The Quiet Before, page 8
Marinetti’s “Manifesto Against Past-Loving Venice” was a perfect example of just how bombastic these documents could be. He introduced it in 1910 by climbing with his friends to the top of the clock tower over the Piazza San Marco and raining down thousands of copies on the tourists below as they returned from the Lido at dusk. The Futurists’ hatred of the city was florid. “Let us hasten to fill in its little reeking canals with the shards of its leprous, crumbling palaces,” the manifesto read, topping itself with every sentence. “Let us burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for cretins, and then raise to the heavens the imposing geometry of metal bridges and howitzers plumed with smoke, to abolish the falling curves of the old architecture.” A few months later, Marinetti returned to Venice for a serata at the Teatro La Fenice, and this time he went even further, reading from another manifesto in which he called the Venetians themselves prostitutes, their lives good only for servicing tourists as guides and hotel waiters. If they could not contribute to the glory of Italy’s future, he told the crowd, “you should throw yourselves down, one on top of the other, like sandbags, to make a dike at the outer limits of the Lagoon, while we prepare a great, strong, industrial, commercial and military Venice on the Adriatic, our great Italian lake.”
These abhorrent flights of fancy and the belligerent tone fit within the bounds of this medium, but the manifestos also absolved the Futurists of responsibility. They were able to profess their brutal thoughts and claim it was just art—and in fact the manifestos themselves remain the most distinct aesthetic legacy of the entire movement. But they also put these ideas into circulation, the swaggering words fueling a swaggering feeling that the world could be dragged, kicking and bloody, into the future. Offering some advice about “the art of making manifestos,” Marinetti said they required “violence and precision.” They must be clear and accessible—an explicit series of steps for arriving at implausible futures—but also capable, at the same time, of prodding and irritating their audience, of driving them off a cliff.
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MINA COULDN’T LOOK AWAY. The Futurists had ignited something within her. But the misogyny of “the bombastic superman,” as she called Marinetti, continued to bother her. When she confronted him about his “scorn” for women, he claimed that he rejected the binary categories of femme fatale and Madonna that were thrust onto them, and men in relation to them. It was not individual women who bothered him but women “as the divine reservoir of Amore.”
She didn’t buy it. There was something about the way he casually juggled these dangerous beliefs that suggested immaturity: boys tinkering with toy soldiers while rolling their eyes at the girls. “I am in the throes of a conversion to Futurism,” she wrote to her friend. “But I shall never convince myself. There is no hope in any system that ‘combat le mal avec le mal,’ that fights evil with evil. And that is really Marinetti’s philosophy—though he is one of the most satisfying personalities I have ever come in contact with.” Satisfying and apparently irresistible, since Mina soon began a playful affair with him in the fall of 1913 shortly after they met—“his tactile adroitness equalled his conversational celerity,” she wrote in a roman à clef about her time on the edges of the movement, giving Marinetti the elaborate pseudonym Brontolivido and, most tellingly, changing “Futurists” to “Flabbergasts.”
She had been in Florence for five years, a long stretch in a life that had been peripatetic ever since her escape from England at eighteen. Her father was a Jewish Hungarian immigrant who worked as a tailor, and her mother was a working-class Englishwoman who, ashamed of her husband’s religion, tried to hide it for most of her life. Mina was born with the last name Lowy, unmistakably Jewish, which she changed to Loy when presenting her paintings for the first time in Paris. Her parents wanted her to marry respectably and lift the family into the middle class. This was the extent of their hopes for her. But Mina had other plans and used her painting as a way to gain distance from the stifling environment at home, attending art school, first in London, then in Munich, and finally in Paris, where she was drawn into a community of eccentric artists and thinkers, including Gertrude Stein. In 1903, she married Stephen Haweis, an English painter and photographer, but the relationship curdled after Mina’s first child, a daughter, died of meningitis two days after her first birthday. They each took lovers, and she got pregnant again, but not by her husband. She was overwhelmed by grief and a tormenting self-pity that felt, she wrote, like “some terrible Golem of doom shattering my aspirations.”
Mina would have divorced Haweis, but that path was closed to her. Her main source of income came from her father, who made her promise that in exchange for the money she would maintain a stable marriage. It was in 1907 that the couple moved to Florence in an attempt to revive their relationship, joining the expatriate community and art scene then flourishing in the Tuscan city. It would at least be warm there. They did reach a bitter détente for a few years and even had another child together. But Haweis decided at the end of 1912 that he was restless, and he soon sailed for Australia, leaving Mina and the two children in a large villa in the Costa San Giorgio neighborhood, just across the river Arno from the city center, struggling to find her artistic footing again.
But now, in the presence of Marinetti, who, following the rousing serata in the Teatro Verdi, visited Florence frequently to see her as 1913 turned into 1914, she began to feel her creative energy return. It was no longer painting that called to her but the manifestos. She too wanted a medium that would allow her to reinvent herself. And if these men could help shape their movement through the back-and-forth of these declarations, why shouldn’t she take part as well?
