Essay from The Literary Review

"She Strips Naked": The Poetry of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Irene Gammel

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is to me the naked oriental making solemn gestures of indecency in the sex dance of her religion. Her ecstasy, to my way of thinking, is one of the properties of art" (Scott, 48). So wrote the American author and critic Evelyn Scott about a poet who gave New Yorkers something to talk about during the early days of the century. An androgynous woman in her forties, "lithe in figure, and as graceful as a leopard," as The New York Times described her in 1915, she was a radical gender-bender and whip-lashing dominatrix in the world of art and poetry ("Refugee Baroness"). In New York's artist circles she was known as "the Baroness."
     Born Else Hildegard Plötz in 1874 in the small seaport town of Swinemünde, Germany, she had escaped her bourgeois home at age 18 and absorbed expressionism and Jugendstil in the avantgarde circles of Berlin and Munich. She acquired her name and title by marrying the financially bankrupt Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven in Manhattan in 1913. It was her third marriage. In New York she earned her money by posing as a model in the Arts Student League, the Modern Art School, and the Lincoln Arcade. She also painted pictures and made sculptures. Yet it was the erotically charged body art of the Baroness that truly stunned her contemporaries. Adorned with everyday objects---a bra made of tomato cans, celluloid curtain rings covering her arms as bracelets, a blinking battery taillight on the bustle of her dress, a whip-like device called Limbswish worn on her hip like a cowboy might wear his Colt revolver---thus adorned with her art objects she created a memorable spectacle as she promenaded along Park Street and Fifth Avenue. She was an early performance artist who had chosen the streets and the salons for her art. Tales about her wild costumes proliferated. In one of the most talked about performances she shaved off her hair, lacquered her bald head vermilion and showcased her Dada by flashing her nude body in the offices of The Little Review; "It's better when I'm nude", she said, as she stripped off her robe (Anderson, 211), just as in the poem "She" an exhibitionist moon performs a strip-tease for the reader.
     The Baroness had arrived in New York just as Europe's exiled artists were claiming the city as their new cultural metropolis during World War I. It was the era of New York Dada (1915-1923), a wild movement in art and poetry, born of the turmoil of the war. American and international poets, painters, and photographers were experimenting with radically new forms. The most impressive risk-taker was the Baroness, who made her publishing debut in New York's avantgarde literary magazine, The Little Review in 1918. "Her verse represented a far more radical revolt against reality than [August] Stramm or Kurt Schwitters or Tristan Tzara," writes the American poet Kenneth Rexroth in his study American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (77).
     Her poetry was a wild dance of the senses. Written in English and German, it was charged with libidinal images and provocative barbs far more aggressive than the gender disruptions of Edna Saint Vincent Millay, Djuna Barnes, Dorothy Parker, and Mina Loy. In the German poem "Analytische Chemie der Frucht," "Analytical Chemistry of Progeny", the high-strung Baroness reflects on the genesis of her Dada spirit. Her bold use of obscenity, blasphemy, and scatology was a legacy from her father. The tensions of her early home life, her parents' "marriage manure" had produced a stunning Dada personality who embodied the movement's spirit of paradox, "Genius - idiocy - filth - purity", all in one person.
     America's young poets William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and Ezra Pound watched her with ambivalent excitement. For the Baroness raised the bar in experimentation. She slashed the English syntax, dispensed with sentences and used word columns for onomatopoeic sound effects and flexible meaning. She dealt a death blow to the old, comatose language to create a new chemistry with remarkable word creations like "wombcrucible" and "phalluspistol". Like the Paris dadaist Tristan Tzara she used mock-mathematical equations as in "Cosmic Chemistry" ("Life = 1 damn thing after another") to poke fun at traditional logic. In her correspondence with Djuna Barnes, she called for a new punctuation system that would allow her to express emotions in "joymarks"; she liberally used dashes and exclamation marks. In the modern machine age she exalted the sensual body in poetry and art.
     The avantgarde circles in Munich at the turn of the century had celebrated Eros as central to art. Elsa's first husband, August Endell, a renowned Jugendstil architect, theorized art in terms of a Lustgefühl; the Baroness carried this principle of ecstasy in art to America. In "Gewitter", "Thunder and Lightning", orgasmic intensity is condensed in the picture of her lover's face as a "drunken flower". The reference to orgasm also recurs in "Cosmic Chemistry" ("Lethe/ Orgasmic/ Transition Coma") and in "Lullaby", which begins: "Ultimate/ Orgasm/ Supreme". Since age eighteen, her life had been a wild sexual odyssey, but it wasn't until she was twenty-eight that she experienced her first orgasm. In her personal writings she insisted on women's "sex-rights", that is, their right not just to sexual freedom but to sexual pleasure, which was a world of difference in the Baroness's life.
     Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, co-editors of The Little Review, likened her genius to that of James Joyce and championed her alongside the Irish wordsmith as the star of their literary magazine. But critics routinely dismissed her intense emotionality as madness. "Cast-Iron Lover", a nine-page poem with an explosive intensity, made the Baroness the most controversial figure of her era. She was "an unconscious volcano", as the New York poet Maxwell Bodenheim observed in his "Reader Critic" defence of the Baroness in November 1919: "It is refreshing to see someone claw aside the veils and rush forth howling, vomiting, and leaping nakedly" (64). In the "Reader Critic" column of April 1920, he continues:

