Karla Kelsey, Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy

 

Mina Loy. Not her birth name Mina Gertrude Lowy, or Löwy, depending on the scholar, or the flourish. Not her married name, Mrs. Stephen Haweis, or her nickname, Dusie, but “Loy”—the name she’d chosen to exhibit under since her first public success as an artist in the 1904 Salon d’Automne. The name under which her first published writing, “Aphorisms on Futurism,” will appear in Alfred Stieglitz’s journal, Camera Work, in 1914.

Photographs of Mina Loy are Mina Loy, have become Mina Loy. Glossy black-and-white inserts of Haweis’s photos—a touch of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler, and Edward Burne-Jones—are joined by those taken by Man Ray, Berenice Abbott, and Lee Miller in Carolyn Burke’s Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy, published in hardcover by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1996. And then paperback by the University of California Press in 1997. Stacked at the front of bookstores and years later appointed the best place among the remainders, Loy looks out from the cover as she leans toward the small bronze statue she cradles in her left hand, eyes catching Haweis’s camera sidelong. A pleasant blouse, hair pulled softly back. Also in 1996, The Lost Lunar Baedecker, selected poems edited by Rober L. Conover, is published by FSG, and for the first time Loy’s poetry reaches a wide audience. Here she poses for Man Ray in profile. A thermometer she’s fashioned into an earring dangles from her ear. Eyes closed, she tilts her head toward the light.

I’d been curious about this recently-published self-described fiction/biography by American writer and editor Karla Kelsey [see my review here of one her poetry titles], her Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy (Winter Editions, 2024), a book that offers this further description on the back cover: “Combining experimental biography with fiction and fact, poet Karla Kelsey’s lyric-documentary rendezvous with iconoclastic writer and visual artist Mina Loy (1882-1966) creates a resonating space for the lost and undocumented.” Through her detailed exploration and excavation of the legendary, almost mythical, figure of Mina Loy, Kelsey is clearly aware of how portraits are shaped, prepared, and made, framed and crafted, her own narrative swirling around an impossible centre that suggests itself too evasive to properly capture. Structured across eleven chapters, each of which is titled a different year from 1886 to 1965, Kelsey composes her biography out-of-sequence, focusing on moments in time and their interplay, allowing the story to almost unfold as ripples out from a single moment. The book opens with a chapter titled “1905,” that has Loy in a photography studio: “Twenty-three-year-old Mina Loy poses as Mrs. Stephen Haweis, the artist’s artistic wife. She sits before an easel wearing a print dress, black belt, and straw hat she’d bedecked with enormous rosebuds.” Kelsey begins with an image of Loy that is crafted, curated, by another, with the full participation of Loy herself; one that allows for a shimmering effect, far more performative than documentary in purpose. From this moment of artifice, Kelsey begins. Two paragraphs later:

A third photograph captures Loy from the bust up. She’s pinned her paisley-patterrned robe to make of her bare chest a white diamond while artfully covering her breasts. She looks in sharp profile to the right, hair Athena-coiled atop her head and tied with a floral scarf. Budapest means British Empire. Elegant, bohemian, so “Loy (Mlle Mina), née à Hampstead (Àngle-terre), Anglaise”—as she’s listed in the catalogue for the 1905 Salon d’Automne above the titles of the four portraits she exhibits. Found on a Weebly site, someone’s school project on Loy, with tarot cards and a map of the Arno, this photo is my favorite, but—unattributed and without citation—it might not be of Loy at all.

