I have often been reckless, forming deep affinities and devotions on the spot, instantly recognizing such-and-such or so-and-so to be a friend. I was sorely mistaken at least once, before the age of ten, but have otherwise been fortunate in these lightning-strike entanglements. To be sure the action of friendship craves time and attention, but the bond — spiritual, mental, physical — comes first. And then the knowing, the tending, develops. 

When I say that Mina Loy is one of my dearest friends, I’m not being metaphorical. I am trying to say in simple language a truth, although the assertion, I admit, takes me aback. Doesn’t friendship imply consent, a call and response in which the dead cannot participate, and entanglement, irrevocable and immediate, which they cannot afford? But this question leads me to ask what I mean when I say “Mina Loy” and, along those lines, to trouble what a person is. By “Mina Loy” I don’t exactly mean the flesh-and-blood human who was born on December 27, 1882, and who died on September 25, 1966. I also don’t exactly mean the idea of Mina Loy — a projection generated from the biography by Carolyn Burke, the reception of Loy’s artistic and literary output, the few photographs of her that exist, and her location (the insider’s outsider) in literary history. I don’t mean her friends and affiliations, her place in time and space (New York Dada, Italian Futurism, Paris Surrealism, etcetera) — but, admittedly, these elements aren’t excluded. I also don’t only or entirely mean her texts themselves, her paintings, drawings, assemblages, inventions themselves, although her creative output might be the closest approximation of what I mean when I say, “Mina Loy is one of my dearest friends.” None of these are exactly right, but all of these, in consort, continue to draw me to her side. My poet’s novel, Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy, proposes these networks as fundamentals of a life while tracing the fierce attachment that developed as I came to know Loy ever more deeply through editing two of her previously unpublished manuscripts of autobiographical prose for Lost Writings: Two Novels by Mina Loy. 

When I arrived at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library to read these manuscripts, the affinity was instantaneously imbued with the flavor and mystery of encountering a new friend. I was familiar with her published poetry and prose, but not with the typescripts titled The Child and the Parent and Islands in the Air. Part of a larger suite of seven known autobiographical novels that Mina Loy called her book or her novel, none of the work was published in her lifetime despite attempts by her and her eldest daughter, Joella. 

“When I try to recall the dim beginning of my human life”: thus begins Chapter I of The Child and the Parent, bursting open the usual narratives of self by starting the story of a life prior to identity, when a bird-like creative spirit comes to inhabit an infant’s body. This idea immediately befriended me, providing longed-for consolation concerning not only the temporal boundaries of a life but also for a flattening of the self which, at the time, assailed me. Loy’s concept of the creative spirit vibrates with the potential to expand understanding of what it is to be. This vibration, so alive, courses not only as an idea, but also through the rhythm of the prose — the long “i” of “I” and “try” and “life;” the short “i” of “dim beginning” — and the manuscript’s browned typing paper, the purpled ink. Also, Mina Loy’s pencil mark lightly crossing out the first paragraph not, as I initially supposed, in rejection, but to signal that it had been included in Islands in the Air, written over a decade later in New York, where she moved in the late thirties, part of the wave of immigrants fleeing the fascism overtaking Europe. Loy’s handwritten edits score her manuscripts with desire for the future, for versions of themselves that had not quite come into being. Mightn’t I, who, after all, had come from the future, answer their call? It was friendship at first sight, this page before me and its accompanying manila folders in the archival file box promising more language, more story. The scholar at the table next to me was reading one of H.D’s manuscripts, and the light slanted through the plate glass windows of the reading room as the Isamu Noguchi sculptures in the sunken marble garden looked on. 

Do I romanticize if I say I was called to those pages in that instant in that room? Do I fantasize if I say it might have been their creator who invited me there? I can sense Mina Loy with me still, just as I can feel the texture of the manuscript paper under my fingers as I type this recollection on the same laptop I used to transcribe her typescripts at Beinecke. The same laptop I used in the series of communications with editors, the estate holder, and scholars; with fellow writers who read and commented on drafts, with friends who kindly interested themselves in the manuscript’s progress as it unfolded over the years that span book proposal to book. Through those years — through the pandemic and other inconsolable large-scale and personal losses — Mina Loy’s manuscripts were there, waiting to hold me, my attention, and gradually, though those years, Mina Loy came to be not only a conceptual but — I’ll say it — a physical presence. 

Sometimes this presence is that of Mina Loy walking alongside me, down the street. I didn’t know what to make of this felt sense until I began to write about it in Transcendental Factory, using the name “Mina” to figure this near-apparition, and to distinguish this aspect from “Loy,” the name I give to fact-bound aspects of Mina Loy. While Mina extends fact beyond what fact can properly know and often reaches into the twenty-first century to find me walking through the neighborhoods in which she lived in New York or reading her papers in the Beinecke, elements of Loy’s legacy transport me to her time and space. The Child and the Parent, written in the late twenties and early thirties when Loy lived in the same apartment building as Djuna Barnes, on 9 rue Saint-Romain in Paris, takes me there. The typescript, a material artifact from that time and place, flowing through my eyes, down my arms, to my fingers, to the keyboard, through the laptop to the screen and back into my eyes, flows me into Paris, 1929: Loy, settling into her new apartment, which she bought after selling the shop she co-owned with Peggy Guggenheim, in which she featured the lamps she designed and made. When Mina opens the apartment’s French doors, the sound of the 6th arrondissement waking to day floats in, and a small wind scatters the paper petals and leaves she had been cutting from advertisements, wrapping paper, and pochoir pattern books, to be glued into bouquets against gold paper scattered with gold stars. 

