Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
This substack is dedicated to exploring the magnum opus of Marguerite Young: Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.
"When you have examined all the illusions of life," Marguerite Young told Miriam Fuchs and Ellen Friedman in an interview, "and know that there isn't any reality, but you nevertheless go on, then you are a mature human being. You accept the idea that it is all mask and illusion and that people are in disguise. You see the crumbling of reality and you accept it."
Praise for Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
Marguerite Young is unquestionably a genius.
A novel of massive achievement.
The most important work in American literature since ... Moby-Dick.
— Howell Pearre, Nashville Banner
A work of stunning magnitude and beauty....in the great styles of Joyce or Broch or Melville or Faulkner...a masterwork.
— William Goyen, New York Times Book Review, 9/12/1965
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling stands out in my mind as the most significant innovative novel since Ulysses and The Waves.
In her zeal to demonstrate that nothing lives except in the imagination, Miss Young, with superb virtuosity, may have written a novel that in the profoundest sense does not exist.
— Melvin Maddocks, Christian Science Monitor, 9/16/1965
Marguerite Young's voice is that of the lyric incantator. If sparingly employed, it might have produced a sweet melody. But its effect here, like that of a soprano trying to sing all the parts in Aida, is first ludicrous, then sad, then just plain monotonous.
— Eleanor Dienstag, The Village Voice, 11/18/1965
Marguerite Vivian Young
Marguerite Young , who derived from Brigham Young, was born in Indiana, and was for many years a resident of New York City. Her first book of poetry was published in 1937, while she was teaching high-school English in Indianapolis. In that same year, she visited the utopian commune of New Harmony, Indiana, where her mother and stepfather resided. She relocated to New Harmony and spent seven years there, beginning work on Angel in the Forest , a study of utopian concepts and communities.
That book appeared in 1945 and was well-received: It won the Guggenheim and Newberry Library awards. Over the next fifty years, while maintaining an address in New York’s Greenwich Village, she traveled extensively and collaborated with other authors, including Anaïs Nin, writing articles, poetry, and book reviews for numerous magazines and newspapers. She also taught writing at a number of venues, including the New School for Social Research and Fordham University.
In 1947, she began working on a new project, the novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling . Intending to take just two years, she did not finish until 1963. Young described it as “an exploration of the illusions, hallucinations, errors of judgment in individual lives, the central scene of the novel being an opium addict’s paradise.” The novel attracted mixed, rather polarized reviews at the time. Between the extreme length of the novel, and her lack of further publications, Young and the novel faded from attention, until rediscovered in the late 1980s by Dalkey Archive Press.
Young’s next project was a biography of legendary Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley. When that work was almost finished, she began what was meant as a side project, based on the relationship between Riley and Eugene V. Debs, but that digression was to occupy the rest of her life, turning into a large (2400 pages in manuscript) treatise on the life and times of Debs, Harp Song for a Radical . Unfinished at the time of her death in 1995, an abbreviated and heavily edited version of the work-in-progress was published in 1999 by Knopf.
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is one of the most ambitious and remarkable literary achievements of our time. It is a picaresque, psychological novel—a novel of the road, a journey or voyage of the human spirit in its search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare. It is an epic of what might be called the Arabian Nights of American life.
Marguerite Young’s method is poetic, imagistic, incantatory; in prose of extraordinary richness she tests the nature of her characters—and the nature of reality. Miss Macintosh, My Darling is written with oceanic music moving at many levels of consciousness and perception; but the toughly fibred realistic fabric is always there, in the happenings of the narrative, the humor, the precise details, the definitions of the characters. Miss Macintosh herself, who hails from What Cheer, Iowa, and seems downright and normal, with an uncorruptible sense of humor and the desire to put an end to phantoms; Catherine Cartwheel, the opium lady, a recluse who is shut away in a great New England seaside house and entertains imaginary guests; Mr. Spitzer, the lawyer, musical composer and mystical space traveller, a gentle man, wholly unsure of himself and of reality; his twin brother Peron, the gay and raffish gambler and virtuoso in the world of sports; Cousin Hannah, the horsewoman, balloonist, mountain-climber and militant Boston feminist, known as Al Hamad through all the seraglios of the East; Titus Bonebreaker of Chicago, wildman of God dreaming of a heavenly crown; the very efficient Christian hangman, Mr. Weed of the Wabash River Valley; a featherweight champion who meets his equal in a graveyard—these are a few who live with phantasmagorical vividness in the pages of Miss Macintosh, My Darling.
