Marguerite Young’s 1965 cult novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is known foremost for being a book almost no one has finished. As I waded through dense paragraphs of long, winding sentences filled with images of stars and waves and angels, of seagulls and silk and butterflies, of dreams and illusions and any other abstraction you can imagine, occasionally I felt angry—on a personal level—at what I took to be the book’s obstinacy, its willingness to reprise what it had said hundreds of times before, not to mention the seemingly endless detours that defy any obvious sense of structure. At other moments, I knew that I was immersed in something beautiful and strange, something too big to understand all at once. As Young herself puts it near the beginning of the novel,
The great things were those which happened without any way of knowing them or knowing when or where or how or why or to whom they had happened, just as if they had happened to no one or were happening now.
Why, yes, of course. There is no other novel like it.
Many stories surround this monument of imaginative prose that is an estimated 750,000 words long, totaling 1,321 pages in small type and with tiny margins. For such a book to survive, it may need to have myths. Commissioned by Scribner’s from a fifteen-page sample (then titled Worm in the Wheat), Young’s novel took eighteen years to write, eventually growing to nearly 3,500 manuscript pages by its delivery in 1964. Supposedly seven suitcases of paper were lost at a Paris train station and later retrieved in seven wheelbarrows—Young would not suffer Hemingway’s fate of concision by misplacement. Variously in and out of print, both praised as the Great American Novel and derided as a pretentious hoax, the novel has been recently reissued by Dalkey Archive, allowing readers a new opportunity to decide for themselves.
What is Miss MacIntosh, My Darling about? The narrator is Vera Cartwheel, a woman who is traveling by bus sometime in the middle of the twentieth century (time here is rarely specified) across the Midwest in search of her childhood nanny, the titular Miss MacIntosh, who has disappeared and is presumed dead. Along for the ride are a pair of newlyweds who argue about whether the half-asleep husband is pining after an old flame. We learn a great deal about these companions, as well as the whiskey-guzzling, hallucinating bus driver—nearly a novel’s worth—but they then fall away, a mere overture as the novel proceeds to a much longer series of digressions and memories of Vera’s youth.
Young introduces a cast of quasi-allegorical characters whose central figure is Vera’s mother, Catherine, a bedridden opium addict living in the ruin of a seaside New England house. “The opium lady,” as she is called, is a font of elaborate delusions:
She would imagine that the house was crowded with the most amazing callers…proud Bostonians, Platonists of the period of the intellectual flowering of Athens, drowned sailors, gold-turbaned Egyptians, centaurs with lilies in their mouths, cherubim spouting fountains, great frogs with jewels in their foreheads, men who had walked out of their watery graves, some who were living in another country.
Catherine’s never-ending salon is attended by personifications of the room’s chandelier and her opium bottle, as well as historical personages ranging from Alcibiades to Alexander Pope. These extended hallucinations, which pass beyond the baroque and quickly overwhelm the fledgling story, become the signature style of the novel as it multiplies (or perhaps metastasizes). Catherine is faithfully visited by her lawyer, Joachim Spitzer, a failed composer with a “tendency toward oblivion”—he is comically vague and can hear the music of the spheres—whose romantic advances Catherine has repeatedly spurned, favoring instead the memory of his dead identical twin brother, Peron, a gambler who was as reckless as Joachim is cautious. Joachim is obsessed by the idea that he may actually be his brother, or that he himself may actually be dead.
As its branches grow, the novel detours to other characters, including Cousin Hannah, a globe-trotting suffragette who fights to emancipate women worldwide in Orientalist torrents of language. Everywhere the prose embraces overabundance: in the novel’s present Vera speaks with a waitress named Esther Longtree, who is known for her “everlasting pregnancy”—her life is marked by a perpetual series of miscarriages—a painful condition that one can’t help but connect to Young’s prolonged struggle to birth her novel. Everyone seems to symbolize something—Joachim, for instance, is an artist figure, racked by uncertainty and the inability to complete his “silent music”—but the oceanic flood of writing itself is always carrying them away, just beyond intelligibility.
