“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 predilection 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. Alpha—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.
In recent decades, Loy has often been cast as a modernist feminist and Insel is read as a radical détournement of Surrealism’s problematic modelling of gender and creativity. Notwithstanding the rhetorical force of her “Feminist Manifesto,” the form of Loy’s feminism remains hard to define. Figuring herself, in “Pazzarella,” as an enemy of “the sacred and inalterable front of masculine solidarity,” Loy writes of having evolved in adolescence “a weird strictly personal form of feminism of which the militant aspect consisted in being peculiarly benign to any woman who had been ‘pushed’ ” (“Islands in the Air”). These idiosyncratic politics did not lead her into public activism on suffrage or education policy. Her feminism does, however, register in startling ways upon her work and, indeed, upon the economies of power and desire between Mrs. Jones and Insel in this novel. What makes Loy’s feminism so fierce is its brutality—but perhaps only the revolutionary violence of her proposal for “the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity throughout the female population at puberty” (“Feminist Manifesto”) is adequate riposte to the patriarchally straitjacketed society into which she had been born. Subtending all of Loy’s writing is a furious resistance to the oppressive regulation of female embodied experience and a commitment to unsettling essentialist binarism. In Insel, she plays out a narrative of reversed (and markedly unstable) gender polarities: making Insel the childlike, unstable and linguistically impoverished male muse to Jones’s powerful, older female patron. The dynamic of their physically and psychically imbricated interaction is no more traditional than it is simple.
The story of Insel’s composition and publication is a convoluted one. Loy is presumed to have started work on the novel in Paris some time after Oelze’s arrival there in 1933, and to have developed and edited the novel after her relocation to New York in 1936. Folders in the Loy archive at the Beinecke Library containing multiple handwritten and typed drafts bearing substantial editorial marks, along with innumerable fragments and variants, attest to a prolonged and multiphased authorial process. In spite of these efforts, to Loy’s disappointment, her editorial exertions on first one, and then the other side of the Atlantic, did not result in the novel’s publication in her lifetime.
In her unpublished dissertation on the author, Marisa Januzzi relates how Loy’s ambitions for the book’s publication were confounded in her lifetime. In December 1953, James Laughlin, editor at New Directions, returned the manuscript of Insel to its author, with regrets. By 1960, Loy’s daughter Joella was also invested in the project to see Insel realized in print but, though Laughlin wrote to the author again in that year, praising her larger “Islands in the Air” manuscript but cautioning that much “compression” would be required, their correspondence failed to yield a published text. In a letter of 1961 to Elizabeth Sutherland at Simon and Schuster, Laughlin identified Insel as the most readily publishable component of “Islands.” Though the editors were in agreement on its merit, Sutherland eventually returned the text in 1963. Here, the history of Insel stalls.
In the course of archival research for her doctoral dissertation (University of Chicago, 1990), Elizabeth Arnold found the typescript manuscript for Insel at the Beinecke library. Intrigued by the text, she was convinced that the manuscript had been left by Loy in a publication-ready state. After writing a chapter on the novel in her dissertation, she set out to pursue Insel’s publication and approached John Martin at Black Sparrow Press. Arnold’s editorial efforts—underwritten, as Conover points out in his original introduction to the Black Sparrow edition, by a recognition that “nothing had to be altered”—brought Loy’s long prose, for the first time, into print. Conceived in Paris in 1936, carried as a collection of notes and ideas to New York, and there compiled, edited and (at least) twice rejected, Insel finally saw publication in Santa Rosa, California, in 1991.
