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  PRAISE FOR MINA LOY

  “[In The Lost Lunar Baedeker,] Mina Loy’s wry, confident inquiries into the nature of men, women and sexuality are a great undiscovered treasure of modernism.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  (STARRED REVIEW)

  “Her utter absence from all canonical lists is one of modern literary history’s most perplexing data.”

  —HUGH KENNER,

  THE NEW YORK TIMES

  “Among the great modernist poets, Mina Loy was surely the greatest wit, the most sophisticated commentator on the vagaries of love.”

  —MARJORIE PERLOFF

  “Is there anyone in America except you, Bill [William Carlos Williams,] and Mina Loy who can write anything of interest in verse?”

  —EZRA POUND, LETTER TO MARIANNE MOORE

  “By divergent virtues these two women [Mina Loy and Marianne Moore] have achieved freshness of presentation, novelty, freedom, break with banality.”

  —WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

  “You’d know a Loy poem when you read one; you’d recognize her art work as distinctively hers. And maybe that’s the mark she would have most cared to leave on the world—literary and visual art made, unmistakably, by a true original.”

  —THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN

  INSEL

  MINA LOY (1882–1966) was born Mina Gertrude Lowy in London to a Hungarian father and an English mother. Originally trained as a painter, she was at the center of all the great artistic movements of the first half of the twentieth century: she wrote Futurist manifestos in Italy (including the “Feminist Manifesto,” which denounced the misogyny and incipient fascist tendencies of Futurism); her poem “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” appeared alongside T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in The Dial; she starred in plays in Greenwich Village in the 1920s with William Carlos Williams; she was friends with Duchamp and Man Ray; she ran a lampshade business with Peggy Guggenheim; and in the 1940s, she lived on the Bowery, where she collected trash for found-art collages, as in the style of her friend Joseph Cornell, whose work she championed. During one of her earlier stints in New York, she met the love of her life, Arthur Cravan, the Dadaist poet and boxer who disappeared in mysterious circumstances shortly after their marriage. Only two collections of her work were published in her lifetime, Lunar Baedecker (1923) and Lunar Baedecker and the Time Tables (1958). She died in Aspen, Colorado, in 1966.

  ELIZABETH ARNOLD, a scholar and poet, is the author of Effacement and two other collections.

  SARAH HAYDEN is Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of English, University College Cork. Her monograph, Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood, is forthcoming in the Recencies series at University of New Mexico Press.

  THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

  I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET

  INSEL

  Copyright © 1991, 2014 by Roger L. Conover for the Estate of Mina Loy

  Introduction copyright © 2014 by Sarah Hayden

  Afterword copyright © 1991 by Elizabeth Arnold

  With thanks to the Beinecke Library at Yale University for their assistance with the “Visitation” materials.

  First Melville House printing: May 2014

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  8 Blackstock Mews

  Islington

  London N4 2BT

  mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse

  ISBN: 978-1-61219-354-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-61219-354-0

  Cover photograph: Mina Loy, ca. 1905.

  Photo by Stephen Haweis, courtesy of Roger L. Conover

  A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Epigraph

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction by Sarah Hayden

  A Note on the Text

  Insel

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Visitation

  Afterword by Elizabeth Arnold

  Appendix A: Translation of Foreign Words and Phrases

  Appendix B: Chronology of Mina Loy

  Appendix C: Chronology of Richard Oelze

  INTRODUCTION BY SARAH HAYDEN

  “It is the nature of individuality to look upon the rest of the world in the light of an audience. I got the idea that ‘an impression is to be made.’ ”

  —“Islands in the Air”

