Insel Read online

  We cannot know what caused Loy to resuscitate Insel, but we are certainly prompted to wonder. The narrator of the “Visitation” understands his appearance in New York to signal their “mutual forgiveness.” She suggests two occasions, “his dope-ring duplicity” and her “written account of him,” for which this forgiveness might be forthcoming. A third—that of Jones’s abandonment of Insel—suggests itself for consideration. Inherent in the act of Insel’s Manhattan transfer is the fact of his continued presence in Europe. At the end of the novel, in spite of the “pact” the pair draw up in Chapter Two to get him to America, Insel remains behind to live out the war in the continent from which Mrs. Jones promised to help him escape. As did Oelze. In Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy, Burke writes that “[i]n October 1936, after the failure of their friendship, Oelze made his way to Switzerland,” and nothing in Loy’s biography or writings suggests that she maintained correspondence with Oelze subsequent to that date.

  The year 1933—the year of Oelze (and Insel)’s arrival in Paris—had seen the publication of the Deutscher Kunstbericht (German Art Report), signaling the Nazis’ dire intentions for German artists. In the same year, Goebbels established the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture), and the first Schreckenskammern der Kunst (Horror Chambers of Art) assembled “degenerate art” for exhibition. However, notwithstanding a handful of curt references in Insel to war, the recognition that Oelze’s security is at stake is explicitly articulated only once by Mrs. Jones (this page). By 1936, the precarious position of German artists was abundantly and broadly apparent. In August 1937, The New York Times ran a report headed: “Goering launches the Nazi Art Purge. Orders Broad Clean-Up of All Public Exhibits to Get Rid of ‘Un-German’ Works.” Below it, the subtitle screamed “MODERNISTS ARE TARGET.” A plethora of similarly stark portraits of an artistic community under attack presented America as a haven for German artists at risk of annihilation. If we can suppose that the “Visitation” dates to 1938, it might be worth considering what Loy had learnt in the two years since her solo flight from Paris. Could a dawning awareness of what had been at stake in their exchanges have spurred the author, in Oelze’s absence, to resurrect Insel—the textual avatar of the German artist she had left to his uncertain fate?

  While the “written account of him” to which the narrator of the “Visitation” alludes is, we might reasonably presume, Insel itself, the matter of Insel’s “dope-ring duplicity” is rather less straightforward. It has long been believed that Loy attempted to cure Richard Oelze of a debilitating drug addiction. In chapter 16 of the novel, Jones is dismayed to learn from Mlle. Alpha of Insel’s heretofore undivulged history of morphine addiction. Her plaintive coda to this revelation, “[m]oreover, was not Insel’s morphinism a thing of the past?” (this page), remains suspended over the remainder of the novel. The narrator’s suspicion about the endurance of his habit remains, in the novel, remarkably contained—focused almost exclusively in this conversation with Mlle. Alpha. Admitting that she favoured her own idea of him, when confronted with Alpha’s superior knowledge of Insel’s insalubrious past, Jones admits to having “waived this information” (this page).

  As the critic David Ayers has remarked, the novel suppresses its own troublingly prosaic suggestion that Insel’s dissipation might, after all, be a product of morphine addiction. Ayers’s diagnosis is lent further credence by the existence, among Loy’s papers, of multiple handwritten fragments of the novel inscribed with the distinctly unambiguous abbreviation, “Morph.” Most of these passages make the transfer into subsequent edits—but they do so divested of their header. Just as Jones denies the possibility that Insel might still be in thrall to his old addiction, Insel’s readers are denied this narrow interpretation of Insel’s behaviour. Or, given the success of Insel as a novel, perhaps we are liberated from it. Insel’s ability to enrich his personal, elastic, atmosphere with an array of sensory effects suggestive of certain psychopharmacopoeia is construed in the novel as a characteristic of his innate surrealism. In his 1924 “Manifesto of Surrealism,” Breton likens Surrealism itself to a drug, writing: “There is every reason to believe that it acts on the mind very much as drugs do; like drugs, it creates a certain state of need and can push man to frightful revolts.” By alternating rapidly between descriptors for Insel, calling him first “the surrealist man” and then “the drug addict,” the “Visitation” suggestively conflates these terms.

  We can only guess as to why Loy chose to minimize this aspect of the narrative. Perhaps, with an eye to a censorious market, the author decided that a novel about a shady surrealist with Black Magic propensities would be more readily publishable than one about a blatant “dope-fiend.” Or, indeed, perhaps her motivation was more aesthetic than pragmatic. Several fragments which never make it in the “first draft” typescript further adumbrate the issue. In one, the narrator asks Aaron whether he could “tell” that Insel “was a morphomane.” His response is blunt: “Naturally—he answered__ he looked queer__ he looked like garbage.” In another example, the narrator addresses a character called Miriam, whose cameo appearances in Insel’s draft notes were never translated into the novel itself: “Suppose I were sitting outside a Café with a man one would not touch with the tongs & he seemed to have some emanation on which one ascended to heaven—could it be—drugs?” Elsewhere, Miriam laments the “sheer perversity … that a lift to utter realisation of Beauty should leave the Body so ugly.” All of these exchanges, like the “Morph” headers, were cut from later edits.

  In this context, the “Visitation” achieves a heightened significance. Potentially reframing the events of the novel as the surreal story of what happened when chance “threw [her] a dope-fiend,” the “Visitation” gives us Jones’s re-evaluation of the events of Insel. Whereas, in the novel, she admits that “drugs meant nothing to” her, the narrator of the “Visitation” regrets her hasty dismissal of opiates as mere “substitute for imagination” (this page). Lamenting her former myopia, she writes: “We hear that a drug in impairing nerve tissue produces a vicious exaltation & our curiosity is no further intrigued.” By explicitly announcing, “Here was my drug addict,” she invites us to re-read the novel, attending more fully to Mrs. Jones’s self-deception, and that of her implied audience. This re-reading delivers a parallel or supplementary, rather than a corrective interpretation of the book. For there is so much more going on in Insel than could be attributed to even the most surrealistically potent narcotics.

  The power of the “Visitation” ’s last line pivots on “radium.” That vibratory noun compels us to compare Loy’s “fluctuant” conceptualizations of atomic energy with the equally uneven course of her fascination with Insel. Asked, in a Little Review questionnaire of 1929, “What do you look forward to?,” Loy answered: “The release of atomic energy.” Throughout her writing life—from the poem “Gertrude Stein” of 1924 to the post–World War II prose of “Tuning in on the Atom Bomb”—Loy returned again and again to the concept of nuclear force. Her attitudes to atomic energy were heavily imprinted by the catastrophic inception, in that period, of the nuclear age. In its last lines, the “Visitation” elaborates on the significance of the “radio-activity” (this page) which Jones associates with Insel throughout the novel.

  At the end of its retrospective analysis of Insel as “phosphorescent drug-addict,” the “Visitation” concludes: “It is, in as far as I am aware, no particularly cleanly matter from which radium is extracted.” The drugs that enable Insel to hook himself up to the cosmic consciousness are at once potent and poisonous. In this, their doubled potentiality, they resemble radioactive matter. The carcinogenic repercussions of experimentation with atomic energy were, in the 1930s, already widely known; the extraction of radium was understood to be a perilous process. Likewise, Insel’s use of drugs to unlock untapped capacities in his mind affords him astonishing powers, but it also exposes him to considerable physical and psychic damage. Psychotropically enhanced and contaminated, his
brain now “gives off a radium glow.” In Insel, the narrator experiences, albeit telepathically, the twinned paralysis and paradise of the surrealist artist’s narcosis. Marvelling at the beauty of Insel’s “increate” (this page) imaginings, Jones recoils, ultimately forever, from the horror of his disintegration. The “Visitation” explores the consequences of Insel’s electric, surrealist, drug-assisted endeavours to amplify and extend Man’s “dynamism.” “Constructing, demolishing him kaleidoscopically,” the “Visitation” seeks “to demonstrate how he ‘worked.’ ” By cutting this one-time “End of Book” from future edits, Loy effectively rescinded the findings of her “research on the spirit”; this edition of Insel recovers it from the archive for her readers.