Loy had known the building well because she had visited Barnes there often, even helping her hand-color fifty copies of her roman à clef, Ladies Almanack, in which Loy appears as Patience Scalpel, the sole heterosexual character among the network of lesbians centered in the salon of their mutual friend, Natalie Clifford Barney. When Joella married and moved to New York City, Barnes thought her friend, both a divorcée and a widow, would be less lonely if she moved with her ten-year-old daughter Fabi into 9 rue Saint-Romain — and so she did, and so she was. 

While Loy’s romantic relationships are inevitably foregrounded by critics and biographers, her friendships receive far less attention. To be fair, there is more documentation of Loy’s two marriages than of her numerous friendships; however, her friendships were far more important to her literary and artistic output than her volatile and relatively short-lived romantic attachments, which seem to draw her interpreters like moths to flame. Might tracing these relationships be something I can do for her, reciprocate the friendship she has extended to me? For instance, this friendship with Barnes. From when they met in New York in the late teens until Loy’s death in 1966, they were great friends. They had much in common. Both wrote short fiction, plays, novels, poetry, and uncategorizable prose and were visual artists: Barnes an illustrator and Loy a painter, designer, and maker of assemblages. Both had erratic educations and were unlucky in love. Although Loy, unlike Barnes, received some support from family members, both had to live by their work and their wit: Barnes more successfully as a journalist, Loy always trying as a maker of hats, lampshades, fashion designs, and various idiosyncratic inventions. They both examine the darker aspects of the human condition. And both have undergone a period of time in which they were “lost” and have been variously found. 

The two women were particularly close in Paris in the mid and late 1920s and early thirties. Would Loy even have written — would she have been able to write — The Child and the Parent if Barnes hadn’t convinced her to move to 9 rue Saint-Romain? Loy’s apartment is described by her son-in-law as, “By Loy out of the Marche aux Puces,” with rooms “divided by wirework or wickerwork cages in which birds flew or hopped about. Doors were always glass, the panes covered with translucent material so that there was privacy but also light. Indoor plants were living everywhere. Whatever patching of crumbling walls, or decorative coloring there might be was mostly done with scraps of metallic paper — wrappings from countless bonbons pasted together in floral collages. And colored cellophane everywhere.” It is difficult to imagine a setting more likely than this to give rise to the abstract, visionary texture of The Child and the Parent’s initial chapters, their bird of creative consciousness, which so beguile me. At the same time, The Child and the Parent shares with Barnes’s Ladies Almanack a scathing critique of heteronormative structures. Like Barnes, Loy extends her critique into the inculturation of female bodies (one chapter is titled “The Outraged Womb”), minds, and domestic spaces. It is obvious from Loy’s letters that she shared drafts of the book with Barnes, who was then working on Nightwood, but seemingly lost to time is their exchange. 

However, if you close your eyes you might see Mina opening the curtains that hang over the French doors of her balcony. Across the courtyard Djuna appears. Hemmed with white tassels and silver bells, the curtains jangle, feathery. Each of their apartments are islands of writing equipped with private docks, private landing strips, all access points patrolled by private security forces. Not even Mina and Djuna know what’s tucked in the other’s inner, deepest recess, labyrinth leading to bosom, sacred heart, solar plexus, guts. 

When someone you love is gone, that person can’t do anything anymore, and so you have to do something — something that they can no longer do. Norman Fischer writes about this, as a way of continuing when faced with a friend’s death. Something Mina Loy could no longer do is see her manuscripts into publication. This I have joined Roger Conover, Sara Crangle, and Elizabeth Arnold in rectifying and in return, she has offered friendship, affiliation, and companionship. Companionship as a presence guiding me through history into galleries, salons, cafes, and living rooms — into the lives of others. Affiliation with the extraordinary scholars, editors, curators, and writers who carry her through the present and into the future. 

Today, Mina’s sitting in the big blue chair next to my desk, looking at the 2017 facsimile edition of The Blind Man, edited by Matvei Yankelevich (my friend, and the publisher of Transcendental Factory) to mark the hundredth anniversary of the publication. The magazine was put together by Marcel Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, and Henri-Pierre Roché — all friends of Mina Loy’s — and four of fifteen pages are by her. She had moved from Florence to New York City in 1917, and there she met many of the writers and artists who would be her lifelong friends. The Blind Man centers around a defense of Mr. Richard Mutt’s Fountain — the Buddha of the Bathroom — suppressed from April’s Society of Independent Artists show where Loy exhibited Making Lampshades alongside Wood’s Un peut (peu) d’eau dans du savon, a headless nude with a bar of soap affixed over her sex (men left calling cards tucked into the painting’s frame). Did Loy think of this soap, the calling cards, the urinal, thirty years later when she was living on the Bowery, gathering trash that she would assemble into her multi-media constructions, her refusées? There she had a new set of friends, indigent men and women whose portraits she incorporated into her art just as she had earlier done within an art world coterie. 

Duchamp was essential in organizing the 1959 exhibition of these constructions at the Bodley Gallery in New York City, the opening of which Loy attended via phone from Aspen where she’d moved to be cared for by her daughters. That Djuna Barnes, deep into her reclusive years, came to the opening is a testament to their decades-long friendship and to the significance the exhibition must have had for Mina Loy. When there is something important to someone you love, essential to someone you love, that they cannot do, you do this for them, you do this in their honor and to resonate with the layers and frequencies of an expansive vision of a life. 

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Lead Image: Ashley Lamb’s collages have been dear to me for decades, and exchanging work has anchored our friendship across years and continents. When I was spending time with Loy’s papers at the Beinecke, a photograph of Across the Courtyard appeared in my inbox; I replied with the very first writing that would later become Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy.