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In her unpublished dissertation on the author, Marisa Januzzi relates how Loy’s ambitions for the book’s publication were confounded in her lifetime.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.