  Born Mina Gertrude Lowy, a self-nominated “Anglo-mongrel,” in London in 1882, Mina Loy died an American citizen in 1966. Between those dates, she was resident of Jugendstil Munich (1900), Futurist Florence (1907–1916), Dada-enfevered New York (1916–1917) and Surrealist Paris (1923–1936), making interstitial appearances in Paris (1903–1906), Mexico (1918), Weimar Berlin (1922) and Freud’s Vienna (1922), among other places. Relocating finally from Europe to New York in 1936, she was the unofficial artist-in-residence on the Bowery when New York was inaugurated as capital city of the postwar art world. Though the stamps in her passport furnish the coordinates to map the development of twentieth-century art, Loy was not just fortuitously “present” in these locations at the zero hour of their modernist fluorescence. She engaged with these art scenes neither as onlooker nor acolyte but as an acutely critical cross-media artist. Leaving New York in 1953, she made her last works in the barely nascent art town of Aspen; Loy’s burial there in 1966 left her body at the site of yet another significant episode in the history of the transatlantic avant-gardes.

  It has become something of a commonplace to populate the opening of any portrait of Loy with globe-wrapping litanies. Though the inventory device might be hackneyed, the listing of multiple cities, movements, artistic colocutors and art practices remains the only way to convey the multiplicities that characterize her formation and her work. There have been many Loys; more are emerging. On the event of their marriage in 1918, the Dada poet-pugilist Arthur Cravan declared: “Now I have caught you. I am at ease” (“Excerpts from ‘Colossus’ ”). Cut short by his mysterious disappearance that same year, their romance was absolute. For the rest of us, capturing Loy is neither possible nor even advisable. Slipping between textual avatars, she remakes herself as Imna Loy, Goy, Ova, Sophia and, in Insel, Mrs. Jones. Though much of her writing rehearses the contours of her biography, her pred
ilection for imposture, anagram and factual distortion make slippery the lines between autobiography and fiction. Nowhere else are these distinctions so bewitchingly blurred as they are in this novel.

  In life, the trajectory of Loy’s career saw her play overlapping roles as painter, poet, model, actor, archetypal Modern Woman, playwright, novelist, autobiographer, inventor, polemicist, designer, gallery agent and assemblagist. Galvanized by inconstant affinities with myriad systems of thought (including Christian Science, Hindu mysticism, Theosophy, Bergsonism, sexology, psychoanalysis) and innumerable species of avant-garde art-making, Loy was variously feted and forgotten. Through poverty, alienation and heartbreak, she remained a practicing artist, ever in evolution, to the end. Striving to impress the intensely modern emanations of her “isolate consciousness” (“Anglo-Mongrels”) upon the world, she proves herself, in Insel and beyond, a sophisticated commentator on creativity—an expert theorist of modern artisthood.

  Loy first came to public attention as a painter at the 1904 Paris Salon d’Automne; in 1906 she was elected salonnier. This early recognition of her prowess as a painter was superseded, however, by her reputation as a poet. The recovery of Loy’s plastic arts production—which comprises drawings, paintings, sculptures and a remarkable body of assemblages—is at last underway. Perhaps our tardiness in coming to evaluate Loy’s visual art can be attributed to her pursuit, alongside it, of such a variegate span of other creative pursuits—for she also designed lampshades, and patented inventions both prosaic (a device for cleaning windows “from the inside out”) and fanciful (a corselet intended for the “alleviation of dowager’s hump”).

  In her lifetime, what renown she attained derived predominantly from her activities as a poet. Between 1914 and 1962, her work was published in magazines and periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic, including Camera Work, Trend, Rogue, Others, Blind Man, The Dial, The Little Review, Contact, Playboy, transatlantic review, Pagany, Accent and View, and featured in anthologies such as the 1925 Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers and in Kreymborg’s 1930 Lyric America: An Anthology of American Poetry. Her first poetry collection, Lunar Baedecker, was published by Robert McAlmon’s Contact Editions in 1923, its title misspelled. In 1958, a new edition of her poems was published under Jonathan Williams’s Jargon imprint. Lunar Baedeker and Timetables corrected some of the 1923 edition’s errors, but introduced others. For too long, she was overlooked, blighted by the critical amnesia that commonly affects women writers, and that is endemic in treatments of Loy’s elusive, experimental ilk. In the last decades of the twentieth century, critics started to probe modernism’s margins, questioning received histories of literary communities and recovering forgotten figures. With the publication of Roger Conover’s editions of The Last Lunar Baedeker (1982) and his revised and comprehensively annotated The Lost Lunar Baedeker (1996), Loy’s literary legacy came, convulsively, back to life. Loy-alists rejoiced to see her back in print; today, their ranks are great and still growing.