In October 2013, I came across the “Visitation of Insel” in a folder marked “YCAL MSS 6 SERIES 1 BOX 2, FOLDER 39: INSEL: FIRST DRAFT FRAGMENTS” in the Beinecke Library. In her 2013 essay on Loy, Amy Morris alludes briefly to the “Visitation of Insel,” designating it “a prose fragment from the late thirties or early forties.” A single sheet of paper, empty but for six words, is housed in the same folder at the archive. It reads: “End of Book Visitation of Insel.” This note unambiguously identifies the “Visitation” as an intended addendum to the novel. Like the “Visitation” passage with which it is housed, it is materially congruent in terms of paper, writing materials and handwriting with the holograph fragments which constitute the novel’s early draft notes. And yet the “Visitation of Insel” sits at a strange angle to the published text: the fossil of an authorial intention later revoked. Provoking questions as to authorial intent, working practices, and even the rightful designation of its own terminal point, the “Visitation” might complicate, but it does not compromise the validity of the posthumously published novel. The novel, as it was published in 1991 and is republished here, remains Loy’s last edited and corrected draft of the text. Whatever authority once attached to Loy’s note, the “Visitation of Insel” was excluded from subsequent drafts by the author herself. Nevertheless, its existence is exciting.
The end of Insel finds Mrs. Jones taking leave of Insel in Paris as she prepares to join her daughters in New York. Their last meeting is bittersweet. While the narrator is exhilarated by the decision finally to sever their connection, her companion is vaguely stunned by this definitive dissolution of their relationship. He seems, nonetheless, to appreciate its inevitability. With Jones’s earlier promise to deliver him into Manhattan either forgiven or forgotten, Insel’s valedictory expression of globalized gratitude—“Danke für alles—Thanks for everything”—closes the novel.
Set, we can surmise, some two years later, the “Visitation” opens with the narrator as alienated newcomer in the New York domain of her daughters Sofia (also referred to as “Sophia”) and Alda, and the extra-diegetically invoked Aaron. Here, as in the contemporaneous prose piece, “Promised Land,” these characters correspond to Loy’s daughters Fabienne and Joella and the latter’s husband, Julien Levy. The autonomy enjoyed by Jones in the novel is, in the “Visitation,” greatly diminished. Her daughters have become her keepers and her gallery agent “business” is revealed as a latterly regretted stroke of largesse on the parts of Alda and Aaron. Most bruisingly, the narrator’s inching progress on her book—already, in Insel, the cause of much self-castigation—is described by her elder daughter as a ploy to “get more money out of” her resentful relatives. Alda’s charge, “ ‘You’re no good—never have been any good—’ ” is received by the beleaguered narrator as “blank truth.” Resonating with her own low estimation of herself, this taunt acts as a sort of psychic propellent which sends her reeling.
Left alone, hungry and incapacitated by ulcer-induced pain, the narrator retires to a couch. Her solitude is soon ruptured by the “Visitation of Insel.” An apparition manifests itself in her room, a surrealist “presence” which the narrator recognizes as Insel. Divested of all “shreds of flesh,” Insel is now a palpable “invisibility.” A mute ghostly force, he projects his thoughts directly into her brain. What follows is a disquisition on her onetime friend, charge, muse and occasional tormentor: an often bewildering exposition of Insel’s character from which some astounding conclusions are drawn. At the end of the episode, the narrator is eventually recalled to reality by the voice of her younger daughter who, having returned, demands assistance with her preparty toilette. In a jarring shift, the “Beam controlling a surrealist man” collapses bathetically to “the high-light on a fallen curler.” When the incorporeal “Sur-realist Being” is replaced by the very emphatically fleshed—“clammy,” “honnied”—body of Sophia, a specifically maternal materiality reasserts primacy over the psycho-spiritual realm. By structuring the passage in this way, Loy bookends the fantastic “visitation” scene with the banal quotidian. The “Visitation”’s core of hallucinatory philosophy is set within this frame of unhappy domestic “reality.” Echoing the effect of her earlier encounters with Insel in the novel, the narrator of the “Visitation” is left disoriented in his wake.
