Children in Flight and Women in Cages

Johanna Pelikan reviews “Lost Writings: Two Novels by Mina Loy,” edited by Karla Kelsey.

By Johanna PelikanJanuary 2, 2025

• Poetry

• Gender & Sexuality

MINA LOY’S PROSE TEXT Islands in the Air opens with the narrator Linda coming home to an apartment in utter disarray. Besides a pair of shoes carelessly thrown into the corner, the floor is covered with countless manuscripts, some of which have been munched on by mice. Editor Karla Kelsey must have had a similar impression when she came across the archival manuscripts for unpublished prose works by Loy, the notorious modernist. Like Linda, who describes how on closer inspection “a minute roach turned into an omnibus loaded with humanity,” Kelsey luckily recognized the “load” of profound human concerns negotiated in Loy’s notes and made them accessible in Lost Writings: Two Novels by Mina Loy (2024).

As the product of careful editorial tidying, the collection arises as an uncovered treasure for both Loy aficionados and newcomers to the oeuvre of a modernist who for too long has been buried under heaps of canonized works. It is the recovery of surviving passages from what Loy called her “Book,” produced in a period following the height of her artistic success in the late 1910s and early ’20s. The British-born writer was trained as a painter and had her greatest successes with daring poetry—in terms of both openly discussing female sexuality and presenting aesthetic innovation through rich imagery and wordplay. Prose was not her typical mode. Only one novel, Insel, posthumously saw the light of day, in 1991. Despite her daughters’ attempts to publish their mother’s autobiographical writings in the 1950s and ’60s, it took decades and an archival decluttering process to eventually bring forth two more novels by Loy.

The opening scene of the second rediscovered novel, in which the narrator enters her disorganized apartment, is not only an excellent allegory for the imagined editorial process but also a key to the organization of Kelsey’s collection. This is because the pages spread across Linda’s apartment floor are the ones that make up the collection’s first novel, The Child and the Parent. This opening 74-page-long “fugitive prose,” as Kelsey calls it, is constituted of an unnamed first-person narrator’s report of infantile encounters with their surroundings and contemplations on the enforced role of women in Victorian society. The second novel of the collection, Islands in the Air, eventually picks up the first novel’s two-part formulation of autofiction and reshapes it into the more consistent story of Loy’s alter ego Linda. Following the “experimental,” as Loy herself calls it, mise-en-abyme opening, Linda eventually recounts her emotionally abusive childhood, her artistic upbringing, and, finally, her first amorous—or rather, nonamorous—encounters with men.

While doing so, Lost Writings allows for a representative experience of what Ezra Pound once called Loy’s “logopoeia,” a dance of the intelligence among words. Following this imagery, The Child and the Parent and Islands in the Air indeed reproduce Loy’s whirling rotation between demanding abstraction and witty lyricism. In the radical fashion of Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto,” for example, readers will find straightforward syntax that calls men wooers of fictitious values. At the same time, both recovered novels contain passages that remind one of Loy’s more ornate and flowing works, like her collage Surreal Scene (1930) or the automythographical poem “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose.” In Loy’s recovered prose, a similarly fantastic imagery and archaic, neologistic, and multilingual diction support her narration of childhood in which consciousness, as she fittingly writes, performs “a veritable dance.”

Another prominent dance of Loy’s novels is the one up in the air—in other words, a flight, which is a metaphor repeatedly employed to narrate both children’s and women’s experience. In The Child and the Parent, such imagery is overtly introduced when the unnamed narrator, referring to their infantile consciousness, states:

Call it Holy Ghost or consciousness, or what we will, a bird in flight is not unlike the roving passage of the intellect between the known and the unknown. […]

So it is, with the aid of this primitive symbol, that I have tried to retrieve from oblivion whatever awareness a bird-like spirit of life enjoys when […] it is first confined to three dimensions.

Following this pictorial aid, both novels then describe a child’s experience as a fleeting series of impressions of a not yet fully materialized world. In this sense, the narrators of both The Child and the Parent and Islands in the Air describe childhood as an experiential flight through time and space. Childhood in this sense is configured as being ‘‘everywhere at once.” It is the infinite flight of an “airy consciousness,” Linda finds.

However, in the novels’ narrative accounts of infantile meaning-making, the child’s will to conceptualize their surrounding appears as an unstoppable force and nonnegotiable need. Linda accordingly calls out: “I decided to conquer the world. It did not matter at all that the words ‘world’ and ‘conquest’ were absolutely unknown to me. Concepts are embedded in the human mind long before they become communicable.” But without any adult instruction, the narrators of Loy’s novels cannot grasp the world. Subject to their fleeing avian consciousness, ideas repeatedly “crash into one another and splinter to bits.” To counteract these so-called “accidents,” Linda from Islands in the Air, especially, longs for help to anchor herself in a fleeting world. As an aid to comprehend her surroundings from which, once awakened, there is no return, Linda is handed a “fat book of rhymed alphabets.” This moment is decisive: it is the beginning of a lifelong fascination with language as a means of representation and an introduction—albeit an imperfect one—to the conceptual world. Linda thus ultimately declares: “I was holding the doors of the universe ajar with my hands.”

