Insel Page 16

  [XLI]

  For years, I had been submitted to the tedium of the imaginative living among races conceiving no final outlet for their dynamism but destruction, forced to inertia by the rush of intellect in the wrong direction, until the casual accident of chance threw me a dope-fiend—guinea-pig for experiment—in research on the spirit.

  [XLII]

  In the make-up of normal man, his good & evil are proportionately mixed. The outstanding characteristic of the drug addict is their separation; their awful alternation.

  We hear that a drug in impairing nerve tissue produces a vicious exaltation & our curiosity is no further intrigued. Nevertheless I had come upon a creature of my own species intermittently enveloped in an aura identical with the atmosphere of some cathedrals in which one catches an actual detonation of a sanctity amassed through the ages.

  [XLIII]

  Sophia, rising from the incredible chaos she produced in the tiny bathroom, her arms white snakes ‘before the fall’, was weaving in the air the rhythm of her toilet.

  Under my fingers the clammy tendrils clinging to her neck sizzled in the curling tongs. Her curses of procrastination crackled about my head while through the slab-like snow of her luminous back that faint electric ‘comfort of life’ conveyed her intrinsic aloofness of honnied marble. The silk, as if pleased to find no intervening fabric, slipped on the bare severity of her body.

  I ‘do her up’.

  Five strass discs confined to the acute concavity of her waist, crests of soft rocks, the pyramidal folds of a taffeta the colour of dim coal.

  “Why the hell must you go and marry a great cow of a man? I’m huge!” she exploded.

  The glitter of a girl prepared for a

  [XLIV]

  party drew the depths of her eyes to the surface. A tinge of azure underlying the shadows & roses of her skin unfolded in the beauty of her face an ineffable magnolia.

  With the deep velvet of her cloak, she doused the unbroken harmonies of a figure she could not ‘see’. Her radiance flared in the slam of a door, leaving a scattered ash of toilet articles & undercloths.

  I picked them up with the successive effort of manual acts performed while the brain is tracing a dissimilar diagram __ _ _ _

  [XLV]

  until as in the confusion of uneasy dreams I must identify that Beam controlling a surrealist man with the high-light on a fallen curler _ _ the scintilla assuming an intermediary significance __ the phosphorescent drug-addict, like a guinea-pig for experiment, flickers within range of my speculations. It is, in as far as I am aware, no particularly cleanly matter from which radium is extracted.

  *

  End of Book

  Visitation of Insel

  *

  AFTERWORD

  Insel is a novel written by a poet, with a poet’s interest in the sounds of words. What is at first most striking, and of special interest to readers of Loy’s poetry, is the adamantine, alliterative quality of the language here which, like the slow piling up of latinate diction and byzantine phrasing in her poems, makes Loy’s novel difficult. But what may on first reading seem byzantine and unapproachable is the very quality which gives Loy’s writing an austere beauty that repays the attentive reader. Choosing the most resistant subject matter, and employing language at once stony and visionary, she finds beatitude in the most unlikely places. Insel the clochard, the ethereal bum, belongs to a long line of materially destitute characters in whom Loy located spiritual riches.

  The arduous language with which she develops Insel’s character reflects a decision to persist in the struggle to hammer the ineffable out of the hard physical matter of language, paint, stone and metal that were Loy’s media as a poet and visual artist. The narrator’s fear for Insel, and for herself as she comes under his spell, derives from Insel’s disengagement from the physical world, which—in spite of its imperfection—provides the material for art. Although she is repeatedly tempted to join Insel on his flights into the “increate,” lured by her glimpses of beauty in the perfect peace of his vision of the absolute, she is ultimately repelled by the way this vision turns one away from life rather than toward it. Her resolve to fight Insel is remarkable given the force with which his vision attracts her: “If Insel committed suicide—I could share in that, too.” The promise of a blissful reprieve from life’s suffering proves almost too great a temptation for the narrator, who later will need to weave her disintegrated self back together after an outing with Insel.