     She is a rare, normal being who shocks people by taking off her chemise in public. She has the balanced precision of a conscious savage. She does not violate rules: she enters a realm into which they cannot pursue her. Even her shouts rise to discriminating climaxes. Her work, in its deliberate cohesion, shows an absolute and rare normality. (61)

She was barred from mainstream magazines and was eventually censored from The Little Review. "Other magazines are opposed to my very name," the Baroness wrote in a long letter to Margaret Anderson around 1922, and kept bombarding her with poems. But they remained unpublished in the drawers of The Little Review.
     Several American heavyweights championed the Baroness and were profoundly influenced by her: Ezra Pound, who immortalized her "principle of non-acquiescence" in his Cantos; Ernest Hemingway, who tried to serialize her poetry in the transatlantic review in 1924 at the same time that he championed Gertrude Stein in Paris; and Djuna Barnes who became the Baroness's agent when she returned to Berlin in 1923. Hemingway's efforts to spice up the transatlantic review with the provocative Baroness were thwarted by Ford Madox Ford, whose vision for the journal was more mainstream. Unsuccessful too were the Baroness's collaborations with Djuna Barnes in co-producing her poetry book, although the collaboration produced a flurry of new poems. From 1924-26, Elsa sent Djuna her poems, along with instructions and elaborate discussions of poetic style. During the 1970s, Barnes was still in possession of Elsa's poetry manuscripts and commissioned her literary executor Hank O'Neal to publish the poems, but that project never materialized either. The poems were eventually deposited at the University of Maryland archives and have remained unpublished until today. After her mysterious death in Paris in 1927, the Baroness was quickly forgotten.
     Four of her over one hundred unpublished poems are featured here for the first time: two English poems, "She" and "Cosmic Chemistry" and two German poems, "Gewitter" and "Analytische Chemie der Frucht," which appear in my English translation. But many poetic gems---enough to fill up a book---remain to be published. It has taken almost a century for readers to be able to understand and appreciate the Baroness's art. Her erotically charged voice presented a critical intervention during the machine age. Her disruptions were all the more provocative and outrageous as they came from a woman poet. She ultimately had a remarkable forward-looking quality. For Margaret Anderson, the Baroness was the only person of the era who deserved the epithet "extraordinary" (211). But Marcel Duchamp perhaps sums up her achievement best when he said: "The Baroness is not a futurist, she is the future" (quoted in Rexroth, 77).


The manuscripts for the four poems published in The Literary Review are in the Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven Papers, University of Maryland Archives, College Park, and The Little Review Papers, Golda Meir Archives, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I would like to thank these archives for making the manuscripts available to me.



                                                            Works Cited
Anderson, Margaret. My Thirty Years' War. 1930. New York: Horizon, 1969,
      p. 211.
Anon. "Refugee Baroness Poses as Model." New York Times December 5, 1915.
Bodenheim, Maxwell. From "The Reader Critic" column. The Little Review 6.7
      (November 1919): 64.
_____. From "The Reader Critic" column. The Little Review 6.11 (April 1920): 61.
Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa von. "Analytische Chemie der Frucht," unpublished German       poem. The Little Review Papers, Golda Meir Archives. University of Wisconsin-      Milwaukee.
_____. "Cosmic Chemistry" and "She," unpublished English poems. Elsa von Freytag-     Loringhoven Papers, University of Maryland Archives, College Park.
_____. "Gewitter," unpublished German poem. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven Papers,       University of Maryland Archives, College Park.
_____. Letter to Margaret Anderson, ca 1922. The Little Review Papers, Golda      Meir Archives. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
_____. "Lullaby," unpublished German poem. The Little Review Papers, Golda Meir      Archives. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
_____. "Mineself-Minesoul -- and -- Mine -- Cast-Iron Lover." The Little Review      6.5 (September 1919): 3-11.
Rexroth, Kenneth. American Poetry of the Twentieth Century. New York: Herder      and Herder, 1973.
Scott, Evelyn. "The Art of Madness." The Little Review 6.8 (December 1919): 48.