push them out of the way as if one obeyed an implicit appeal not to
look at him, but rather give in to the mischievous peace which seemed
to enclose him in a sheath.

That evening I wrote a letter to a friend:

Aaron's latest surrealist is absolutely divine. He has painted a
picture that's not so very hot, any particular detail-- a gigantic
back of a commonplace woman looking at the sky. It's here to be
shipped with the consignment I am sending to London, and I swear
whenever I'm in the room with it I catch myself staring at that sky
waiting, oblivious of time, for whatever is about to appear in it.
Most eerie! The man himself is just like that. He did not say
anything in particular, but you felt you were in the room
with an invisible will-o-the-wisp, and that at any moment it might
light up. He's the son, he said, of tiny working people and seems
the most delicate and refined soul I've ever come across. He has
an evening suit, but never an occasion to wear it, so he puts it
on when he paints his pictures, first having meticulously cleaned
everything in his studio. Now, I don't mean he's a delicate man.

soul because he paints in evening dress-- that's just one of his stories I remember. I shall probably find that this quality exists only in my imagination because there's something fundamentally black-magicky about the surrealists, and I feel that going in that direction his face, that looks almost luminous from starvation, will turn out to be a death's head after all. It's funny how people who get mixed up with black magic do suddenly look like death's heads-- they will grin and there is nothing but a skull peering at you, at once it's all over--but you remember. Max is an exception. He is permanently a skull with ligaments attached, having the false eyes of an angel, and, at the back of them his cranium full of intellectual dust. Often they look like goat's, while Breton is an outrageous ram, his wife the re-animated mummy of an Egyptian sorceress. In fact, they are very, in their fantastic ways, expressive of their art, which overcast after all takes on such shapes as would seem the from a cauldron by some wizard's tortuous will."

This letter was never finished, for once he had left, and (this was often to be the case) his person would gradually gather together till at last one could normally see him as he really was, or had been, when present. Tall, his torso concave, he was so

emaciated that from the waist down he looked like a stalk on one leg. His queer ashen face seemed veritably patched with the bruises of some physical defeat that had left him pretty repulsive. One's mind, released from the unaccountable influence of his

readjusted nature's emanations, the time spent in his company to the rational proportion of an interview with a plain, eccentric, somewhat threadbare rather dirty man, strangely pitiable in a premature old age. His manner, alone remained unchanged by this surprising reverse-- it was of an extreme distinction. Owing to this, before drew to a close, I had lost the impression of whatever had inspired it, finding myself very much in the situation of Titania confronted with entirely meaningless donkey's ears.

It argued a certain good fortune, in Insel's timing of his next visit, that it should coincide with that of a German girl, as his absolute inability to acquire any language to add to his own must have made of his inhabitation of a foreign land a somewhat lonely affair. But in how far I found it at last impossible to determine, so narrowly, his unformulated existence seemed associated with itself. Her visit was fortunate for me also,

for later on, in our checking up of the subject of this very Insel,
she, so common-sensed and unimaginative, was able to clear my doubt
as to whether it was I who must be mentally derenged. Wishing to get
on familiar terms with an acknowledged surrealist, we took him to
a cafe, and, in the embracing glare of a locality above all others
conducive to the liberal exchange of confidences between the most
heterogeneous people, the meager personality of this stranded German
opened up.

I still retain wisps of the irreal crises in his foot-loose
career that, as he related it, grew up, story by story, a frail
edifice of lies and memories out of our marble table-top. It was
securely buttressed by groups of obese tradesmen who, in their
agglomerated leisure, were playing bellotte. He told us, his
gray eyes atwinkle with the inner security the possession of a strange
surplus fortune, balancing destitution, gives to men of genius, he
had solved the problem of keeping alive without any money and thus
had lived for sixteen years.

been to remain undiscovered, that caused me so suddenly to fling
myself on that door and to open it-- outside stood a very severe
looking Huissier. He was sealing up the rooms. And, as usual"
added Insel, in utter discouragement, "They hauled me before a
magistrate."