  But just as the mantras of “timeless peace,” “perfect happiness,” blooming fragrance and space are about to pull her under, she happens to glance at a cafe clock, on whose “uncompromising dial all things converged to normal.” “In my veritable seances with Insel, the clock alone retrieved me from nonentity—thrusting its real face into mine as reminder of the temporal.” This periodic attention to the clock prevents her from merging with the otherworldly Insel, who seems to be on his way out of life, having relinquished his right to secular existence. Frequent appointments with friends and other artists—a relentless schedule—provide a structure within which the narrator can both experience Insel’s world from a safe distance and maintain the balance necessary to record her experience of his “Edenic region of unreasoning bliss,” which in spite of its destructiveness she values. In her description, Insel visualizes “the mists of chaos curdling into shape,” just as she herself seeks to evoke “a chaos from which I could draw forth incipient form.” The narrator consistently pushes the “procreational chaotic vapor” that threatens to destroy both Insel and herself in the direction of artistic form. It is no surprise, then, that the narrator’s final victory over Insel—the definitive moment of the book—coincides with her success as a writer. By the end of the novel, she has reached the necessary compromise for the practicing artist: to make the most of the flawed human condition, to refine as much as possible the imperfect media available to the artist in this world. She encourages Insel to do the same, to get back to his painting in spite of both his financial worries and his precarious hold on reality. But she can only be sure that she herself will keep her balance; she leaves Insel at last to fend for himself.

  Insel, the character, is modeled on the German surrealist painter, Richard Oelze, with whom Loy was acquainted in the mid-1930s in Paris. Rumor has it that Oelze was addicted to opium, and that Loy may have helped him recover from his addiction. Though in Insel and many of her poems Loy focuses on how decadence incapacitates the artist, she also makes a point to cast in sharp relief the actual devastation of individual lives brought about by drug addiction, poverty, and madness. Throughout her writing career, Loy gravitated toward the rockbottom of human existence for her subject matter, always struggling to locate what beauty or hope might reside there, but without romanticizing the anarchy or squalor.

  Mina Loy met Oelze in 1933. By this time, she had already written two other fictional accounts of avant-garde figures she knew, neither of which was ever published. Brontolivido satirizes the Italian Futurist, F. T. Marinetti, and Colossus describes her relationship with Arthur Cravan (“Colossus” in Insel), the proto-Dadaist poet whom she married in 1918. During the twenties, Loy had associated with several other expatriates living in Paris, including Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Natalie Barney, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Constantin Brancusi, and Peggy Guggenheim (probably “Alpha” in Insel), who helped Loy financially, arranging exhibitions of her art work and backing her lamp shade business for a time.

  From 1931 until she left Paris in 1936, Loy worked as Paris representative for her son-in-law, Julien Levy (“Aaron” in Insel), an art dealer and collector whose New York gallery introduced surrealist art to America. Her job was to commission paintings for the gallery from artists, such as Oelze, who were living in Paris. Earlier associations with Marcel Duchamp, Cravan, and Man Ray had given her entrée to André Breton’s circle of surrealist artists in the twenties, and she successfully commissioned work for Levy’s gallery from Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, René M
agritte, Alberto Giacometti, Giorgio de Chirico, and other major figures of the movement. Chances are that it was in this capacity that Loy met Oelze, who arrived in Paris on the last train out of Hitler’s Germany and, 33 years old and relatively unknown as a painter, continued an itinerant lifestyle that ended only after the war, when he settled in Worpswede. Around the time Loy knew him, he seemed always to be passing through the places he lived in, invariably choosing an apartment near the local train station.

  In Insel, she comments that Oelze did not speak a word of French, and that his “will-o’-the-wisp” behavior extended to his association with the French Surrealists, with whose work his own paintings have been grouped and among whom he might have found kindred spirits, or at least sympathetic colleagues. But Oelze assumed the pose of the reticent mingler rather than the blind conformist in Breton’s regimented inner circle, just as Loy had assumed the role of critical observer in her associations with the Italian Futurists and the New York Dadaists. Oelze hid behind the language barrier and the identity of the transient.

