While Cravan's practices may have aligned with certain anarchist and socialist principles, he was staunchly unaffiliated, mocked all notions of progress and subscribed to no single ideology or movement. In 1917, Cravan met the poet Mina Loy at a war benefit ball where the dress code was modern art movements. That night Cravan had to deliver an address on "The Independent Artists of France and America" but he was pranked by Picabia and Duchamp who got him so drunk that he ended up swaying and slurring his speech on the platform, shouting obscenities and removing his coat, vest, collar and suspenders. This led to his arrest by four private detectives at the event but, after being taken to the local police station, Cravan was soon bailed out by friend Walter Conrad Arensberg who took him back to his home at West Sixty-Seventh Street. Loy was to describe him, for the rest of her life, as the love of her life. Mexico Cravan left New York for Mexico on 1 September with a friend called Frost. Around this time in his letters to Loy, who remained in New York, he wrote that "I am only at my best when travelling" and that "[w]hen I have to stay too long in the same place, I become almost imbecilic." Together Cravan and Frost hitchhiked north through Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine to Canada. After many failed attempts to sail from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland due to the Canadian authorities refusing their lack of papers, Frost became ill and Cravan boarded a schooner bound for Mexico alone. By December, Cravan had reached Mexico City and sent Loy a multitude of letters pleading with her to join him, insisting that his life depended upon it. In one such letter he begged for a lock of her hair and begged, "Better yet, come with all of your hair." He finished this letter with: "La vie est atroce." Soon after this Loy purchased a one-way ticket to Mexico City involving a 5-day train journey. Loy, in one of the extracts from her autobiography Colossus (the title taking after her name for Cravan), recalls their time in Mexico City:"Our life together consisted entirely in wandering arm in arm through the streets. It never made any difference what we were doing – making love or respectfully eyeing canned foods in groceries, eating our tamales at street corners or walking among