"where latterly a thousand languages have been born, and each one, for purposes of communication at least, English — English enriched and variegated with the grammatical structure and voice-inflection of many races . . . "

I'm afraid I don't understand this, what is she trying to say?

Posted by michael farris at December 30, 2007 01:20 PM

Presumably that the influx of immigrants from all over created many ("a thousand," in her hyperbole) variants—Yiddish-American, German-American, Polish-American, Russian-American, and so on—which coexisted in a rich linguistic stew that provided the conditions for a truly modern poetry, free from the shackles of traditional structure.

Posted by language hat at December 30, 2007 01:43 PM

I always assumed that Myrna got her stage name because it sounded Oriental. She started out in the chorus line at Grauman's and was type-cast for a time as an Eastern vamp beginning with Ben Hur. Is it really likely that a young starlet from Montana in Hollywood would be familiar with an avant-garde poet?

Posted by MMcM at December 30, 2007 02:11 PM

MMcM: Are you calling Kenneth Rexroth a liar?

Posted by Allan at December 30, 2007 02:20 PM

"MMcM: Are you calling Kenneth Rexroth a liar?"

That's a little harsh. Is Burke implying Rexroth is a liar by making 'further efforts' to confirm the story? Of course not. Memories can be unreliable, people may have been misinformed, etc. Even if evidence turns up that Myrna Loy was not named for the poet, that doesn't make Rexroth a liar, simply mistaken.

Posted by aldiboronti at December 30, 2007 07:06 PM

I think Allan was saying that jokingly.

Posted by language hat at December 30, 2007 08:37 PM

A friend who's working on a biography of Myrna Loy (and has already published bios of Mae West and Rudolph Valentino) confirms that she chose the name, at the suggestion of "a poet friend" (not further identified), based on Mina Loy, and then found herself stuck in stereotyped Asian-Eurasian parts for a while.

Posted by rootlesscosmo at December 30, 2007 11:10 PM

I was whooshed! (The term used on another message board when a joke whisks over one's head).

Sorry, Allan.

Posted by aldiboronti at December 31, 2007 10:30 AM

I admit that the poet friend does make the connection rather more plausible. And that detail is part of the standard story (e.g., NYT obit) which I certainly could have found with just a little checking.

Posted by MMcM at December 31, 2007 11:27 AM

Here is Myrna Loy's account from her autobiography:

I traveled with a sort of artistic avant-garde at that time—writers and would-be writers, painters, sculptors—young people in the arts who would have lived in Greenwich Village if we'd been in New York. Some of them decided that the name Williams was too ordinary for a performer. I resisted. I considered it a perfectly good name. They mentioned Earle Williams, Kathlyn Williams, and several actors of that name, and started tossing around variations, awful combinations, really absurd. Someone even suggested “Myrna Lisa,” playing on the Mona Lisa, which I found embarrassing. Then Peter Rurick, a wild Russian writer of free verse, suddenly came up with “Myrna Loy.” And I said, “What's that?” It sounded all right, but I still wasn't convinced about changing my name.

As Burke says in the margin note to which LH referred originally, “Myrna Loy's account of her name change is nonetheless compatible with Rexroth's.” And it does quite explicitly contradict my earlier rash assumption about her environment. It's remarkable, but hardly conclusive, that an otherwise quite detailed story has no mention of Mina. But, for one thing, the actress was eighty when this was written.

A quick check at the library and online didn't turn up anything on Peter Rurick, if that is indeed the right spelling, other than the odd, but unsupported, assertion, here, that it was from a Gertrude Stein poem. (Now, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein certainly knew one another. Mina Loy is mentioned in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and even wrote a poem about Gertrude Stein.) Peter Ruric was the pen name of the screenwriter for The Black Cat (where Karloff plays a Bauhaus Aleister Crowley), and a number of places do suggest that is who was responsible. But he wasn't Russian, and would she have forgotten a Hollywood connection?

With luck, when rootlesscosmo's friend's new biography comes out, it will supply the missing details.

Posted by MMcM at January 2, 2008 08:57 PM