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 ” By cutting this one-time “End of Book” from future edits, Loy effectively rescinded the findings of her “research on the spirit”; this edition of Insel recovers it from the archive for her readers.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
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
1
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.