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LOY, from page 1
Financially, Stephen was completely dependent on Mina, an additional dependence that kept them married for years beyond any real relationship. Mina gave birth to their first child, Oda Janet, in 1904, but she died of meningitis two days after her first birthday. After her death Mina stayed up all night completing The Wooden Madonna, a painting now lost. Upon its completion Mina became increasingly ill, possibly suffering a nervous breakdown.
During the years Mina and Stephen spent in Paris, Mina met many emerging modernist artists and writers. Among them were Gertrude and Leo Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, and Auguste Rodin, whose sculptures Stephen photographed. Then when Mina was twenty-three, her marriage a façade held together by the monthly allowance her father sent, she and Stephen moved to Florence, Italy. Here Mina continued to paint and to exhibit her work in England as well as Italy. It was these years in Florence that marked her emergence as a modern poet.
Personally, however, they were not easy years. Two more children were born, Joella in 1907 and Giles in 1909. That same year Joella became ill, and Mina fearing she would lose another child, turned to Christian Science for help. She would continue an association with this group for the rest of her life. Financial worries and continued marital unhappiness took their toll on Mina, and she was often ill. Despite these personal trials, though, the Haweisis were friends with a growing Anglo-American community in Florence including Muriel and Paul Draper and Mabel Dodge (Luhan). Additionally, the Italian Futurists Mina met were a great inspiration to her poetry. Two who were prominently in her life were F. T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini. Both would also become her lovers after her separation from Stephen when he de
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parted for the South Seas in 1913, although she was not able to finally obtain a divorce from him until 1917 in New York.
At the beginning of World War I Mina was swept up in the futurists' war fever, and she worked a stint as a nurse in a surgical hospital. However, by 1915, Mina's interests had shifted to New York. Her poetry was already appearing in American publications, and Mina was thinking of ways to make a living in the United States. In October of 1916, she left her children in the care of a nurse and sailed for New York. Upon her arrival the New York Evening Sun declared her the "modern woman," and she was quickly accepted into the ever-changing circle of American and expatriate poets and artists of the day.
She starred with William Carlos Williams and William Zorach in an experimental play by Kreymborg, Lima Beans, and in 1917, when Maracel Duchamp's ready-made sculpture, a urinal, was not accepted at the New York Independents Exhibition, Mina joined Duchamp and other budding Dadaists to publish the Blind Man.
It was during this time in New York that Mina finally met the man destined be her great love as well as one of her greatest personal tragedies. The man was Arthur Cravan (born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd), boxer and nephew of Oscar Wilde.
Not content to flount bourgeois manners, Cravan was also eager to take on the avant-garde. He had welcomed the Futurists to prewar Paris. …By the following year, however, Cravan was preparing to one-up the Italians, at least where satorial innovation was concerned. He regularly accompanied the poet Blaise Cendrars and the painter Robert Delaunay to the Bal Bullier, where this avant-garde trio could be seen dancing the tango in costumes painted the colors of
See LOY, Page 8
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