Alan (the Lone Librarian rides again) Teder’s Reviews > Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven > Status Update

CATAFALK
Novemberday -
Gold cold -
Dust blue -
On poplars -
Green metal
Death slow -
Last
Leaves.
1924
In 1924, the young subeditor of the transatlantic review, Ernest Hemingway, published a variant of this poem (along with "Enchantment") against the wishes of the magazine's editor, Ford Madox Ford, in issue 2.2 [August 1924]; Hemingway championed Gertrude Stein in the same magazine.

FPG's autobiographical novel Settlers of the Marsh (1925) explores his tumultuous life with Elsa in Kentucky in fictional form.

[A Canadian 🍁 connection for Elsa, as Frederick Philip Grove abandons her in Kentucky and moves to Manitoba, Canada which becomes the setting for his novel, even though it fictionalizes events from Kentucky, USA.]

How does a sound poem communicate without words? The nonsense word Mardoodaar evokes murder/murderer (German: Mord, French: meurtre); masré massacre; Goorde God (German: Gott); and Tzarissamanili the czar of Russia or Tristan Tzara, the leader of the Zurich and French Dada movement.

The poem distinguishes itself through its many portmanteau words, including automatonguts, spiritembrya, and soulpant> The variants reveal the evolution of some of these compound words, showing nervetransfixion evolving from "sensual transfixion," and kissambushed demons from "earth ambushed monster."

The German dadaists are closer to madness than the French. The French still have expiations to make. The Baroness does not belong to the German Dadaists. She fails whenever she trips over her German skeleton and falls into a Goethe-Nietzsche wrestling with God. When she is dada she is the only one living anywhere who dresses dada, loves dada, lives dada. - Jane Heap, "Dada", (Spring 1922).

Else von Freytag-Loringhoven's "Cast-Iron Lover' holds a half-inarticulate frenzy - the sensualist frankly screaming over his flesh. Most sensualists write with an obliquely repressed savageness or a drained staidness. It is refreshing to see someone claw aside the veils and rush forth howling, vomiting and leaping nakedly.
[a contemporary review by Maxwell Bodenheim, "The Reader Critic" (November 1919)]

[BODY SWEATS]

Body
Sweats
Mind
Rags
Agony
Unceasing -

Heartleech
Bloodseeps
Agony
Unceasing -

LIfe
Pollensweet
Diebitterness
Churn
Unceasing -

Figure
To
Flee -

Shape
Unceasing

Top
Me.

GRAVEYARD SURROUNDING NUNNERY

When I was
Young - foolish -
I loved Marcel Dushit
He behaved mulish -
(A quit)
Whereupon in haste
Redtopped Robert came -
He was chaste -
(Shame!)
I up - vamps fellow -
Carlos - some husky guy -
He turned yellow -
(Fi!)
I go to bed - saint -
Corpse - angel - nun -
It ain't
(Fun).

ca. 1921

The poems in this collection are unabashedly humorous in their ribald, bawdy, mocking tone - a striking feature in a literary age dominated by veiled satire and a much more connotative humor, as in the poems of Mina Loy or the lesbian eroticism of Gertrude Stein. Like Stein's work, the Baroness's poems are also playful. Scatological references abound, as in her poem "Kindly", inspired by James Joyce's Ulysses

Her experiments in Dada have inspired a biography, Irene Gammel's Baroness Elsa: Gender Dada and Everyday Modernity; a novel, Rene Steinke's Holy Skirts; Francis Naumann's Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven Retrospective Exhibition in New York with iterations in Berlin and Zurich; Kerry Reid's play Last of the Red Hot Dadas; and also a fashion shoot with the late Hollywood actress Brittany Murphy performing the Baroness...