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During the Second Great Awakening, the wave of religious fervor that spread through America in the early nineteenth century, a self-proclaimed prophet named John George Rapp founded the town of Harmony, Indiana. Around 1820, his followers built a labyrinth with a small shrine at its center; they used it to meditate on the many false paths the soul would face before the coming of the millennium. When the millennium failed to arrive and Rapp’s cult of personality began to fray, the settlement was sold to the wealthy Scottish industrialist Robert Owen, who renamed it New Harmony and invited hundreds of ordinary people, along with some of the great scholars of the day, to join his own utopian experiment. Owen’s libertine, rationalist “science of society” was diametrically opposed to Rapp’s ascetic, authoritarian “scriptural communism”; it failed all the same. The town descended into chaos, Owen abandoned New Harmony, and the labyrinth was neglected until 1939, when a local preservation society built a new one.
One of the first people to visit the new maze was the Indiana poet Marguerite Young, a descendent of Brigham Young, the Mormon leader. A literary prodigy who wrote her first poem at the age of six, Young was then at work on a series of ballads on Rapp’s and Owen’s utopian experiments. In what would become a pattern for her, the project grew well beyond its initial scope. Young dropped the constraining ballad form for prose, publishing her history of New Harmony as “Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias,” in 1945.
“My theme has always been paradise lost,” Young would tell an interviewer shortly before her death, in 1995. A forerunner of what we today call creative nonfiction, “Angel in the Forest” paints vivid portraits of the “inveterate dreamer[s]” of the nineteenth century—not just Rapp and Owen but also George III and Queen Victoria—in poetic prose derived from the Elizabethan- and Jacobean-era authors who were the subject of her master’s study at the University of Chicago. The book considers the pointed ironies that emerge from the fantasy of turning “hallucination into fact.” “Nothing lingers so like the memory of failure,” Young wrote, “especially if it has sought the extreme perfection.” For Young, the cycle of enchantment and disenchantment that defined the Indiana utopias was the very essence of the national character.
“Angel in the Forest” was nominated for the best nonfiction book of the year award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters. It probably would have won had “Moderate Fable,” another of Young’s books, not won the same award for poetry that year. On the strength of this performance and a short writing sample, Young sold her next project—a novel with the working title “The Worm in the Wheat”—to Maxwell Perkins, the legendary Scribner editor who had discovered Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe.
Young envisioned a book that would top out at around two hundred pages and take two years to complete. When she delivered the manuscript to Scribner eighteen years later, the stack of papers was almost half as tall as she was. In the meantime, Young had acquired a new residence (the Greenwich Village apartment where she was to spend much of her life), a new editor (Burroughs Mitchell), a new series of honors (Guggenheim, Newberry Library, and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships), and a new title for her now epically proportioned novel: “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.” Young, too, had reconstructed the Harmonist labyrinth—out of paper and ink instead of shrubbery and wood. In her version, though, there was no shrine waiting to be found in the center.
In “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling,” the American Dream is depicted quite literally: as a series of incompatible hallucinations. Set largely in the course of a single, harrowing nighttime bus ride during the last years of Depression, the story follows the narrator, Vera Cartwheel, as she sifts through her memories of her eccentric upbringing in a mansion on the coast of New England. It is into this house that Vera’s mother, Catherine Helena Cartwheel, a legendary beauty and former socialite, has retreated following the death of Vera’s father, a “professional ne’er-do-well.” Catherine takes prodigious quantities of opium. She spends her days in a baroque dream world of her own creation, wandering the grounds full of life-size chessmen and out-of-tune grand pianos. She discourses with Mr. Chandelier, her chandelier, and Mr. Res Tacamah, her drug bottle, and entertains an imaginary cast of historical figures whom she has invited to tea.
The mansion is staffed by a retinue of servants and Catherine’s loyal factotum, Mr. Joachim Spitzer, a failed composer whose love goes unreciprocated because Catherine prefers his identical twin, Peron, a gambler who has been dead for years. Although pathologically indecisive, Mr. Spitzer is tasked with finding a governess to raise Vera. He settles on the titular Georgia MacIntosh, a red-headed nursemaid with a broken nose, without asking for a single character reference.
Miss MacIntosh’s pedagogical principles are unusual. They include proverbs from “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” factoids from the “Farmer’s Almanac,” the primitive church doctrines of her missionary brother, and the pragmatism, asceticism, and small-“r” republicanism that once characterized the small-town ethos of the heartland. Her aim is to make her charge an industrious, deferential future wife, but she pursues her agenda with a single-mindedness just as detached from reality as Catherine, whose taste for luxury she opposes. A typical lesson finds Vera enjoined to state the population of Kansas, to recite the genealogies of the Moody Bible or the “great kings of baseball,” or to listen to half-baked sermons on the need for playing the stock market. Miss MacIntosh places great stock in practical skills and physical education, so she and Vera mend holes in sails and coats, hammer boards in rotted fences and broken rafts, and chase around a red ball.