The novel touches on many aspects of life—drug addiction, woman’s suffrage, murder, suicide, pregnancy both real and imaginary, schizophrenia, many strange loves, the psychology of gambling, perfectionism; but the profusion of this huge book serves always to intensify the force of the central question:44 What shall we do when, fleeing from illusion, we are confronted by illusion?” What is real, what is dream? Is the calendar of the human heart the same as that kept by the earth? Is it possible that one may live a secondary life of which one does not know?
In every respect, Miss Macintosh, My Darling stands by itself—in the lyric beauty of its prose, its imaginative vitality and cumulative emotional power. It is the work of a writer of genius.
-published 1965
Preface by Anais Nin
When a writer decides to give us a complete universe, all that he has explored and discovered, it is necessarily vast. No one ever questions the expanse of the ocean, nor the size of a mountain. The key to the enjoyment of this amazing book is to abandon one’s self to the detours, wanderings, elliptical and tangential journeys, accepting in return miraculous surprises. This is a search for reality through a maze of illusions and fantasy and dreams, ultimately asserting in the words of Calderon: “Life is a dream.”
The necessity for the cellular expansion of the book lies in Marguerite Young’s own words: “I just tried to leave pebbles along the road so that no one could get lost.” For the perilous exploration of illusion and reality, the author’s feeling is that if one is to follow the full swelling of the wave of imagination one must bring back to the shore the wave which carried you. It is in the fullness and completeness of the motion that one achieves understanding.
That is why she is able to sustain all through both the rich deep tone and powerful rhythm of the book. This is a feat of patience, accomplished by weaving of each connecting cell, with unbroken bridges, from word to word, image to image, phrase to phrase. She is an acrobat of space and symbol but she gives her readers a safety net.
This tremendous edifice is not as abstract as it might seem because it is cemented throughout by her individual vision which is fundamentally human, compassionate and humorous.
The furling and unfurling of her lyrical phrases are at times like a slow-moving camera which is able to catch not only the plain, homely, familiar gestures but the levitations of fantasy, the fluidity of emotional quick changes achieved only by magicians of language.
Although she accomplishes for native American folklore the same immortality of the myth that Joyce accomplished for Ireland, Joyce was not her inspiration. Her inspiration was America, her Middlewestern, down-to-earth America with its powerful orbital dreamers, so rarely portrayed, born on native soil, American as Joyce’s characters were Irish, with the American high sense of comedy, extravagance and vividness: the bus driver, the suffragette, the old maid, the composer of unwritten music, the clamdigger, the dead gambler, the waitress, the featherweight champion, the hangman, the detective, the stonebreaker, the passenger pigeon, the frog, the moose.
The power of imagery suggests paintings (she admits she would have married Chagall). But what she is past master at is the description of subtle, ambiguous events which never become explicit. One of the characters, for. example, is Esther Longtree, who is perpetually pregnant in fantasy only and who is the mother of us all in the end because she is the mother of stillbirth fantasies. Another is the featherweight champion who falls in love with the only child he never had. There are other shadowboxers. “Nature does not care if we are born or not.”
The work has a disappearing shore line. It is a submarine world, geographically situated in the unconscious and in the night. “The sea is not harmful if you sleep under it, not over it, best place for keeping pearls,” says one of her characters. Parallel with science, we are taken as far up into space and as deep below as it is possible for a man to explore.
The numerous characters enter one’s own stream of consciousness and cannot be erased because they are part of the American psyche, a psyche, as Marguerite Young says, capable of the wildest fantasy. They are listed only in the Blue Book of the Uncommon. Marguerite Young is an aristocrat among writers, perhaps the precursor of a new era in American literature.
The book is also a canto to obsession. Life is filled with repetitions culminating in variations which indicate the subtlety of man’s reactions to experience. “To get hold of a character I may have expanded it too much but if I shortened it it would not be an obsession, and obsession is what possesses people. If I removed the repetitions I would remove one of the motifs of life itself.”
The characters are tangible, accessible, familiar. But it is the nature of their experience which Marguerite Young questions, its sediments, its echoes and reflections. What is reality? Deep within us it is as elusive as a dream and we are not sure of anything that happened.