His father, he said, was a schlosser, which turned out
to mean blacksmith, and very early in Insel's life, as in the episode
in the empty villa, his destiny appeared to me to get mixed up with
keys. I cannot remember in detail the vague accidents in which
his minor salvations depended upon keys, except for a fleeting im-
pression of Insel crawling under the bed to find his destitute
couch in search of some kind of key to a gas meter confused with
an intermittent in and out of his history, of gas men and
electricity bill collectors who would come to cut him off and who,
owing to some either mental or manual hokus-pokus of Insel with
the key, ended by turning the gas or electricity on. Thus leaving
him at least two elements of life. "Don't schlossers make keys,"
I asked. "Surely," he agreed. "Well, you've inherited the keys your
father made. You'll see the whole of your life will turn on a key.

B-15

unexpectedly the schlosser one, had hitherto been incapable of
relating to him had at length intruded upon us with his anvil stuffed
in his cheek.

Only towards the close of his reminiscences did he seem to have
shared a responsibility with normal men. "They sent me to war"
he told us wryly, voicing that unconvincing complaint against their
perpetual situation in the ridiculous made by people who, pleasing
to laugh at themselves, one suspects of aiding destiny in detaining
them there. "in two left-foot boots" and, trotting his fingers
along the table in a swerve, "the one would follow the other" he
explained as the mental eye also followed that earlier Insel---
out of the ranks; on the march to a war that, at its blasting
zenith, ceased to be war, for, in elaborating his martial adventures,
Insel turned out to have been taking part in a film.

B - 16

Then I looked at the note I had so unpreparably written,
wondering to what appeal, and why, I had answered. I did not care
if Insel were in trouble. Obviously he fabricated trouble and far
be it from me to deprive him of it--- I threw the card into the
waste paper basket, and started for the post. When I had opened
the front door I shut it again and retrieved the postcard. Before
the letter-box I put it in my pocket and turned away, only to go
back--- with a relieved determination I posted it.

Insel must have crossed my message for in a couple of
hours he panted into my place all undone, despairingly waving a
sheet of blue paper.

"Dass Blaue papier," he articulated hoarsely, ducking his
head as if the 'papier' was one of a shower of such sheets bombarbing
him in his dash for escape.

"Something the matter? Have a porto. Sit on a chair.
Whatever it is-- out with it!"

"Dass blaue papier," he reiterated, casting a haunted
look over his shoulder. On its return that look fell in with some
photographs of paintings lying on the table.

B-17

"Whose pictures are these?" asked Insel, immediately collected, and staring at each in turn with entire attention."

"Who could have done these?" they are mine."

"You are an extraordinarily gifted woman," he said, still staring at them. "Oh, how I wish I could read your book."

"Its not like those pictures," I laughed and told him their brief history.

"'Those' are my 'last exhibition' cancelled the moment the dealer set eyes on them.

"Good God" muttered Insel under his breath.

"I felt, if I were to go back; begin a universe all over again, forget all form I am familiar with, evoking a chaos from which I could draw forth incipient form, that at last the female brain might achieve an act of creation."

I did not know this as yet, but the man seated before me holding a photo in his somewhat invalid hand was. (most probably) the only other being in the world who had done this very thing--visualized the mists of chaos curdling into shape. But with a male difference, I must define further on.

B - 18

Well, it turned out, that the blue paper was a summons for rent involving the evacuation of his studio.

Insel's system in such emergency was this:-

Never to pay. To work himself into an individual kind of epilepsy whenever served with a summons or notified to appear in court to explain why the money was not forthcoming. Computing illusory accounts to find the exact sum he could promise to pay by a certain date, knowing full well he would not be able to pay anything at all; in order to scare himself into fits awaiting the fatal appointment.

Now one could watch him following the path of pursuit at an easy canter, having proved he had something definite to flee from.