Marinetti had left for part of that winter on a trip to Russia to meet artists intrigued by the manifestos and serate, eventually launching what would become a Russian arm of Futurism (made up of painters like Kazimir Malevich and poets like Vladimir Mayakovsky, some of whom would soon produce their own founding manifesto, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”). Mina found a way to continue her intellectual wrestling with Marinetti and with the parts of Futurism that repelled her. She too wrote a manifesto, entering the imaginative space that had been opened up by the men. It was an unusual choice for someone who had always seen herself as a visual artist. The risorgimento was also turning her into a writer and a poet, and the manifesto she produced in January 1914 would be her first published work, soon appearing in America in a small journal, Camera Work, run by the photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz.
What immediately stands out about Mina’s “Aphorisms on Futurism” is how much more personal and self-affirming it is than other manifestos; instead of devising a despised “they” (as in, “we are of the future, but they are stuck in the past”), Mina is addressing a “you,” which could easily be imagined as her own conscience or, perhaps, women in general. There is much less “precision” in these sometimes cryptic lines and certainly less “violence,” but she is attempting to use the tropes of the movement, the spirit of the other manifestos, toward a new end: self-liberation. Though it begins with a sentiment that aligns her with Marinetti—“DIE in the Past / Live in the Future”—she moves into a deeper register. She is fixated on the problem of living in good faith, trusting one’s feelings, and not being hampered by social and cultural conventions. It’s a Futurist theme—cracking the shell to get to the yolk of authentic experience—but she’s applying it much more sharply to her own existence as a woman. “LIFE is only limited by our prejudices,” she writes. “Destroy them, and you cease to be at the mercy of yourself.” The manifesto demands changes not from some external force but from an internal one, the “you” she addresses. Clear out the “fallow-lands of mental spatiality” in order to make “place for whatever you are brave enough, beautiful enough to draw out of the realized self. / TO your blushing we shout the obscenities, we scream the blasphemies, that you, being weak, whisper alone in the dark.”
Who is this weak, whispering being she is addressing? This is not the collective, assertive voice of the other manifestos. This is unmistakably a woman struggling with questions the men aren’t asking themselves, about whether they are mentally prepared to be new people in a new world. She is suggesting a shift, from the annihilating spirit that wants to smash all the physical surfaces—all those doomed libraries and museums—and toward a psychological reckoning, dismantling past attitudes and certainties. She cannot march alongside the Futurists to level cities or prove herself in war. But if the struggle is an inward one, a question of conquering oneself, that is a battle she can join. Mina ends by returning to the mode in which she started, a demand to “ACCEPT the tremendous truth of Futurism,” a truth she has just reinterpreted for herself through her own manifesto. “Leaving all those / Knick-knacks.”
Mina was not the first woman to use a manifesto to try to edge her way into the movement. Valentine de Saint-Point was a French poet and artist at the center of Parisian salon society—a model and muse for Rodin and an experimental dancer—who often appeared in extravagant costumes that included high-necked beaded bodices and elaborate ostrich-feather headdresses. Not long after Marinetti’s initial manifesto, she wrote her “Manifesto of the Futurist Woman,” which opened by directly responding to his “scorn”: “Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. They are all equal. They all merit the same scorn.” She rejected the notion that masculinity and femininity resided respectively in men and women. Everyone had both of these qualities, and everyone needed more masculinity. “What is most lacking in women as in men is virility. That is why Futurism, even with all its exaggerations, is right. To restore some virility to our races so benumbed in femininity, we have to train them in virility even to the point of brute animality. But we have to impose on everyone, men and women who are equally weak, a new dogma of energy in order to arrive at a period of superior humanity.” The nudge her manifesto hoped to provide Futurism was, in the end, an affirmation of its basic assumptions and mode as set by Marinetti; she just wanted it applied equally to women—“let woman find once more her cruelty and her violence that make her attack the vanquished because they are vanquished, to the point of mutilating them.”
Mina took a different tack. In her manifesto she removed from Futurism its most troubling illiberal, antihumanistic aspects. In a way she intuited what Marshall Berman, the cultural historian, would later see as the danger of an ideology that perceived modernity as a relentless and cleansing wave. “What happens to all the people who get swept away in those tides?” Berman asked. “Their experience is nowhere in the Futurist picture. It appears that some very important kinds of human feeling are dying, even as machines are coming to life.” Mina’s manifesto was her attempt to bring human feeling back into the movement, into its purpose, turning it away from a death cult and emphasizing all that was life-affirming in what the Futurists were saying—what it could mean for a woman if the old societal conventions were obliterated.
Did “Aphorisms on Futurism” make her a Futurist? In a way, yes. By writing her own manifesto, she had entered into a conversation with the others. But she still had to contend with domineering men who would not easily alter their thinking. For them, modernity would be achieved by making themselves harder, by taking apart the material world around them, and not, as she had suggested, by scrutinizing their preconceptions and value systems.
