February 10,1997 The Nation.

29

for Isherwood was something purely ex- is struck many times, countered nearly al- a month or so the relationship is already
ternal. His friendly associate John van ways by smiling recollection of the swanii in place, and he lets its long-term success
Druten turned the Berlin Stories into a as well as his relationship with Don Ba- do the justifymg. The diary concludes in
successful play called I Am a Camera. chardy, which began in 1953 and lasted a fairly rosy sunset glow, with Isherwood
Play became movie and Broadway musi- until Isherwood‘s death in 1986. The story writing novels and screenplays,host to the
cal, its ultimate avatar the brash, boffo of how they managed to overcome enor- talented and famous, with not too many
Cabaret. Isherwood had next to nothing mous differences-in age, nationality, ex- dark corners in the background-more
to do with all this, but it’s clear the at- perience and vocation-is touching, even lions than shadows, in short, with the dia-
tention and improved bank account gave though Isherwood is apparently not able, rist himself the central lion, weighing the
him new confidence. When we consider at the age of 48, to write, “I’ve just started truth and falsehood of the MGM motto:
the achievement of his later years, espe- an affair with someone who is 18.” Within Ars Gratia Artis. ‘ D
cially his brilliant gay novel A Single Man,
we can’t help joining in the chorus with
Sally Bowles.
The critic Earl Miner has noted that the
archetypalhero in Japanese literature is the
.PornographicDickinson
diarist, not the world-beater our aggressive HARRIET ZINNES
West prefers. The theory would point to
one more affinity between Isherwood and BECOMING MODERN: The life of Mina Log.
Asia; in some ways he is at his most “hero- By Carolyn Burke. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 493 pp. $35.
ic” (unflinching and fully conscious of his THE LOST LUNAR BAEDEKER: Poems of Mma by.
literary powers) when the pen is poised Edited by Roger L. Conover. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 236 pp. $22.
above the day’s receptive page. He dashes
off scores of brilliant th-bnail sketches of
the people he knows, and among the recur-
hat poet and painter, born in England in 1882 and dying in Aspen, Col-
rent pleasures here is the rendering of what orado, in 1966, could be called a Futurist, Dadaist, Surrealist, feminist,
Virginia Woolf called “the lives of the ob- conceptualist,modefist and postmodernist? Only Mina Loy. And she was
s ~ u r epeople
, ~ ~ who, if the diarist hadn’t de-
scribed them, would have been consigned also an internationalist, a fashion designer, a creator of lampshades, a
to near-total oblivion.Isherwoodisjust the collector of Bowery detritus and trash, a word of hers). And how ironic that this ele-
opposite of the careerist who avoids being constructor of “objects’~from such trash, gant elitist should have lived out her finan-
seen in the company of the unfamous, for a playwright, a composer of manifestoes, a cially difficult later years on the Bowery,
fear of contracting obscurity. satirist, a writer on sex and its discontents where Duchamp, Djuna Barnes, Berenice
Take, for example,the pages devoted to and a survivorof two husbands (one was the Abbott and Cornel1 would occasionally
Pete Martinez, a Mexican-Americanballet poet-boxer Arthur Craven) and such lovers visit her.
dancer not quite good enough to make it as the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. This legendary life in the art centers of
as a principal, who utterly charms Isher- Daughter of Sigmund Lowy, a Hungarian Paris, Berlin, Florence andNew York in the
wood-and, in fact, everyone he meets. Jew, and the Evangelical Julia Bryan- early decades of this century is described
You keep asking yourself, Why couldn’t Loy’s “mi~ed‘~ parentage led to the 1925 in great detail, with w o n d e a photographs,
they fall in love? They don’t; but, when he autobiographicalpoem “Anglo-Mongrels in Carolyn Burke’s fine biography,Becom-
escapes from Caskey, he knows he’s had a and the Rose”-she was an astonishingly ingModern. Add an excellentnew edition
close call. A nicely done vignette of Auden beautiful intellectual praised esirly on by of Loy’s poems, The Lost Lunar Baedeker,
and Chester Kallman, whom he runs into Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos edited by Roger L. Conover, that includes
by chance in Paris in 1948, hints at an en- Williams,Basil Bunting and Kenneth Rex- concise analytical and biographicalnotes,
tombment in joint dependency that Isher- roth, and later by Thomas Merton and Rob- and a rounded picture emerges of that very
wood hopes to elude: ert Creeley-as well as admired and feared complicated New Woman whom Edward
We sat together this morning on the by Marianne Moore. Dahlberg called one of modern poetry’s
boulevard in the sunshine, and sudden- This painter and collagist was also a “tutelary Muses.”
