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.