Insel (2 page)

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.