But while both of Loy’s novels portray infantile consciousness as a fascinating moment in the process of human habitual meaning-making, in Islands in the Air, Linda’s childhood experience goes beyond that of a rushing flight. This is because Linda’s mother is someone who, discontent with her child’s creative explorations, constantly insults her daughter. She calls her a “clumsy slut” and a “downright disgrace,” and once exclaims in rage: “I could kill you.” Alternatively, she makes Linda feel guilty by reacting to her actions with fits of anger or weakness. In the framework of the bird analogy, one scene in particular speaks volumes to this dynamic: “When I was half undressed [once],” Linda recounts,

[my mother] came running into the nursery to show us ‘a dear little bird’ she had found fallen out of its nest. “I kept kicking it along the grass,” she said. “I mistook it for a bit of red flannel.” There it lay, mauled to a pulp, of that queerly putrid quality that bird flesh has without its feathers.

Like the little bird described in Islands in the Air, Linda is her mother’s toy. In a figurative sense, she is kicked and crushed without any plumage-like protection, and her free development, in a manner of speaking, is doomed to death.

Later, in Linda’s teenage years, gender-specific education following her Victorian mother’s bourgeois ideals comes into play. At this point, the already constrained childhood flight becomes pressed into a corset-like cage composed of prevailing gender norms. Islands in the Air, in this respect, picks up arguments made in the second part of The Child and the Parent: it likens the role of the “women of the eighties” to that of a caged bird, eyed by men whose “morals and […] feathers followed an identical curve.” Loy stresses that society reduces women to their appearance while at the same time denying them their bodily self, including the deprivation of sexual pleasure. In Islands in the Air, the teenage Linda experiences this reduction and double standard with her pious mother asking: “Do you think at your age it is decent to have a figure?” Her father, on the other hand, anxious she might not find a husband while looking “thin as a rail,” asks: “Can’t you fatten yourself up a little[?]” Anticipating 1960s feminism, Loy, as Kelsey writes in her foreword, hereby “draws out the ways in which the most intimate issues of domestic life […] are structural and systemic.”

Linda’s double-standard upbringing eventually leads her to the obfuscation of her “instinct of self-preservation,” and she repeatedly feels drawn to men of “glorious irresponsibility.” Following first sexual encounters, a phase that she calls a necessary “amoral period,” Linda becomes engaged to Lucas, an “agonizing mule” whom she likes because he is easy to caricature. She also engages in an “abstract” relationship with Holyoak, a fellow art student, whom she likes but whom she describes as inscrutable, as if hidden behind a “separative wall.” During her artistic education in Munich, she eventually meets Alexander, a Dutch law student, in whom she has so little interest that, when he stands before her with a pistol declaring to “blow his brains out should [Linda] find no use for his passion,” she says “Shoot.” However, despite not feeling any amorous connection to these men, time and time again, Linda finds herself in their company, for her upbringing taught her to “automatically comply” if anyone “insisted upon [her] doing anything.”

Coming full circle, Loy’s chronological account from infancy to womanhood shares a common denominator beyond avian imagery: a core experience of both the child in flight and the caged woman is the realization of beauty in life and art. As described in both novels, the infantile first encounters with the world in all its fascinating and fleeting beauty already foreshadow the artistic awakening of the adult Linda in Islands in the Air. What, with a view to her childhood, has been described as an “aesthetic excitement” similar to the feeling of “a caterpillar […] crawl[ing] up [one’s] inside,” Linda reexperiences as a young woman reading poetry by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Recalling the graphic childhood memory of tickling excitement, Linda’s artistic awakening thus equals an experience of art as a space of “infinite potentiality.”

Carried by this feeling of life’s infinite possibilities, it does not matter to Linda that her mother rips up her London art school drawings in terror. Linda is already well on her way to becoming an artist, a path on which she also defies the taught values of femininity. Significant in this regard is how, during her art studies in Munich, the young Linda, in Dada-anticipating fashion, buys a long clay pipe in a symbolic act of feminist liberation. In doing so, she frees the caged bird of womanhood and returns to the birdlike flight of infantile consciousness, which—freed from imposed constraints—makes her realize anew that “being alive is the loneliness of the multitude.”

And this freedom of multitude, of understanding life as an eternal constitution of infinite possibilities, is ultimately reflected in Loy’s never-finished autobiographical prose project. Similar to both childhood and artistic experience, the now-published novels by Loy are two possibilities, two fictionalized multitudes of one prismatized biographical experience. Without Kelsey’s editorial intervention, Loy’s elusive fragments would surely have met a different fate. Loy herself, in this respect, once fittingly stated that our “destiny is like a roll of negative film—already printed But unrevealable until it has found a camera to project it—and a surface to throw it upon.” Through her editing, Kelsey has successfully taken on the role of a camera operator, and with the publication of Lost Writings: Two Novels by Mina Loy, she has given the fate of Loy’s “Book” a proper projection surface.