Eventually, it becomes clear that, in her paeans to “homespun virtues” and the “bare simplicity” of truth, Miss MacIntosh doth protest too much. On Vera’s fourteenth birthday, she discovers a secret about her governess that precipitates the latter’s drowning, in an apparent suicide, in the ocean. Vera mourns the loss of her “darling” for years. When a storm swallows both the mansion and her mother, she decides to take Miss MacIntosh’s advice to “strike out on [her] own.” She will “see America . . . the broad interior, the spacious Middle West, that life which required no medium of the evil imagination to stand between one’s self and the clear reality of simple things.”
Vera’s goal is to reach What Cheer, Iowa, where Miss MacIntosh grew up. She only makes it as far as southwest Indiana. In the novel’s final act, she exits the bus and checks into a hotel that was once a former Harmonist dormitory and Owenite tavern. Far from experiencing the “normal life” that Miss MacIntosh had promised, Vera will meet characters in the Midwest—such as the drunk bus driver Moses Hunnecker, who refuses to cut his hair in protest of Roosevelt’s policies, or the perpetually pregnant waitress Esther Longtree, who gives birth only to stillborns—who prove no less fantastical than those of her New England childhood.
As her name suggests, Vera encounters the truth as something that is constantly flipping upside down and right side up again. In Young’s telling, reality is not the neutral ground where disparate perceptions overlap; it is the interstices between them. Reality is the worm in the wheat, as the novel’s working title would have it, the point at which our “perfect equations” come up short, our “definitions fail,” and our desires for “ultimate harmony” are frustrated. Truth is “but another illusion,” Vera is forced to conclude. As with the two utopias Young describes in “Angel in the Forest,” you could “substitute” one theory of life “for another and get the same result.”
Vera spends most of her time listening to other people, but she’s able to narrate the book partly because she’s reconciled the seemingly antithetical world views of her mother and her nursemaid. She comes to agree with Catherine that “reality bears with it always an aspect of fateful disappointment,” and that making one’s peace with illusion is precisely “that on which the whole of life depended.” Unlike Catherine, however, she gives up the quest for “perfect happiness,” a pragmatic move that Miss MacIntosh might have approved of. Although Vera never makes it to What Cheer, she doesn’t despair. “One still had reached one’s goal,” she reasons, “even if it was not the one intended . . . Whatever one found was real.” What Vera finds at the end of “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling” is something none of the novel’s perfection-seekers do: love.
“Miss MacIntosh, My Darling” was a critical success when it appeared in 1965. Norman Mailer, impressed by Young’s achievement, took her aside at a party to ask whether she had boxers in her family, “because it took a lot of strength hanging out in the sawdust ring like that, punching away for eighteen years.” (He later sent a letter to Scribner calling Young a “gentle Hercules in high heels,” which the publicity department promptly turned into a cartoon of Mailer and Young duking it out.) Young’s former student, Kurt Vonnegut, said that she was “unquestionably a genius,” and her friend, Anaïs Nin, praised “the complete universe” she had created. The New York Times compared Young’s prose to the “great styles” of Melville, Joyce, and Faulkner. Other reviewers invoked the term “the Great American Novel.”
We have grown wary of overheated praise, but it is impossible to talk about “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling,” which has just been reissued by Dalkey Archive Press, without superlatives. At 1,198 pages, it is among the longest single-volume novels in the English language. If “Moby-Dick,” the book against which all other Great American Novels are measured, is about a single monomaniac, “Miss MacIntosh” is a veritable republic of Ahabs, each more idiosyncratic than the next. An Indiana bus and a New England mansion furnish the book with its principal settings, but Young, much like Melville, never fails to imbue them with cosmological import. (In one scene, Vera, looking out the bus window, likens the “watery greyness of the Middle West” to the scene of “the first creation when only the spirit of God had moved upon the deep.”) The book is an epic of mothers and daughters, rather than of fathers and sons, husbands and wives, or war and peace, and Young’s sentences, which marry the breadth of Whitman to the opulence of Nabokov, are among the most virtuosic ever produced by an American novelist.
Despite selling, according to Nin, forty thousand copies in its first year, “Miss MacIntosh” failed to make much impression on the public. This is hardly surprising. The novel’s length alone makes it prohibitive for most readers. Like the Harmonist labyrinth on which its structure is based, it is easy to get lost in. The book proposes mysteries, approaches solutions, then swerves into digressions that last for hundreds of pages. It adds minor characters until the very last chapter, giving the impression that it could have continued indefinitely. Cause and effect are suspended just as surely as in one of Catherine’s opium dreams, and states of being usually thought to be opposed—imagination and reality, life and death, female and male, past and future—switch or merge. Young’s “transshifting” sentences (to use her coinage) do not so much progress from line to line as accrete via repetitions and variations of phrase and imagery:
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