His role was helplessness personified. So here he was without a roof. In spite of the ceiling a pitiless rain seemed to be falling upon him already.

Whenever I have seen poor people asleep on stone seats in the snow, like complementary colors in the eyes, there arise in my mind unused ballrooms and vacationers' apartments whose central

B-22

"So they liked the look of you," I teased with friendly disdain.

"Yes," he concurred apologetically.

"And-- was it nice?"

"Well," he reflected, "I _thought_ it was going to be nice. And now the trouble is, to get rid of them. And what have you erlebt?" he commented.

"Not quite so _much_-- anyhow."

I saw the picture. Its various forms, at once embryonic and precocious, being half evolved of degenerate purpose, were overgrown with a hair that never grew anywhere else-- it was so fine. And when our host had gone out of the room, Insel stared, at it amazed. rigid

His face became limbed with incredulity. He murmured, "I cannot believe I ever painted anything so wonderful. How did I do it?" he begged himself to explain.

When we got out on the street, again I walked some paces off parallel to him in order to observe him. Adverse remarks with ordinary men it is politic to keep to oneself, while to withhold

B-23

one's comments on Insel would have appeared impolite. His very personality taking the form of a question mark, it would have shown a lack of perspicacity when intentionally confronted with a self-composed conundrum, not to attempt solutions. The secretive exhibitionist would have felt himself unobserved, the intriguer, underrated.

Curiosity he constrained to stand off to take his measure, mentality, to pivot him for noting whether there were any creases in his aural suit. As those who are of the body, whom other bodies have traffic with, slap each other on the back, with / 100 Insel social intercourse depended on putting out feelers among the loose matter of psychologic nebulae.

"You walk so weirdly," I said. "Are you one of those surrealists who have taken up black magic?"

Totally bewildered, he exclaimed whatever is that? Yet, like all who have to do with any form of magic, he apparently had lost some of his specific gravity.

He was passing over the light-reflecting pavement in his shabby black as if a rigid crow, although with folded wings should skim.

B-24

32

30

25

"Acra," I said, "sends dreams across the Atlantic."

"He could not," protested Insel, off his guard. "He has not got the power."

There is a way of speaking that word peculiar to those
alone who have wielded it-- that way was his.

And he glided on, turning his face towards me hung with
deflated muscles one felt, could be blown about by the wind.

"You can't glide," it defied me, and I noticed how I
was keeping my distance in my effort to 'get at him.'

He had for the moment the stick-fast aloofness of an evil
presentiment-- the air of a priest of some criminal cult. All the
same, this slight impression of criminality he gave off at intervals
I did not receive as a direct impress on my own mind, but as a
glimpse of a conviction he hid within himself.

"Aren't you rather bad?" I laughingly inquired.

"Everybody imagines I am the devil." and, shrugging his
shoulders, "There's no harm in me at all."

When we fell into line once more, he resumed the uniformity
of all people making for a cafe.

188

end of second list

When I returned the place was different-- In the smoothed
out air there was a suspicion of a collapse in time. As if by a
magnet, I was drawn into the studio and up to the dark oak table.
Upon it lay a flat packet. I could have sworn it emitted a faint
phosphorescence that advanced from all the rest of the room. The
wrapping paper was so strikingly creasless it looked unusual. It
had in some inexplicable manner become precious as ivory; its
squareness was instinctively exact as the hexagons of wasps.

"He has left the drawings," I supposed, almost reluctantly
undoing this magnetic focus of an uncanny precision. But once
unfolded, I found it contained only a shabby block of writing paper
that had been left lying there and from which I had torn the note
I left for him.

"Did you find anything?" he asked when, later having
resuscitated from the moribond state in which he preferred to arrive,
he was able to articulate.

"Yes. What on earth---?"