  In his introduction to the first edition of Insel, Roger Conover—Loy’s longtime editor, literary executor and curator—traced Loy’s posthumous evolution from “ ‘neglected’ poet” to one “whose reputation and readership are very much on the rise.” On the occasion of its re-publication, we find Loy securely instated among her rightful cohort—as a luminary of literary modernism. In 2011, Sara Crangle’s edition of the Stories and Essays of Mina Loy opened new vistas not only onto Loy’s heretofore submerged prosodic imagination but onto the principal preoccupations of her poetry. Crosscurrents exist between her poetry and prose that weren’t previously recognized: oppositions to censorship and social injustice implicit in her poetry are made explicit in her prose.

  Where once she enjoyed only a refractory sort of fame-by-association, today the extent of Loy’s intellectual interplay with figures such as Ezra Pound, F. T. Marinetti, Giovanni Papini, Marcel Duchamp, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams eclipses the anecdotal. We have come to recognize that Loy was acutely attuned to the ways in which cosmopolitan avant-garde movements were attempting to reconstitute the artist’s role in modern society. Polemical texts such as “International Psycho-Democracy,” “In … Formation” and “Aphorisms on Futurism” give us her position papers on contemporary notions of artisthood. Her short prose pieces—“O Marcel … Otherwise I Also Have Been to Louise’s” and “Pas de Commentaires! Louis M. Eilshemius”—elucidate the depth of her ironic engagement with the performance politics of Duchampian New York Dada. Similarly, her conflicted response to the hypermasculine bombast of Florentine Futurism is rendered into the sharp satire of the early poems, “Brontolivido,” “Lion’s Jaws” and “The Effectual Marriage,” Loy’s investment in aesthetics led her to compose taut ekphrases—“Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” “Joyce’s Ulysses,” “The Starry Sky of Wyndham Lewis”—and acute portraits of her literary and artistic contemporaries, including Stein, Picasso, Pascin, Lewis and William Carlos Williams. The nature of genius fascinated her; in poetry, prose and drama, she anatomized its “curious disciplines” (“Apology of Genius”). Insel is the product of one such investigation, a fantastical account of her experiences as “tout for a friend’s art gallery, feeding a cagey genius in the hope of production” (this page).

  Although the first flush of critical interest in Loy’s oeuvre concentrated on her earlier writing, analysis of the prose and poetry that occupied her latter years is now well underway. These writings articulate a sustained attention to the nature of creative enterprise, the development of broad philosophical and spiritual curiosities and a burgeoning social conscience underwritten by a marked, if loose, affiliation to psychoanalytic theories of mind. From 1936 onwards, Loy’s primary focus was on the composition “Islands in the Air”: an ambitious, categorically unstable project to encompass the entirety of her autobiography in a fictionalized prose form. A sort of modernist case study, it would, as she envisioned it, offer “(m)y experience to yours for comparison” (“Islands in the Air”). Insel was originally conceived as part of this immense experimental prose work.

  In 1931, the art dealer Julien Levy appointed Mina Loy sole “Paris représentante” of his newly opened Manhattan gallery. In her capacity as gallery agent (and Levy’s mother-in-law), Loy represented a host of major artists, including Gris, Giacometti, Gorky, de Chirico, Dalí and Magritte. In 1933, Loy became acquainted with the isolated German Surrealist, Richard Oelze; three years later, they parted company. Leaving Oelze in Europe, Loy sailed for New York in 1936. As Elizabeth Arnold explains in her afterword, Insel is Loy’s prose-rendering of what transpired between those dates. Strung from a series of impossible happenings, furred with bizarre blooms and spasmodically fluctuating between revulsion and fascination, the story of Insel and Mrs. Jones is not a love story. Variously designated as Surrealist novel, Künstlerroman and modernist roman à clef, Insel is, like its eponymous anti-hero, a strange and beguilingly fugitive creation: a text that exists “at variance with” itself (this page).