ly it was like a scene from Chelchov. friend of Marcel Duchamp, the creator of Loy’s poetry has been called difficult,
I thought: “Here we are, just two old ready-mades (through whose efforts she ,even “pure pornography” by, appropriate-
bags-and only a moment ago, it seems, received the Copley Foundation Award ly, Amy Lowell, but it has also been de-
we were boys, talking about our careers. for Outstanding Achievement in Art),and scribed as the work of a modern Emily
Like Truman and Gore. How sad.” of the artist Joseph Cornell. Though her Dickinson-and by the poet herself as
Wystan still fusses and rags anxiously poems appearedin a variety of avant-garde “the best since Sappho.” What makes the
at Chester, and screws up his eyebrows magazines, she published only two books poems difficult and non-canonical is not
when he fears that Chester will say or duringher lifetimeand essentiallyvanished her emphasis on sex-depicted not as ro-
do something tiresome or upsetting,to from the scene until the very recent ac- mantic or indulgent but as duplicitous, as
. his plans. Chester teases him,of course. knowledgment of her “genius” (a favorite symbolic of a wavering and ambiguous in-
But, watching them, you feel: “They’re tent-but her language’s fragmentedstruc-
Harriet Zinnes, professor emerita of English ture, derived in part from Loy’s involve-
together, now, till the end.”
at Queens College, has recentlypublishedher ment with the Futurists. But she also said
Something ominous in that “the end,” and seventh voliiine of poems, My, Haven’t the with cocksuremockery in 1927that she was
as the years roll on the lacrimae rerum note Flowers Been? (Magic Circle). trying “to make a foreign language.. .be-
30 The Nation. Febmary 10,1997
cause English had already been used.” page. Her details are visual, and what she Secretaryfor agriculture,living in Moscow;
Her poems were also influenced by Ger- sees is not for the innocent. Consider the by 1980, a fill member of the Central Com-
trude Stein, whom she met through the following passages from her poem “Photo mittee’s policy-making Politburo.

1
Dadaist Mabel Dodge. Consider this very After Pogrom”:
Steinian stanza from Loy’s famous “Love long the way he acquired what was for
Songs” (1923), with its staccato wordplay Arrangement by rage
his generation a characteristic reform
and witty sexual metaphors: of human rubble.. .. outlook. In Stavropol in 1956 he had
Shuttle-cock and battle-door Tossed on a pile of dead, access to a still-secret document con-
A little pink-love one woman, taining the substance of Khri.shchev’s
And feathers are strewn her body hacked to utter beauty condemnation of Stalin for, above all, his
oddly by murder, anti-Communistterror of the thirties. The
Loy’s languageis often contrived,heavy motto of Khrushchev’s reformism, “back
with neologisms, nonsense words, words attains the absolute smile to the path of Lenin,” connoted a revival
that sound pretentious with their scientific of dispossession.. .. of party rule that had been eclipsed by
or philosophic importations. In fact, her Stalin’s police-based personal despotism.
words at times seem almost translations the purposeless peace
sealing the faces
Unlike other party-state functionarieswho
from an unknown tongue, and this effect were upset by the secret speech, Gorbachev
may have been her intent. Yet her Modern- of corpses-
reacted positively. For him, as for a few
ism delights. She displaced grammar,mud- Corpses are virgin. other well-educated figures who became
dled syntax, avoided transitions and punc- known as “children of the Twentieth Con-
tuation, specialized in silent open spaces Though Mina Loy was hardly political, gress,” the condemnation of Stalin was a
and employed collage. She was often bril- she had lived through two wars. Her views watershed event.
liantly epigrammatic.Her disclosures have were not “virgin.” Nor was her life. Nor is But we do not learn from the Memoirs
a satiric thrust; her wit is sharp on the her work. how Khrushchev’s speech shaped Gorba-
chev’s outlook as a would-be reformer.