  Along with a mutual respect for each other as artists, it may have been this shared aversion to wholehearted membership in groups that drew Loy and Oelze together. In all of her associations with the avant-garde—she was well-connected with the important artistic and literary circles of the first decades of the century in Europe and America before she became a virtual recluse in the Lower East Side of New York—Loy fought to maintain her independence, and survival, as an artist. Likewise, Oelze seems to have developed a similar strategy with regard to the Surrealists. His first exposure to surrealist art came in 1921, when he saw reproductions of paintings by Max Ernst and Hans Arp in Ascona, Italy. The favorable impression they made on him eventually drew Oelze to Paris in 1933, where he soon met Ernst and struck up a friendship with Paul Eluard. He showed his paintings at a few of the Surrealists’ exhibitions, but his contact with Breton’s crew was sporadic at best, and when he did encounter them en masse, he acted coy.

  As time passed, Oelze moved farther and farther from the group, preferring to shut himself up in his sparsely furnished workroom to paint rather than to be seen at surrealist events. Though concerned about his psychological well-being and the precise direction in which he was headed as an artist, Loy apparently respected Oelze for his fundamentally surrealist nature and his independence from the surrealist group. She seems to have believed that, in spite of his periods of inactivity, this behavior was evidence of a more serious dedication to his art. Throughout her life, she struggled with the conflict between an attraction to centers of artistic and literary activity—meeting the Futurists in 1913 had jolted her out of a long debilitating isolation—and the need to stay at home and work. In a 1929 Little Review questionnaire, she confessed that her greatest weakness was compassion, and her greatest strength was her “capacity for isolation.”

  The frequency with which social outcasts of every description appear in her poems and fiction reflects a concern about the possibility of maintaining one’s integrity as an artist while part of a group, be it the middle class or the avant-garde. Her interest in Oelze continues this pattern of ambivalent feelings about avant-garde groups she had been associated with since she met Marinetti. Though she welcomed the heightened level of artistic activity and social life that surrounded avant-garde groups, she wasn’t interested in collaboration; she couldn’t abide by the tendency of the avant-garde to view works of art as means to political ends, for example; and there was no place for a serious woman artist in the elitist fraternities that these groups often became. Thus, it is not surprising that Loy was critical of the surrealist idea that the work of art is valuable only as a means of achieving the mental state of surreality, as well as of the Surrealists’ tendency to view women as passive muses incapable of the work of the serious artist.

  She takes her criticism of the Surrealists one step farther when she questions their very notion of what the surrealist state of mind actually is. Insel was, according to Loy, “more surrealistic than the Surrealists”; he “possessed some mental conjury enabling him to infuse an actual detail with the magical contrariness (that French) surrealism merely portrays.” When Insel joked that the Surrealists wouldn’t have anything to do with him because he’d ask them for money, Loy’s narrator replies, “I should have thought you’d be worth a little money to a Surrealist. He might learn what supereality is about— you are organically surreal—.…”

  In this way, Loy uses Insel to set herself not just apart from but far above the Surrealists while at the same time guarding against this quintessential Surrealist’s instability and misogyny. The narrator’s defiant farewell to Insel at the close of the novel sounds feminist but does not come across as hollow feminist dogma; her victory over his seductive aura and near violence is hard-won, and the tie to survival as an artist gives her victory more breadth. Loy’s emphasis on preservation of the integral self or ego in Insel affirms her life-long concern about her identity as a practicing artist. In this sense, Insel can be read not only as an experiment in surrealist narrative, but as a satire on the whole surrealist endeavor. If this is true, the similarities between Loy’s Insel and André Breton’s Nadja bear more than a passing consideration. Loy may have actually structured her novel after Breton’s in order to satirize him—as Victorian-styled middle class voyeur—and to express her indignation at the compromised role the Surrealists assigned to women.

