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their versos, discarded drafts of these andrelated 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

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    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