"I wrapped it up," said Insel-- an enormous intention fixed
in his eyes.

conducted the tempo of thought and sentience in response to his
half petrified tepidity, for he moved within an outer circle of
partial decease-- a ring of death surrounding him-- that gave one of
those magically-animated corpses described by William Seebright.
Even before he came into one's presence, one received a draughty
intimation of his frosty approach. He chilled the air, flattened
the hour, faded color.

one

But if you could crash through this necropholous aura,
its consistency dissolved, and one came to an inner circle where
aerial things floated in a semi-existent aquarium. Or, at times he,
himself, would overflood it, as now when his coming close to me
effected acclimatization turning an unreal ice into tenuous warmth.

"I was so terribly afraid I should miss you." "I got to
bed at seven this morning-- (quite exceptional" he added hurriedly-- as
if wishing to efface a bad impression-- "I shall not do it again)
and when I woke up my watch said twenty past six. I was convinced you
would be gone-- But, is it not astounding-- a moment later it said
half
~~twenty~~ past four."

He had brought me a present-- As he bowed his head over
what he held in his hands, all the sweetstuffs of the earth exuded
from his nerves, in an exquisite music of a silence that is alive.
Soddens
He seemed to be saturated with some ineffable satisfaction, as if
emerged, drenched from some luxuriance requiring little tangible for
its consummation. I had to hold myself in check. My charmed
curiosity wanted to cry, "From what enchanted bed of love have you
so lately arisen? What astral Venus has just receded from your
embrace?"

It was a queer impulse, the idea of making such delicious
inquiry of this bald and toothless man whose clothes were stiff with
1/2 words.

"I'm so ugly naked," he told me most unexpectedly, in a tone of intense and anxious confidence. "I can't go to the public baths because I daren't walk down to the water."

"Your face is naked and you walk about with it."

"Yes," he assented miserably, "and it frightens the women. I used to be so beautiful. Is it imaginable," he asked, peering expectantly into my face.

"I'm tired of your tirade as to how hideous you are."

"All women are terrified of me," he continued automatically.

"I said tired-- not terrified, and I'll tell you why.

I've never really seen you. You always give me the impression that you are _not there_. Sometimes you have no inside; sometimes no outside, and never enough of anything to entirely materialize. Like a quick-sand when one looks at

It is almost impossible to recover the sequence, or the veritable simultaneity of the states, of consciousness, one experienced in the company of this uncommon derelict. It was so very much as if consciousness was performing stunts. Always in his vicinity one had the impression of, living in or rather of being surrounded by an aquarium-- filled with, not water, but a dim transparency.

The precreational chaotic vapor in which all things may begin to grow; the coincidence of our both having evoked this in our work may be the explanation for the telepathic pictures he conveyed to me.

Either he had a peculiar power of projecting his visualizations or some leak in his psyche enabled you to tap the half formulated concepts that drifted through his mind.

In his mixture of Beggars Opera and oratorio he shew-
ed a tragi-comic duality in his confidences. A coxcomb in
purgatory he enlivened a supliant self abasement with pranks
he was proud to have played on a short-sighted mistress.
Vast tracks of his barren universe were fixed in her mono-
cle.

Our discussions of his tribulations had the light
hilarity of conversation between clowns. Our shoulders almost
touching, we seemed to have come within risible distance of
each other. As if our imbecilic mirth were due to an as-
surance that suffering loses weight when tossed to and fro.

Intermittently his intriguing anxieties ceased to be
actual. In his cerebral commotion, Trouble, attaining an in-
flation at which it burst, had no further existence except
in the fragments constituting his exortations for help which,
at that, were his means of entertaining one.

B-

Along the narrow open passage with its bare iron railing
the Chambres de Bonnes moved past me as I looked for his name on
the doors, when, coming to a closed iron shutter fleeced with dust
and cobwebs growing in patches like a moss of soot or hanging in
grey festoons about its slits, I felt the liveness of the air
decrease, and "Insel" written in the archaic hand of some automatic
writings drew up my eyes-- . To that darkened crack which
outlines the magical versatility of a barrier measuring a yard
across and with merely the touch of a hand diminishing to a strip
three inches wide. That zxx cover of a living book whose history
may come to an end before you can get it open; or cut short your
personal adventure by remaining shut; out of this oblong outline of
Entrance and Exit there leaked a perceptible seepage of Insel's
torpor.