And then there is Miss MacIntosh herself. In contrast to the romantically doomed Catherine, Vera’s nanny is “so plain, so unadorned,” a dowdy and unromantic matron wearing seaboots, sporting marcelled red hair, and toting a black umbrella on her seaside walks. Hailing from What Cheer, Iowa, she is a dispenser of stolid midwestern common sense, a source of sturdy realism countering the rampant delusions that every other character seems to suffer from. Her lessons are a curious blend of the only apparently practical—“pulling nails out of an old box, straightening the nails, then driving them into another box made of old boards”—and the socially conscious. In the latter vein there are brief glimpses of more worldly experience:
the numbers of tons of coal mined by coal miners in distant mines…the unjust circumstances under which Negroes were employed…the injustices done to the Africans working in diamond mines blazing like fields of light.
But even Miss MacIntosh proves to be not what she seems at first. As Vera grows into adulthood, her lessons avoid the question of sexuality—Miss MacIntosh responds to the question “Where are your ovaries?” with a barrage of counterquestions. The novel’s pivotal moment occurs less than a quarter into its sprawl, on Vera’s fourteenth birthday. She wants to wear a new white party dress and to dance past her bedtime, a show of frivolity that Miss Macintosh clearly disapproves of. (“Did not my heart bleed for the orphans in cold countries? Was I not ashamed of my revealed shoulders?” as Vera ventriloquizes her nanny’s position.) That evening she has a strange dream: “Mr. Spitzer was the bride, wearing a white veil. Miss Macintosh was the bridegroom, wearing a waxed mustache like Mr. Spitzer’s and a high silk hat and her silver dollar watch.”
This gender-swap dream prompts, on awakening, another dreamlike journey through the mansion (for several pages she’s riding a black pony through the house) that ends with her stealing into Miss MacIntosh’s room. Vera is shocked by what she finds: “She was bald as the egg or as the rock where nothing grows…. And she was this monster moving toward me in the darkness. Who was she?” Unsexed, caught with her guard down, Miss MacIntosh turns out to be another conjurer of fantasies, perhaps not so unlike the other members of the pleasure-dome mansion. After this revelation, the trust between caretaker and ward is broken, and a month later Miss MacIntosh is gone. It is suspected that she has committed suicide by walking into the sea, and Vera comes to believe that, because of her intrusion, she is responsible.
In a 1988 interview, Young described Miss MacIntosh as “the central character with all the spokes of other characters radiating out from her,” and she is perhaps the best clue to the novel’s mystery. Against the general opium haze, she is the one who insists that reality is real, that appearances are what they appear to be. For Vera, her absence challenges the idea that there’s any epistemological ground to stand on at all. It’s never entirely clear why Vera goes looking for MacIntosh if she is already presumed dead, but this is in keeping with the novel’s protective attitude toward the unlikely, even the impossible. The search for Miss MacIntosh, then, is nothing less than the search for a boundary or form that can contain Vera’s—and, by extension, Young’s—supercharged consciousness, with the lurking acknowledgment that any hope of coherence may be already lost. So the dream continues to grow to prodigious proportions.
To read Young’s novel is to dwell in uncertainties and shadows, in Jungian archetypes and their dissolution. As Meghan O’Gieblyn puts it in this edition’s excellent new introduction,
It is the unconscious of our literary tradition, containing everything too vast, too odd, too philosophically daring to find expression in the workaday craftsmanship of American letters, and in that sense, it provides a truer glimpse into the national psyche than many other novels of its time.
What can one extract from that immense unconscious? I know my eyes passed over every word on every page. I think I understood what was happening, insofar as that was possible. At the same time, the novel washed over me, around me, and through me. I gave myself up to the mystery.
“Difficulty” in literature has long been associated with the modernist revolution that arrived at the beginning of the twentieth century and produced works like James Joyce’s Ulysses, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, and Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Why this happened is not completely straightforward, although there are competing explanations: it was a response to a rapidly industrializing and networked world, an exploration of new theories (like Freud’s) of society and human consciousness, an attempt by elites to separate high art from an emerging “culture industry.”