  Throughout her long career, Mina Loy kept a sober check on what glimpses of the other side the difficult and painful world can offer, partly because she recognized the futility of attempting to live in this world as if it were the next one, and partly because she was committed to producing an art with a measure of integrity. The limits Loy places on her narrator in Insel reflect this commitment, as does the narrator’s victory at the end of the novel, when she asserts her authority over what up to this point has been for her a vision of overwhelming, and mostly destructive, power, with Insel in control. Finally, she is able to draw Insel’s attention to her power. By transmuting his “Sterben—man muss” (Die, one must) to “Man muss reif sein—One must be ripe,” she shocks Insel into a new way of seeing; he notices “me for the first time.” The narrator has surpassed the richness in postponement that paralyzes Insel, and Mina Loy has completed her novel.

  Elizabeth Arnold

  1991

  APPENDIX A

  TRANSLATION OF FOREIGN WORDS AND PHRASES

  this page belote: pinochle

  this page Mädchen: girl

  this page Huissier: sheriff [Loy’s note]

  this page Es war wirklich prachtvoll: It was really splendid

  this page Der Prozess: The Trial

  this page Zum Teufel: What the devil

  this page Was haben Sie schönes erlebt: What beautiful experiences have you had [Loy’s note]

  this page clochard: tramp, hobo, bum

  this page Elle n’a pas froid aux yeux: She does not have cold eyes

  this page Fleisch ohne Knochen: boneless meat

  this page carrefour: intersection

  this page Je suis la ruine féerique: I am an enchanting ruin

  this page La faim qui rode autour des palaces?: Starvation prowling palaces? [Loy’s note]

  this page I read later that sugar was used for strengthening concrete. [Loy’s note]

  this page Vielleicht verkaufen: Perhaps to sell

  this page Die nackte Seele: The naked soul [Loy’s note]

  this page schade: a pity [Loy’s note], i.e., too bad!

  this page Sterben: To die

  this page Sterben—man muss: Die—one must

  this page Unglaublich: Incredible

  this page consommation: drink, snack

  this page Ameise: ant

  this page cafés fines: coffees and brandy

  this page librairie: bookshop

  this page maquereau: pimp

  this page macrusallo (i.e., maquereau and salaud blended together)

  this
page plat anglais: a plate of cold meats

  this page Um Gottes Willen: For God’s sake

  this page Pfefferminztee: peppermint tea

  this page sommier: divan

  this page Strahlen: rays

  this page Ich bitte Sie: I beg you

  this page femme de ménage: housekeeper

  this page bidons: cans

  this page Der Totenkopf: The death’s-head (In earlier manuscript versions and in letters, Loy called the novel Der Totenkopf. —Ed.)

  this page pour se faire une beauté: to make himself up, to do his face

  this page Chambres de Bonnes: Maids’ Rooms

  this page Das ist die Irma?: That’s Irma?

  this page Die Irma ist nass: Die Irma is wet [Loy’s note]

  this page ou connait ça: or knows that (obscure: perhaps a slip for “qui connait ça, who knows that”)

  this page lustig: jolly [Loy’s note]

  this page grand sympathique: the sympathetic nerve

  this page Gestatten Sie?: May I?

  this page Entwicklung: development

  this page écoliers: schoolchildren

  this page Sterben—Man muss: One must die (see this page)

  this page Ich bin so müde: I am so tired

  this page Il dort dans son dos: It sleeps on its back

  this page Und Tatsächlich: “And as a matter of fact” [Loy’s note]

  this page trompe l’oeil: deceptive appearance, illusion

  this page The poet Arthur Cravan (“Colossus”), Loy’s second husband, is considered a precursor of the Dadaists and a patron saint of the Surrealists. (Ed.)

  this page Seien wir uns wieder gut: Let us like one another again, let’s make up

  this page die Rothaarige: the redhead

  this page um Himmels Willen!: for Heaven’s sake!

  APPENDIX B

  CHRONOLOGY OF MINA LOY

  1882 b. December 27 as “Mina Gertrude Lowy,” London, England.