n18, 99n143, 106, 119, 175–80, 188, 209, 211n1, 229–32, 287 Mellon School of Theatre and Performance Research, 3, 26n1 multimedia, 20, 114, 119, 199, 297–8. See also film; sound narrative, 12, 20–1, 29–30, 37, 296–7 Negro Anthology (Cunard), 196, 199, 208nn1–2 Neruda, Pablo, 209, 274–83

319 non-linear time, 20, 33, 37, 42–3n1, 203 orality, 8, 9–10, 111–12, 114, 116n2, 116–17n4, 298 Papini, Giovanni, 119, 141, 144–5 “Parturition” (Loy), 108, 137 Patmore, Brigit, 36, 40, 45, 66–8, 69, 81, 82–3 performance-based research, 13, 30, 296, 299–300 performance and teaching, 113, 300–1 Picabia, Francis, 119, 147–8 Pound, Ezra, 12, 28n18, 30, 32, 35, 36, 39–40, 43n2, 43n3, 45, 48–58, 60, 61–2, 63–71, 73–5, 78–9, 95, 101, 103, 104, 109, 196, 203, 209, 210, 211n2, 232–35, 255, 286–87, 291 psychoanalysis, 23, 38, 107. See also Freud, Sigmund psychology, 8, 31, 201, 206 Puchner, Martin, 26n1, 27n10, 39–40 quotation-based drama, 18–19, 207, 297, 298 race, 11, 196–7, 199–202, 207, 208n1, 299 rehearsal process, 36–8, 297, 298 research-based performance, 11, 13, 296–7, 299 Roach, Joseph, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 26nn2–3 Ruhl, Sarah, 18–19

320 satire, 107–8 science: methodologies, 3, 5, 26–7n4; social sciences, 5, 6, 7, 27n5 Schechner, Richard, 6–7, 27n5 Scottsboro Boys, 200, 201–2, 264–7 Second World War, 41, 204, 299 sexuality, 23, 30, 35–6, 111, 208 solo performance, 30, 34–6, 298 “Songs to Joannes” (Loy), 107, 108, 132, 174 sound, 8, 19, 44n5, 111–13, 116n2, 116–17n4, 197; music, 12, 113, 197, 202, 208n1; soundscape, 33, 198. See also multimedia Spanish Civil War, 25, 196, 200, 203, 204, 299 spectacle, 23, 197–8, 201, 207. See also audience speculative drama, 207, 299 staging, 11–12, 20, 22–3, 25, 34, 110–11, 115, 116n3; the self, 23, 108

Index Stein, Gertrude, 119, 139–40 surrealism, 25, 196, 200, 203. See also Dadaism; futurism teaching, 3, 113, 117n5, 300–1 technology, 7, 112, 114 Vas Dias, Robert, 109, 111, 116n2, 168n69 Victorianism, 16, 25, 41–2, 106, 233n34 “Widow’s Jazz, The” (Loy), 107, 112–13, 163 Williams, William Carlos, 51, 52n19, 52n22, 55, 105n162, 119, 180n84 World Performance Project, 3–4, 8 Yorke, Arabella, 39, 40, 41, 46, 83, 99, 91, 93