Many of the high-water marks of modernism sought to express a more fragmented experience of life. Young’s novel is fundamentally ambivalent toward even that kind of realism, though it springs from the supposedly mundane diners and bus depots of her native Indiana. We are as likely to be in a dream as in any kind of reality; at least we are constantly negotiating the boundary between the two. The book perhaps most resembles Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, if it were inflated into Claes Oldenburg–sculpture proportions. It is hard to get a feel for the book’s style without reading some of it, because its sentences range so widely and wildly. Take, for instance, one sentence in which Catherine’s lawyer, Mr. Spitzer, considers his existence:
He should have been oriented, and yet he was disoriented by his great experience of living when he was dead, waking only when he was sleeping, sleeping in a watery grave or in an ice hole, the strangest things occurring to him, baffling him because, no matter who or where he was, it was always this one great star like a floor of embers still glowing with burning lights or the eyes of birds, this star which seemed the remainder of many stars honed away…this where he sometimes mistook his own great shadow for my mother’s coach with one light burning within like a star or the eye of a bird or his rippling shadow for the human-sized blackbird he had seen upon a doorstep of a vanished house with blackened chimneys blowing sparks where the sea crawled with its long fingers gleaming with riparian jewels and reaching like a gambler’s long-wristed hand toward golden coins or their reflections upon the fog, showers of sequins, a butterfly pirouetting in a cloud, butterfly which had seemed one butterfly but was always two butterflies conjoining over the suddenly shining wave, one with its image, a folded sail coming out from behind a sail upon a far horizon as the moon moved, blackbird pale as smoke through which the glassy fireflies glittered like all lost stars diminished by this magnitude made of minorities, or perhaps it was not one great blackbird with its reproductive shadow gleaming beyond the clouded pinpoint stars, each like a separate world, but a globe or house of blackbirds like that which had slept all winter long beneath a frozen brook until the ice melted with a crackling, buzzing sound.
Doubtless this will have many readers looking for the nearest exit (and this is only two thirds of the sentence), but it’s a fair example of Young’s ability to prolong abstraction, as well as her peculiar, high-poetic tone—blackbirds and ice have perhaps a hint of Wallace Stevens’s “supreme fictions.” One can hunt for such influences—Stein’s repetitions also come to mind, or the hypertrophied prose of the baroque Elizabethan John Lyly, whom Young studied in graduate school—but the sheer persistence and perversity of Young’s overflowing style are original. The sentence is an abundance of metamorphoses, each image flirting with affinity or opposition until the reader has lost sight of the starting point. This vertiginous movement calls to mind Kant’s idea of the sublime, a representation of “limitlessness.” If the reader is to have pleasure, it is of a more ambient than semantic kind, like spending time in front of a Rothko painting. If you can slow down, suspend the rush to reach the end of the sentence, there can be beauty in duration itself.
Like Miss MacIntosh, Marguerite Young was a midwesterner. Born in 1908 in Indianapolis (a city once known as “the Athens of the West”), she often wrote about her place of origin while simultaneously disdaining the “regionalism” that is so often associated with the literature of noncoastal America. In a 1945 essay titled “The Midwest of Everywhere,” Young staked a claim for Middle America’s weirdness, writing:
For me, a plain Middle Westerner, there is no middle way. I am in love with whatever is eccentric, devious, strange, singular, unique, out of this world—and with life as an incalculable, a chaotic thing, meaningful above and beyond the necessary and elemental data of my subject.
Academic brilliance gradually pulled her into the center of the literary world. A degree in French and English led to graduate work at the University of Chicago, where she studied Elizabethan and Jacobean literature and attended Thornton Wilder’s writing class. She also accepted a part-time job that involved reading Shakespeare to Minna K. Weissenbach, a literary patron of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
At Weissenbach’s house in the 1930s, Young met Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and Weissenbach’s opium addiction, which confined her to bed, became the seed for Young’s epic. After a stint teaching high school English in Indianapolis—Kurt Vonnegut was one of her students—and the publication of her first book of poems, Young went on to the University of Iowa, where she worked on a Ph.D. (apparently unfinished) and became a lecturer in the creative writing program. She moved to New York City in 1943 after the enthusiastic reception of two manuscripts by the scholar Mark Van Doren on behalf of a publishing house.
