The Vanishing Pugilist and the Poet
The marriage of twentieth-century avant-gardists Arthur Cravan and Mina Loy was blissfully happy — until his mysterious disappearance
By Emma Garman
When the surrealist hero and sometime pugilist Arthur Cravan vanished off the coast of Mexico at the age of thirty-one, both the man and the circumstances lent themselves to speculation that he’d faked his own death. Born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd in Switzerland to Anglo-Irish parents, Cravan spent his late teens and twenties wandering the globe using different passports, publishing essays and poetry under pseudonyms, competing in boxing matches, and self-mythologizing. “The mysterious Arthur Cravan” was how he introduced himself before stepping into the ring, “the world’s shortest-haired poet, boxer, hotel rat [thief], muleteer, snake-charmer, chauffeur, ailurophile, gold prospector, grandson of the Queen’s chancellor, nephew of Oscar Wilde.”
In early 1917, the year before his putative death, Cravan relocated to New York from Paris to avoid conscription. He was not, however, a conscientious objector, supposedly saying, “But I don’t object! They may all allow themselves to be murdered for aught I care, only they need not expect me to follow suit. If their collective insanity suggests to them that they…