The “Visitation” presents Insel in terms that are at once familiar and significantly developed from his characterization in the novel. Imagery associated with light, divinity, electricity, technology, the manipulation of time, healing and doubling are carried over from Insel. Here, as before, peculiar powers are ascribed to his eyes. Some concepts relating to the pineal gland and “blind back”—charged though they are with intertextual allusions—are less immediately intelligible. The Insel of the “Visitation” is understood by the narrator to have undergone a further phase of evolution since his last appearance in the novel. While this advancement augments his powers, it also makes him vulnerable to explosion. By projecting himself into New York, Insel risks being dynamited with his “own force.” In addition to the changes undergone by Insel, a major transformation is seen to have taken place in the narrator’s perception of him. Whereas, in the novel, she shies from the suggestion that Insel’s dissipation might, after all, be a product of morphine addiction, the narrator of the “Visitation” unshrinkingly salutes the revenant as “my drug addict.”
Prior to addressing the reverberations of that revelation, I want to plot the lines by which the Insel who manifests so unexpectedly in Manhattan might be related to his characterization in the novel. In both book and addendum, Insel is figured as a semi-divine entity. In spite of his many unsavoury attributes (including lustfulness, mendacity, unproductivity and criminality) he retains a paradoxically angelic aura of sanctity. Repeatedly associated, in the novel, with an “especial clarity of the light” (this page), Insel’s status as otherworldly “man-of light” is indexed to the degree of his material tangibility. Having arrived, in the “Visitation,” at a state of absolute immateriality, he is perceived to hang from the “cosmic consciousness by a ring of light.”
Among the most striking of Insel’s attributes in the novel is his capacity to generate what he calls his Strahlen, or rays. A curious amalgam of supernatural, spiritual and corporeal elements, these rays are generated by, and temporarily obscure, the revolting appearance of his flesh. In Insel, the eponymous anti-hero’s degree of fleshliness fluctuates constantly. Watching him swing between extremes of embodiment and immateriality, Jones comes to associate these fluctuations with the waxing and waning of his Strahlen. The physical environment of those in range of his rays is repeatedly seen to alter itself in sympathy with Insel’s state of mind. Constituting a sort of fluid ephemeral exoskeleton, these rays provide the infrastructure for the psychic bridge between Insel and Mrs. Jones. These magnetic rays also possess capacities for healing; they nullify “the lightning hand of pain” (this page).
Insel retains this function as “magnetic healer” in the “Visitation.” Indeed, there inheres a suggestion in the opening fragments that the narrator’s ailment—which eventually “turned out to be a duodenal ulcer” (this page)—may have somehow summoned the surrealist spirit to her side. Upon Insel’s arrival, “the pain lay dead among the shadows”; both physical and emotional suffering are immediately salved. As Carolyn Burke, Loy’s biographer, notes, the author received a corresponding ulcer diagnosis in 1940. A psychosomatic explanation is posited by the author for the incidence of this longterm complaint. In “Islands in the Air” and the short essay, “Tuning in on the Atom Bomb,” Loy associates the ulcer with atmospheres of culpability and condemnation, and with the operation of a pernicious internalized “Voice.” A remnant of her mother’s habitual recriminations, this “Voice” was incorporated into her own psyche in childhood and persists even into her own motherhood. Given Loy’s interest in psychoanalysis, and her infamously troubled relationship with her mother, it bears highlighting that the “Visitation” pushes the role of ulcer-trigger onto the narrator’s daughter.
In the poem, “Evolution,” Loy marvels at Nature’s progressive improvement of “increasingly/complex organisms/streamlined for survival,” asking, at the end of the poem:
“what, in infinitude,
will be our contour,
our density,
our potency?”
Insel, as he appears in the “Visitation,” is the disembodiment of these speculations. With its images of prototypical growth and musings about man’s potential for future evolution, the novel prepares us for Insel’s reappearance, in the “Visitation,” as a new and improved version of himself. While the Insel of the novel remains a fundamentally corporeal being who absorbs and exudes electricity, the Insel of the “Visitation” is entirely, fleshlessly electric. Where once Jones was astonished at the extent of his arm’s reach (this page), the evolved Insel of the “Visitation” reaches across continents. In her dialogic essay “Mi & Lo,” Loy suggests that “a man aware of the fourth dimension, if enclosed within a room without exits, could get out of the room.” In the “Visitation,” Insel realizes this potential.