Her most enduring image is as a Greenwich Village literary eccentric, a friend of the midcentury glitterati, from Norman Mailer to Carson McCullers—the list of her famous friends is seemingly endless. The writer Charles Ruas described her as
a colorful presence, strolling nonchalantly down Bleecker Street in her long crimson dresses, with a gold embroidered vest, her black Polish nursemaid boots worn with pink stockings, toes peeking through, and a floor-length red woolen cape thrown over her shoulder.
In his interview with her in The Paris Review, Ruas notes that her apartment’s drawing room is dominated by a merry-go-round horse and a life-size doll in a Victorian chair.
Young found early success as a poet, publishing her first collection, Prismatic Ground, in her late twenties and her second, Moderate Fable, seven years later. A recent Collected Poems, which brings together these two with a selection of her unpublished poems, helps trace her formation. The poetry suggests a writer who had not yet found her form—Amy Clampitt wrote that “there is a vagueness about those poems, a dreamy lassitude, that belies the enormous energies in wait.” The poems are nearly as odd as Miss MacIntosh, but when esoteric images are constrained by tightly rhymed verses, the effect is less impressive. Vast, airy abstractions predominate. An ode to Bishop Berkeley, the eighteenth-century philosopher of idealism, includes the lines “We eat and drink ideas, we are clothed with them/As water clothes the waterfall,//And the annihilation of realism is close to our eyes.” Young is no imagist in the sense of concrete, observed precision; her mind is more profligate in the way religious thinking, seeking to portray infinity, can be.
Although she always claimed allegiance to poetry, Young did not return to it after the mid-Forties. Before departing the Midwest, she spent some time visiting with her mother, who had moved to New Harmony, Indiana, a town built in 1814 as a utopian community by George Rapp, a German Pietist who dreamed of a new society on the American frontier. This encounter with utopian ideals had a profound impact on Young’s imagination, and a poem about the community gradually evolved into her first, and arguably most successful, prose work, Angel in the Forest (1945), a nonfiction history of the town. She is said to have remarked, “I discovered that I couldn’t fit in [a poem] all the facts, which are fabulous.”
After the Rappite community failed in 1825, the town was purchased by Robert Owen, the Welsh reformer and protosocialist; his secular community also failed shortly thereafter. The parallel of spiritual and rationalist dreams of harmony—both admirable and both doomed—became the perfect catalyst for Young’s emerging view of the world: how difficult it is to alter its fabric, or to see what it is truly, and how fertile the misrecognition can be. It’s possible to glimpse shades of Catherine’s rhapsodizing and Miss MacIntosh’s common sense in the citizens’ strivings: the grandiosity of the utopian plans is matched by the fatal toil of ordinary planning and commerce. For Young, the medium of prose, more capacious than poetry, opened the floodgates to describing a teeming midwestern landscape. As she puts it in the book, channeling Rappite awe, “An infinite variety of complex sensations, and how exclude them?”
After the eighteen-year detour of her work on Miss MacIntosh, Young returned to nonfiction. Her final book began as a biography of the Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley, now obscure but well known at the turn of the twentieth century for inventing the character of “Little Orphant Annie.” Young’s research drew her further into a counterhistory of the radical nineteenth century, and the book transformed into a biography of the union organizer and Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs. Published posthumously as Harp Song for a Radical (1999), it is an ensemble work, zigzagging between characters such as the poet Heinrich Heine and the early communist Wilhelm Weitling (not to mention the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Allan Pinkerton, founder of his namesake strikebreaking detective agency), figures Young saw as spiritual forefathers of the radical movements that she witnessed and sympathized with in the 1960s and 1970s. This project, too, was potentially everlasting—the book remained unfinished at her death.