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  The base text for this edition of Insel is a typescript manuscript labeled “Third draft, copy 1” at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. This manuscript was prepared and corrected by Mina Loy. Her footnotes have been incorporated into Appendix A, which gives English translations of all foreign phrases except those which are clearly translated in the text of the novel. Where Loy indicated section breaks by triple spacing, we have numbered each section. A few minor corrections of punctuation and typing errors have been made, and foreign words and phrases have been italicized. In general, however, Loy’s idiosyncrasies have been preserved. Throughout the manuscript, Loy used British and American spellings interchangeably. For the purposes of this edition, we have used all American spellings, following the ninth edition of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

  Elizabeth Arnold

  “Visitation of Insel,” as it is published here for the first time, runs across forty-five small, handwritten and numbered pieces of plain paper. Most of the pages fit only one to three of Loy’s characteristically long sentences, and they appear to have been torn to size along a roughly horizontal line. Many bear, on their versos, discarded drafts of these and related passages. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the product of this peripatetic, portable writing practice currently contains three outright lacunae. Unlike the manuscript of the novel itself, which exists in numerous typescript drafts, this handwritten text is rife with orthographical errors, typos and incompletions. It also bears evidence of substantial editing and correction by Loy. The punctuation of “Visitation,” in line with the author’s customary style, is dominated by indeterminate dashes of varying lengths, the intended position of which, on unlined paper, and in a wandering hand, is sometimes ambiguous; the published text offers the closest typographical correlates, as approximately as possible. The sequence is ordered by roman numerals from I–XXXIX, and a single arabic numeral that marks the fortieth fragment. The five subsequent pages were not assigned numbers by the author; they are represented here with roman numerals in brackets. All but five of the pages are dated; the dates they bear span the period from August 4–23. Fragments XXIV–XXVI and XXVIII A are undated, while the fragment numbered XXVII is marked with the curious interrogative: “Aug?” Loy presents these dates in diverse formats, variously representing the same date as “4th Aug.,” “4th August,” “August IV,” “August IVth” and “Aug. IV.” This striking degree of inconsistency, coupled with the highly irregular justification of the dates, problematizes the presumption that these dates correspond, quasi-diaristically, to dates of composition. In the interests of legibility, these dates have been erased. A single page, inscribed “End of Book / Visitation of Insel,” is set off from the sequence with a pair of asterisks.

  House publishing conventions demanded that various changes were made to the punctuation and layout of piece. In order to produce a readily readable text, Loy’s haphazard systems of punctuation, indentation and capitalization have been substantially regularized. Words underlined in the manuscript have been italicized. A handful of compound words have been hyphenated or rendered as closed compounds. Some apparent spelling mistakes have been corrected; others, which have been deemed representative of Loy’s deliberately unorthodox orthography, such as the onomatopoeic enunciation of “prove” as “proove,” are retained. Two indecipherable words have been elided from the text and a single indefinite article has been inserted.

  Due to the exigencies of space and formatting conventions established by the Neversink series, it was not possible to include my extended notes and critical apparatus. A comprehensively annotated version of the “Visitation of Insel,” displaying and commenting upon its material particularities, along with all textual ambiguities, revisions, insertions and other markings, is available at www.mhpbooks.com/insel-visitation.

  Sarah Hayden

  INSEL

  1

  THE FIRST I HEARD OF INSEL WAS THE STORY OF A madman, a more or less surrealist painter, who, although he had nothing to eat, was hoping to sell a picture to buy a set of false teeth. He wanted, he said, to go to the bordel but feared to disgust a prostitute with a mouthful of roots. The first I saw of this pathetically maimed celebrity were the tiny fireworks he let off in his eyes when offered a ham sandwich. What an incongruous end, my subconscious idly took note, for a man who must once have had such phenomenal attraction for women. And he wants them of the consistency of motor tires … my impression faded off. For, to my workaday consciousness, he only looked like an embryonic mind locked in a dilapidated structure. I heard plenty of talk about his pictures, but I was afraid to visit his studio as, to all accounts, his lunacy rendered him unsafe. It rather took me aback, when a few days after his casual introduction to me, he paid me a call. I had been giving tea to my little model after the pose when he arrived. Her Slavonic person was colored a lovely luminous yellow, owing to some liver complaint, and her sturdy legs, which I supposed he could not see for she was already dressed for the street, were of such substance as sun-warmed stone. With the promptness of a magnet picking up a pin, he made a date with her for the following day.