She was hopeful, though, about Papini, the subdued and self-conscious Florentine intellectual at the center of the movement, and she was also fascinated by his face, which he allowed her to paint in the winter of 1914. “His mass of curly light brown hair shot up from the deeply lined enormous forehead in a tall surprise,” she wrote in her notes. His mouth seemed to belong to “an impertinent gamin.” Their flirtation proceeded much more quietly (and Mina thought, deeply) than her ongoing affair with Marinetti. Papini’s memoir, The Failure, revealed a prodigiously intelligent man who nevertheless struggled to come to terms with his own “concreteness,” with the limitations of his class and his strange looks. In Papini, Mina recognized her own dilemma. She too felt pulled between a drive for greatness and a frustration with her lived existence as a woman. Papini also seemed, at heart, much less doctrinaire than his Futurist comrades. Like Mina, he was more interested in how manifestos could allow you to test propositions, squeeze and pinch reality, and less in how they could produce directives. It was possible, from a distance, to hear only shouting in the manifestos, but closer up and looked at as an ongoing exchange, they revealed a working out of ideas, a sense of process. And it was this unfinished quality that appealed most to Papini; as he wrote in the opening manifesto of Lacerba, the journal he started in 1913, he preferred “the sketch over the composition, the potsherd over the statue, the aphorism over the treatise.”
She saw in him a possible ally. But Papini, cerebral and distant and envious of Marinetti’s charm and hold on the movement, would disappoint her, personally and ideologically. For all his philosophizing, Papini was so obsessed with Marinetti and so competitive that he lunged toward extremes, behaving impetuously, often in self-defeating ways. Just at the moment when Mina began an impassioned relationship with him, Papini retreated to Paris. In a poem she would later write, “Songs to Joannes,” Marinetti appears as “a boy”; Papini is “a haloed ascetic” but too preoccupied with the other man to recognize her love. At the very moment he left, in March 1914, Marinetti steamed in, inviting Mina on a trip to Rome for the opening of a Futurist art gallery that would feature one of her paintings—a portrait of him, Marinetti. “His proximity was in a manner thermal,” she wrote about the mustachioed dynamo. “Raw” from her “aborted love” for Papini, “she felt the salutary jar of being lifted up and let down.” She was willing to give in to that “liveness of his.”
At the gallery, Mina presented herself as a Futurist for the first time, mingling with the others who all hung on Marinetti’s every word. At one point the conversation turned to Papini and a recent essay he had written for Lacerba, one that Mina was trying hard to pretend did not exist. It was a vicious, almost homicidal, attack on women, one she could not reconcile with the man she had started to fall in love with. Titled “The Massacre of Women,” the article was clearly Papini’s effort to outdo Marinetti: “Women must disappear. It is useless, my Futurist friends, to preach scorn for women if we then continue to live together. Living together, one can hardly avoid loving them—and loving them, one can hardly avoid serving them—and serving them, we are cowards, the betrayers of our true destiny.”
Standing before his acolytes in Rome, Marinetti took the opportunity to publicly attack Papini (who he guessed by now was vying for Mina’s affections). The other man’s ugliness, Marinetti announced, was such that “it is a physical commotion to sit in the same room with it.” He then turned, perhaps for Mina’s benefit, to the subject of the article. “A woman,” Marinetti said, “is a wonderful animal, and when I put into print any part of her body I choose, it is in purest appreciation.” He enjoyed women, he said. Why should he be able to describe everything that gives him pleasure, except “a vagina, which gives me infinitely more,” he said, stunning the room. “This is a beautiful word.”
Mina couldn’t help but be impressed by how little Marinetti cared about conventions or propriety in that moment. In her own manifesto, Mina was desperate for such “obscenities” to be shouted and not whispered, and that’s what Marinetti was doing. “He had said one word—distinctly, unaffectedly; and it had crashed down the barriers of prudery,” she later wrote, examining the evening. “Such primordial pokes of simplicity might redirect the universe”—and perhaps the goals of Futurism as well. But, then again, he had also crudely reduced women to their body parts, their ability to satisfy his desires. There was no real reason to think the supermen would make room for her.
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AND THEN, ALL OF A SUDDEN, in the summer of 1914, the work of defining Futurism’s true aim became moot. War, a real war, had arrived. Bloodshed had featured in Futurist manifestos from the very first. If war came, they would approach it “dancing and singing,” Marinetti wrote. In war there would be an opportunity for renewal, for regeneration, for the kind of chaos where men could prove themselves and achieve glory: an “apocalyptic transition,” as one manifesto described it. Blood was invoked so often that it barely seemed to refer to what actually flowed through human bodies. In 1913, Papini wrote, without any sense of irony, that “blood is the wine of strong peoples; blood is the oil for the wheels of this enormous machine that is flying from the past into the future—because the future quickly becomes the past. Without the sacrifice of many men, humanity will go backward; without a holocaust of lives, death will defeat us.”
When a European-wide war broke out in August, drawing in every major country from Russia to France, the Futurists felt history had finally shown up. The abstract became real. And their persistent argument about the redemptive power of war turned them overnight into Italy’s leading voice for intervention. More manifestos followed and now dropped the pretense of being just about art. “Only war knows how to rejuvenate, accelerate and sharpen human intelligence, to make more joyful and air the nerves, to liberate us from the weight of daily burdens, to give savor to life, and talent to imbeciles,” Marinetti wrote in a manifesto directed at students a few months after the guns of August.