The two nonfiction works that bookend the great novel, both deeply focused on the idea of utopia, offer a clue to the symbolic sprawl of Miss MacIntosh. Young said Debs “was of the belief that socialism had been sleeping in the womb of time long before it was born.” The boundless future inherent in the present, like Blake’s infinite grain of sand, requires an act of imagination, often formally daring, to project it forward. When one main character lives vibrantly in a dream, and another (Miss MacIntosh) represents a kind of dreary “realism” that ultimately melts away, is it any wonder that the dream—unrealized but beautiful, infinitely extensible—would come to dominate?
Although the novel is vaguely structured as a quest—Vera rides the bus into the midwestern interior—this journey is largely abandoned for several hundred pages. Near the beginning, Vera reflects on the meaning of her experience, in a moment that could be read as a confession of the novelist’s anxiety about her own prodigious style:
All my life I had been reaching for the tangible, and it had evaded me, much like the myth of Tantalus, much as if the tangible itself were an illusion. My life had been made up of just these disrelated, delusive images hovering only for a moment at the margin of consciousness, then passing like ships in the night, even ships manned by dead helmsmen, by ghostly crews, by one’s own soul at large.
Nonetheless, patterns emerge from the vatic flood of language. One hallmark of Young’s writing is a love of antithesis—life is death, death is life, dreaming is waking and waking dreaming. Chiasmus litters her novel: “She saw an idiot who had become a great philosopher, a philosopher who had become a great idiot.” “Perhaps the dragons would appear as saints, wearing their shining armor, or the saints would appear as dragons.” This can be tiresome after a few paragraphs, let alone several hundred pages, but there is also something instructive about her insistence on this pattern. Young intends to challenge familiar divisions until the reader’s resistance is broken down. For instance, there is a continual confusion in the novel as to whether characters, such as Cousin Hannah or even Miss MacIntosh herself, are really men or women, an example of an “obvious” binary that, of course, is not obvious at all. When Vera, at the climactic moment, screams “Miss Macintosh, you are a man!” it is intended as a cruel remark, but it is also, she admits obliquely, “the realization of a dream.” Vera goes on to reflect that,
like all realizations, it had brought with it both that which was expected and the unforeseen, the unforeseeable nothing which changes everything and stops us in the midst of our laughter or makes us laugh with joy when we are filled with tears.
The idea of Vera’s truth-seeking journey owes something to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a work Young frequently alludes to. Perhaps in her view we are on a spiritual journey to deprogram our conventional sense of life. Catherine Cartwheel’s opium dreams invite a more skeptical perspective: How much can any of us trust what we see? The novel repeatedly meditates on who its characters really are: they represent obvious allegorical concepts—Catherine is delusion, Mr. Spitzer is indecision, and so on—but if we sit with them long enough, their qualities are revealed to be shifting and various.
By expressing such fundamental doubts, Miss MacIntosh creates space for a radical fantasy to extend itself. In the market and perhaps in the common culture, the “literary doorstopper” has moved to the margins since the days of writers like William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon. Yet there is still a select fellowship keeping the ideal of the mega-novel alive—Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, László Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, and many others are waiting for the readers who want to be swallowed up by them. These books can be utopian spaces, too—places to get lost in, organizing their own liberatory dreams and dream logic.
Miss MacIntosh concludes on a slightly conventional note—true love!—but in a way strange enough to befit Young’s marathon endeavor. Vera, having arrived in the heart of the heart of the country, Young’s sacred Indiana, wakes up one morning and hears a man’s “sonorous voice” singing: “He was the stone deaf man whom I saw in the dim corridor at dawn. ‘I am a stone deaf man,’ he said, belligerently, swaying back and forth…. He heard with his eyes.” In an astonishingly brief couple of pages, considering everything that has come before, Vera finds happiness in his arms. Perhaps there is a leap of faith here that supplants the search for the certainty of Miss MacIntosh, the original darling. As ever, opposites rule in Young’s imagination: the man who cannot hear is the greatest singer—he might also be the person best fit to listen to Mr. Spitzer’s uncompleted celestial music. Maybe it’s because we, as readers, don’t get to know him that he can represent the possibility of love. The text has to end somewhere, and Young, finally, can leave something to our imagination.
English (US) · 