Insel (21 page)

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 Magritte, 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