I would argue slightly with the description of the book, as Kelsey’s approach to the whole project is reminiscent of other titles also blending non-fiction research with a kind of lyric memoir, specifically Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay’s Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1993) and Montreal writer Gail Scott’s Furniture Music: A Northern in Manhattan: Poets/Politics [2008-2012] (Seattle/New York: Wave Books, 2023) [see my piece on such here]. While someone, whether publisher or author, might suggest Kelsey’s work sits under “Fiction/Biography,” Transcendental Factory reads firmly set within the genre of creative non-fiction, a genre in which the author is not a distant narrator, separate from the action, but one deeply engaged within the narrative of the story. Early in the fifth chapter, “1925,” Kelsey writes:

I don my faux Turkish fox over an unseasonably thin dress to create a Mina Loy—or Myrna Loy—type woman. Psychically I’m all Hannah Höch collage, machine arms stuck to a Siren’s body. While the interior remains private, for the outfit to work does it matter whether I style myself as Mina Loy, born December 27, 1882, with the name Mina Gertrude Lowy in a North London suburb or as Myrna Loy, born August 2, 1905, as Myrna Adele Williams in Helena, Montana? In her early twenties Williams changed her last name to Loy at the suggestion of a wild Russian writer who’d found his way to Hollywood. This man, let us call him Sasha, let us give him a shock of white hair and sand-colored eyes, could have been Mina Loy’s lover when, after a summer in Vienna, 1922—sketching Freud’s portrait as he read some of her prose—she moves to Berlin and stays there until relocating to Paris in spring of 1923.

I’m charmed by the music, the lyric, of Kelsey’s prose, all highly deliberate through such luscious sweep and gesture; the prose is reminiscent of how Isaac Jarnot originally worked chapters of their biography of Robert Duncan, well before the multiple-year peer-reviewed process appeared to smooth over the remarkable music to land as Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2012). “Loy’s Jemima,” Kelsey writes, “thought to be a self-portrait and shown in London at the New English Art Club’s 1910 summer exhibition, will be lost. Also from circa 1910, Ladies at Tea is lost, Ladies Watching a Ballet is lost, Ladies Fishing is lost, Heart Shop is lost, The Little Carnival is lost, Voyageurs is lost. Lost, lost— [.]” Kelsey offers a biography of depictions and smoke, often articulating a particular lack of archival information by detailing all that surrounds it, offering details and surrounding context so fine that the contours of Loy’s story can’t help but find definition. She digs deep into all that there is to uncover and decipher, but there is still, as Kelsey suggests, so much of Loy’s narrative that is missing; too much of Loy’s image defined by the works and depictions of those that surrounded her, certain of which remains incomplete, contradictory and even incorrect (including the portrait on the book’s cover, long attributed to be of Loy but actually, as Kelsey learns through her research, of American actress Evelyn Brent, circa 1920). Kelsey works through such wonderful prose across research, informed speculation, conjecture and intricate wanderings across and around her subject, providing paragraphs of context around what else was happening during those same years as Loy, as important to her story as those bare facts of her life, of which there are too few. Early in chapter “1965,” for example, she offers one of a number of passages that provide a broader context from which Loy can’t help but exist in the world alongside and within, whether directly or indirectly. As the passage begins:

In 1965 the US increases military forces in South Vietnam and begins Operation Rolling Thunder, an aerial bombardment campaign over North Vietnam which will last until 1968, killing more than fifty-two thousand people. In 1965 most of Congress and much of the US support the war, although tens of thousands attend the antiwar teach-in at the University of California at Berkeley. Half the population of the US is under twenty-five. Eva Hesse is awarded a year-long fellowship in an abandoned textile factory in Germany and begins to move into the three-dimensional space of found objects and papier-mâché. By the end of her residency, she will consider herself a sculptor. Carolee Schneemann teaches herself how to make films.

The publication of Transcendental Factory follows close on the heels of Lost Writings: Two Novels by Mina Loy, edited by Karla Kelsey (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2024), a pairing that offers an echo to Ianthe Brautigan’s memoir of her late father, Richard Brautigan, You Can’t Catch Death: A Daughter’s Memoir (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001) alongside the posthumous appearance of Richard Brautigan’s final novel, An Unfortunate Woman (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001), two years after a third title, Brautigan’s long-lost volume, The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings (Mariner Books, 1999). For best effect, one might suppose, these titles appear in clusters, to catch the attention. Are you paying attention?