Noiselessly, indolently, the door vanished. I walked
into its chasm and Insel led me to his painting set in the pacific
light of a large attic window.

"Dass ist die Irma?" he said with the secretive in-looking
twinkle that lit up his eyes with recurrent delights. And suddenly
it dawned upon me that one thing about this man that made him so

different to other people was that contrary to our outrunning
holding-up-the-mirror self consciousness, his was constantly turning
its back on the world and tip-toe with expectancy, peeping in-
quisitively into its own mischievous eyes. Or, in some cerebral
acrobatic recoil, that being who is, in us, both outlooker and
window, in him, astonishingly, was craning back to look in at the
outlooking window of himself, as if there were something there he
might forget, some treasure as to whose existance he wished to remain
assured, some lovely illusion inside him, he must resee to insure
its continued projection.

"Die Irma," he repeated lovingly to introduce her to me, and
the magnetic bond uniting her painted body to his emaciated stature--
as if she were of an ectoplasm proceeding from him-- was so apparent
one felt as if one were surprising an insane liaison at an almost
too intimate a moment. He was glittering with a pleasure as
dynamically compressed as the carbon of a diamond.

A narrow canvas, nigger-black, whose quality of shining
obscurity was the effect of minutely painting in oil on some tempera
ground, die Irma stood knee deep on an easel.

holy-of-holies, "thought that _this_ picture would be just the one that _you_ would like."

Time hovered, suspended in the attic air as the powders of life in the noxious mist of the exhausted city below. When suddenly the soporific lure he sowed in his magnetic field-- shattered. Insel was snatching at the emptied flesh on his face in the recurrent anxiety inspiring his wilder gestures.

"She ought not to _be_," he cried out, "if you don't like her. I am going to destroy her."

His cerebral excitement seemed to inflate his head, rather as a balloon from which his wasted body hung in slight levitation.

"Come down to the floor, for God's sake," I said per-emptorally, "What does my opinion matter? _I'm_ not the museum."

"But you're right," he insisted. "I have been going in the wrong direction. Die Irma's _out_."

"And don't use me as a sop for your terror of working."

"It's really not that-- but a technical question.

Die Irma ist hess."

My once luminous clochard had composed himself in the
kitchen holding his usual insignia, the ort of pumpernickle,
this time one in either hand. Extrême oval ends-unbitten -
of an absent loaf. He looked forbid ding as had they been bone.

" Did you get the overcoat" I enquired amiably.

"I may as well tell you" he snarled " that I dont care for
all this supervision .........I had not the time. You understand
.....the last nights in Paris" he raved ecstatically "Es ist so
schon das leben, wen mann so lebeh kann? " (It is so beautiful
living-when one <u>can</u> so live).

an
His emaciation no longer of flesh had become exteriorised
act of the flesh in which the last ooze of the spermatic juices
might have been in some fearful ennervation, spent instead of
being suffused with that liquidity of relief following upon the
fleshly embrace, his eyes, in some ultimate heat were boiled to
the creamy, soiled putrescence of stale oysters in a stew.

I could not reflect that this enormity of sensuous filth
was probably as irreal as his nervous aromatics distilled from
his astral collusions with the a Goddess. It was a mental impos-
sibility to associate these opposite phenomena . Had I recalled
the earlier irridescent Insel it could only have been as a fig-
ment of my insanity .

An alarming presentment occured to me . " Insel"
I gasped " you've blown that thousand francs." " what are you "
he snarled venemously " an inquisitor ?"

He has notions as to how wite women should be handled too,
I laughed to myself as I hurried down the corridor to the dress-
maker.

I was determined to take conventional leave of a guest who
would be gone when I returned to Paris . It would put me to great