Insel (4 page)

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.

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

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.