  Facing each other they possessed voluptuous attributes the poor will find in one another unmarred by an unwholesomeness which is mutual. The model, tremendously engaged in hoping to have a baby to persuade her lover to make her his wife, later decided it would not be politic to turn up. Not without regret, however, for “I like him,” she confided to me, squeezing her hands together in delight.

  As for myself, he cleared my recollections of the prejudice for his madness as he sat disseminating in my amusing sitting room a pleasant neutrality, pulling one’s sympathies in his direction. And as the afternoon wore out, it was as if a dove had flown through the window and settled upon a chair. Whenever his features obtruded on the sight some impulse of the mind would push them out of the way as if one obeyed an implicit appeal not to look at him but rather give in to the mischievous peace which seemed to enclose him in a sheath.

  That evening I began a letter to a friend: “Aaron’s latest surrealist is absolutely divine. He has painted a picture that’s not so very hot in any particular detail—a gigantic back of a commonplace woman looking at the sky. It’s here to be shipped with the consignment I am sending to Aaron, and I swear whenever I’m in the room with it I catch myself staring at that sky waiting, oblivious of time, for whatever is about to appear in it. Most eerie! The man himself is just like that. He did not say anything in particular, but you felt you were in the room with an invisible will-o’-the-wisp, and that any moment it might light up. He’s the son, he said, of tiny working people and seems the most delicate and refined soul I’ve ever come across. He has an evening suit, but never an occasion to wear it, so he puts it on when he paints his pictures, first having meticulously cleaned everything in his studio. Now, I don’t mean he’s a delicate soul because he paints in evening dress—! That’s just one of his stories I remember. I shall probably find this quality exists only in my imagination because there’s something fundamentally black-magicky about the surrealists, and I feel that going in that direction, his face, that looks almost luminous from starvation, will turn out to be a death’s head after all.

  “It’s funny how people who
get mixed up with black magic do suddenly look like death’s heads—they will grin and there is nothing but a skull peering at you, at once it’s all over—but you remember. Sex is an exception. He is permanently a skull with ligaments attached, having the false eyes of an angel, and, at the back of them his cranium full of intellectual dust. Often they look like goat’s. While Moto has the expression of an outrageous ram, his wife the re-animated mummy of an Egyptian sorceress. In fact, they are very, in their fantastic ways, expressive of their art, which after all takes on such shapes as would seethe from a cauldron overcast by some wizard’s tortuous will.”

  The letter was never finished, for, and this was often to be the case, once he had left, his person would gradually gather together till at last one could normally see him as he really was, or had been when present. Tall, his torso concave, he was so emaciated that from his waist down he looked like a stork on one leg. His queer ashen face seemed veritably patched with the bruises of some physical defeat that had left him pretty repulsive. One’s mind, released from the unaccountable influence of his nature’s emanations, readjusted the time spent in his company to the rational proportion of an interview with a plain, eccentric, somewhat threadbare man, strangely pitiable in a premature old age. His manner alone remained unchanged by this surprising reverse—it was of an extreme distinction. Owing to this, before my letter drew to a close, I had lost the impression of whatever had inspired it, finding myself very much in the situation of Titania confronted with entirely meaningless donkey’s ears.

  It argued a certain good fortune, in Insel’s timing of his next visit, that it should coincide with that of a German girl, as his absolute inability to acquire any language to add to his own must have made his inhabitation of a foreign land a somewhat lonely affair. But in how far I found it at last impossible to determine, so narrowly his unformulated existence seemed associated with itself. Her visit was fortunate for me also, for later on, in our checking up on the subject of this very Insel, she, so common-sensed and unimaginative, was able to clear my doubt as to whether it was I who must be mentally deranged. Wishing to get on familiar terms with an acknowledged surrealist, we took him to a cafe, and, in the embracing glare of a locality above all others conducive to the liberal exchange of confidences between the most heterogeneous people, the meager personality of this stranded German opened up.