Once in power he returned to Khrush-
Comrade chev’s anti-Stah, back-to-Leninthemeand
drew on Lenin’s final writings (in which
Lenin espoused a nonrevolutionary, re-
ROBERT C. TUCKER formist, gradualist approach to building a
cooperative form of socialism in Russia).
MEMOIRS. By m a i l Gorbachev. Doubleday. 769 pp. $35. Now, however, he is critical of Khrush-
chev, attacking the secret speech for being
istory has not been kind to the few Russian rulers who set out to reform their devoid of analysis and excess&ely sub-
jective. “TOperceive the tragic events in
autocratic state system. Alexander 11,who sponsored a measure of glasnost Soviet history as the result of Stalin’s
on taking power in ‘1855and emancipated Russia’s serfs by royal decree, ‘evil’ nature is a fundamental mistake,”
he tells us. “Khrushchev had no intention
was murdered by a member of a revolutionary group that had emerged of analyzing systematically the roots of
in the new atmosphere of freedom. Nikita sian Stavropol Territory, where as a teen- totalitarianism. He was probably not even
Khrushchev, who opened the way for So- ager in the postwar fortieshe learned to op- capable of doing so.’’
viet refoqs with his denunciationof Stalin erate a combine, Gorbachev early showed ’ We do learn from the Memoirs, how-
in 1956, was ousted by a palace coup. the desire to set things right in a society ever, that as a local party functionary in
And Milhail Gorbachev was driven from where they were mostly very wrong. From the seventies Gorbachev saw for himself
the Kremlin in 1991 by Boris Yeltsin’s the outset Mikhail Gorbachev was Com- that the Soviet system was in deep crisis
crude expedient of abolishing the Soviet rade Fix-It. under the conservative rule of Leonid
Union, whose president Gorbachevhad be- After graduating in law from Moscow Brezhnev. “The super-centralizedattempt
come. Then the reform process gave way Universityin 1955,hereturnedto Stavropol to control every single detail of life in an
to attempted revolution. to work as a party official.Travelingaround immense state sapped the vital energies of
This English version of Gorbachev’s the territory invarious official capacities,he society,’, he says, and he wondered.“Why
Memoirs, just passably translated, gives was struck by the desolation of village life was our system so unresponsiveto renewal
his side of the story. About 500pages short- and the arrogantways of local functionaries and itmovation?” Later he found himself
er than.the original, which came out in indifferent to the misery around them. But in a Politburo “in total disarray,”’where
1995, it is a generally revealing account this he confided only in letters to his wife, some meetings lasted no longer than fifteen
of a political life that changed Russia and Raisa, meanwhile recommending himself or twenty minutes “so as not to weary’, the
the world. ’ to higher-ups by his energetic devotion to aged and ailing Brezhnev.
Of peasant origin from the south Rus- work and loyalty to the existing system. By March 1985 Gorbachev had some
Indeed, Gorbachev’s rise was truly spec- suspicious ill-wishers in high circles. But
Robert C. Tucker is professor eweritus ofpoli- tacular. By 1961hewas first secretaryofthe after ‘some backstage wrangling the Polit-
tics at Princeton Universiv. His niost recent territory’sKomsomol Committee; by 1970, buro unanimouslychose bim to succeedthe
book are Political Culture and Leadership in first secretary of its party committee, the emphysematous Konstantin Chernenko.
Soviet Russia: FromLenin to Gorbachev (Nor- equivalent (as he points out) of a czarist (The Politburo was influenced by regional
ton) and Stalinin Power: The Revolution From governor; by 1971,a member of the Central party bosses, who were determined,Gorba-
Above, 1928-1941 (Norton). Committee; by 1978, Central Committee chev tells us, not to let itjuggle another old,