In Insel, Jones wondered whether her pet Surrealist was somehow capable of existing in two states at once. In the “Visitation,” she clearly perceives him as an innately binary construct. Fed by an internal circulatory system, he is supported by a quasi-internalised, exo-skeletal “phosphorescent circulation.” This inconstant layer constitutes the aura glimpsed in the novel. A further comparison is made here between the nature of the normal man, in whom “good & evil are proportionately mixed,” and that of the drug addict, in whom these opposites alternate. The description of Insel’s “amazing dédoublement” is perhaps the most obscure component of the “Visitation.” Building on the novel’s frequent allusions to doublings, halvings and bisectionalities, Loy suggests that further evolution has enabled the surrealist artist, parthenogenetically, to split. By formulating his own simulacrum, Insel can exist bodily in Europe and spiritually in America.
Although, in “History of Religion and Eros,” Loy had proposed that a “mystic” might, through training, gain control over atomic and electronic capabilities already latent within him, here it is the psychotropically enhanced surrealist artist who performs this feat. In the “Visitation” ’s depiction of how Insel achieves “the electronic transfer of his person through space” (“History of Religion and Eros”), Loy employs a number of highly elusive concepts. The genealogy of her startling image of the spinal column acting as conductor for a dynamizing life-force of immense voltage can be traced through “Mi & Lo” and the short story “Incident.” The “gland” which Insel suspects of enabling “the penetration of his mind by an extra-luminous radience” is, we can adduce from Loy’s wider oeuvre, the pineal gland. More mystical than medical, Loy’s notion of the pineal gland owes much more to the writings of Blavatsky than Bataille. The equally strange image of the “blind back” recurs in “Mi & Lo” and “The Child and the Parent.” A sort of psychic stopper which exists forever in the past, the blind back shuts off the ordinary human body from an infinite “cosmic consciousness.” It is “the shutter on the fourth dimension” which blocks off our entrance into that ordinarily unavailable zone (“Mi & Lo”). In the novel, Insel faces his blind back towards the future, thereby perverting this obstructive function (this page). Freed from the tri-dimensional incarceration that is the lot of the common man, the surrealist genius runs rampant in an invaded fourth dimension. This, we are given to understand, is how the “Visitation” came to pass.
Throughout Insel, Loy connects the painter with machine technologies. Critics including David Ayers, Andrew Gaedtke, and Tyrus Miller have analyzed the operation of these technologies in the novel in relation to a complex of scientific and pseudo-scientific theories. They cite Loy’s readings on mysticism, early experiences with Crowleyite occultism and a Christian Science vocabulary of mesmerism, magnetism and rays. In the novel, Mrs. Jones presents the telepathic connectivity she shares with Insel as a phenomenon no less magical and unfathomable than the latest developments in interwar communications technology. Whereas Insel uses photographic terminology in its description of the artist’s “development,” the “Visitation” depicts the surrealist spirit being “relayed” through the air as though by radio. Insel’s transatlantic manifestation is framed as an inter-psychic broadcast.
Pre-eminent among Insel’s powers is his capacity to manipulate time. When he is at his most powerful, he becomes capable of enfolding his patron into his idiosyncratic timezone, applying himself variously in the novel to accelerate, decelerate and stop time. Reaching forward from 1938, the Insel of the “Visitation” remains paradoxically anchored, via an “antedeluvian tail,” to the past. Appearing to the narrator in the present, he simultaneously inhabits both past and future. A “primordial soft-machine”—he is a being at once ancient and ultra-modern. Insel’s anachronistic constitution is coded in a trail of bones, primitive tools and machines. Emitting “search-light shafts” from “future eyes,” he beams a premonition of imminent war back from the future. Ocular analogue to the smile of Alice’s Cheshire Cat, when the rest of him “fades,” it is his eyes that linger.
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.