  Staged against the familiar backdrops of the Select, Dôme and Capoulards cafés, the Lutetia hotel, the Orangerie and Tuileries gardens and the Gare d’Orléans, Insel is replete with references both concealed and transparent to historical inhabitants of Surrealist Paris. Dalí, Man Ray and Ernst appear undisguised, whereas the figures of Julien Levy and Arthur Cravan are manifest here, as elsewhere in Loy’s writings, in the guises of Aaron and Colossus. Some come off better than others: the narrator refers admiringly to Joseph Cornell’s boxes as “delicious” (this page) (the subject of Loy’s laudatory review-essay “Phenomenon in American Art”), whereas Insel’s sudden nausea at the sight of a painting by Raoul Dufy registers as a glancing blow of bad publicity (this page). Early drafts of the novel contain direct references to biographical figures that Loy later cut or obscured. Mary Reynolds—a fellow American expatriate then active in Surrealist Paris—appears once in the first draft, but was cut from later edits. The identity of Mlle. Alp
ha—introduced by Insel in chapter 4 as another benefactress “who was liable to feed him at crucial moments” (this page)—remains something of a mystery. Though Elizabeth Arnold suggests that we look to Peggy Guggenheim, the presence in one first-draft copy of a penciled-in (and then struck-out) qualifier, “the painter,” complicates this identification. Indeed, in spite of her being—or perhaps because she is—so vital to the plot, we might surmise that she, like much else in the text, is a work of fiction.

  In Nadja, a novel to which Insel is often compared, André Breton declares: “I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar like doors; I will not go looking for keys.” In direct contravention of this call for transparency from the man christened the “pope” of Surrealism, the characters of “Acra” and “stiff Ussif the surrealist” in Insel elude identification. Loy’s biographer, Carolyn Burke, suggests that the character called “Sex” stands in for Max Ernst, and indeed that the replacement of Ernst’s forename with “Sex” derives from a transcription error. Burke deduces from Loy’s correspondence that the figure of Moto stands for Breton. Burke’s assertion is corroborated by the fact that in the second draft, Breton’s name has been scratched out and replaced with “Moto.” However, Loy’s insertion in pencil of the word “Dalí?” above the name “Acra” on an early typed draft implies that her approach was sometimes more oblique than we might presume. Even as we read Insel as roman à clef, it might ultimately prove more productive to consider what effect the author sought to achieve by this blending of recognizable cameos and enigmatic ciphers.

  Perhaps most significantly of all, several suggestive inconsistencies are in evidence in Oelze’s transposition into Insel. Against Oelze’s relatively comfortable childhood and considerable education pursued across a number of cities (Magdeburg, Weimar, Dresden), Insel is presented as the product of an altogether more marginalized, less educated and less cosmopolitan life-story. In her portrayal of Insel’s family, domestic circumstances and cultural consciousness, Loy adulterates Oelze’s biography with myriad inventions, omissions and alterations—pushing this ostensible roman à clef towards a parody of that form. Early in the novel, Loy’s alter-ego, Mrs. Jones, is forced to abandon her plan to write Insel’s biography when she realizes that her erstwhile subject had purloined the details of his own life story from a novel by Kafka. Jones is herself depicted as a figure blighted by creative impasses, troubled by an incapacity to distinguish between truth and fiction and prone to experiencing dramatic shifts in her perception. By littering the narrative with references to doors, keys and acts of obstructed and delayed ingress and egress, Loy draws a network of false and chimerical connections to the surface of this remarkably self-aware novel.