It’s all about the isolation of the individual. It’s also about the interrelationship between life and death. More or less. That’s it. But such simple concepts get stretched out into 1,321 pages of dense, long winded, and sometimes opaque text that is written less like a novel and more like an extended prose poem. Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is like atomic fission. Just as a nuclear physicist takes a microscopic atom and smashes it against anothet atom to make a bomb explode, Young takes the tiniest of ideas, clashes them together like cymbals, and the result is an explosion of contemplative language.
Vera Cartwheel is the narrator. At the start of the book, she is a thirteen year old girl, living with her invalid mother and being raised by a nursemaid named Miss MacIntosh. Vera thinks of Miss MacIntosh as her mentor and hero. The elderly woman is described as being plain, practical, and pragmatically opposed to any embellishments or flights of the imagination. The education she gives Vera involves doing chores in preparation for her future as a housewife and making her memorize the facts in an almanac. They live in a mansion owned by Vera’s bedridden mother on the ocean shore in Massachusetts. Then one day, Miss MacIntosh wanders off into the sea and disappears.
Soon, we find Vera Cartwheel on an old bus, traveling at night through Indiana, going in the direction of Miss MacIntosh’s hometown in Iowa. Aside from Vera and the bus driver, there are two other passengers, newlyweds named Madge and Homer. The two have a long discussion about Homer’s ex-girlfriend who, according to Madge, is dying of tuberculosis. Homer had never heard this news and Madge chatters on about it all throughout the bus ride. We never find out if Homer’s ex is really dying or not, but it is quite obvious that Madge is jealous of her. In this conversation, we get introduced to a theme that gets examined throughout the whole novel: the relationship between marriage and death. Closer to the end of the bus ride, the couple also discuss other people in their town and the themes here morbidly involve poverty, incest, mental illness, suicide, and the possibility that a woman who had married two brothers in two separate marriages had murdered both of them. Another interesting thing to notice abput their conversation is that the two of them hardly know each other. Madge and Homer’s discussion about the dark side of their hometown is one of the only instances of actual dialogue throughout the whole book. Thus, the two characters who display the deepest level of intimacy are two people who barely understand each other. Other character speak in the forms of soliloquies or monologues, sometimes with Vera listening with only minimal participation.
The bus driver is another example of this. While drinking whiskey throughout the entire trip, he drunkenly talks endlessly about why he never cuts his hair, how he is unmarried and lives with his mother, and then obsessively rants about a senile doctor who tries to drive a car that is falling apart and has delusions about delivering babies. The doctor delivers babies that never exist. Death, life, presence, and absence are all intertwined. You can’t even be sure that the doctor is real as the bus driver’s babbling seems to veer off into delusion too. In fact you can’t even tell if the bus driver and his leaky bus are real or figments of Vera’s imagination. Throughout the prose, from beginning to end, the interpenetration of reality and fantasy are just as prevalent as the mixture of life and death or presence and absence. One thing is for certain: this bus ride represents to Vera a journey into the unknown and a place where all reference points of familiarity recede. But then again, nothing in the novel, from the start, can ever be known with certainty.
By this point, it becomes clear that this Herclitean dichotomy, this clash and harmony between opposites are a defining element of Young’s writing. Norman Mailer uses this dichotomy to a different effect, but with similar results in terms of expansive prose. Once you latch onto this theme, the ideas become easier to follow. The writing remains dense and heavy until the end though. It moves slowly like a Stanley Kubrick film, say Barry Lyndon, and reading it slowly but steadily helps to move it along with consistency. If compared to music, you could say it moves, possibly at the pace of a glacier or tectonic plate, not with the verse-chorus-verse structure of a rock song, but like the movements of a symphony. It is an exercise in variations on a theme, and the theme is repeated rhythmically like calm waves on a gentle shore.
So as the bus driver pulls into the destined town, Young takes us back to the New England mansion where Vera lives with her mother and Miss MacIntosh. Vera’s mother is bedridden and addicted to opium so that she floats in and out of hallucinations so freely that it is impossible for her to tell what is real and what isn’t. The porous boundary between the real and illusory allowed for visitations of guests from ancient times and the presence of the dead. Through her we get introduced to a whole constellation of objects that may or may not be symbols depending on the context in which they appear. Doorknobs, apples, moths, stars, fireflies, starfish, seashells, and all kinds of other things appear in conjunction in ways that sometimes make sense and sometimes confuse you. It is possible that a state of confusion is what the author is sometimes trying to achieve, especially in some passages relating to her friend Mr. Spizter. Otherwise, the presence of horses is another constant in the text as is the presence of water in all its forms, especially in the form of fog as an element of concealment and confusion, and also the ocean which sometimes acts as an element of consciousness. In any case, water in its varied forms is closely related to revealing and concealing hidden aspects of the writing.
While Vera’s mother lives in the flux of her fantasies and realities, her friend Mr. Spizter lives a life of restraint, rarely ever venturing outside his self-imposed limitations. He hunts butterflies, capturing them and then enclosing them in glass cases for his own private collection, symbolically killing the free spirited creatures of flight to be permanently imprisoned, like Mr. Spitzer is inside his own head. Mr. Spitzer also composes music in his head that no one will ever hear because he never plays it for anybody. Instead he writes it on scraps of paper and cloth in hopes that when he dies, someone will piece them all together to form complete works of music. Is that an indication of the author’s intention? She feeds us loads of information and leaves us to our own devices to piece it together to make a coherent whole. As readers we may never be certain if we put the pieces together in the right way or not. Mr. Spitzer is also a lawyer and executor of last wills; his job is to hunt down lost relatives who, without knowing so, are heirs to abandoned estates. He never succeeds though, so the man who hunts and captures butterflies is never able to track missing ancestors of the deceased. It probably doesn’t matter anyways because the deceased, being dead, can’t know that their relatives are absent. And Mr. Spitzer’s mind is saturated with silent music.
The most distinctive thing about Mr. Spitzer is that his twin brother died. His brother’s first name is Peron and his first name is Joachim. Peron is the opposite of Joachim who lives his life though the avoidance of taking chances while Peron lived by doing nothing but taking chances. He earned a living by being a professional gambler. There is a catch to all this because Vera’s mother was in love with Peron even though Joachim is in love with her. She doesn’t love Joachim though and his presence in her life represents the absence of Peron because Peron, allegedly, committed suicide. The suicide is alleged because we never find out if it really happened or not. It is possible that Joachim and Peron are actually the same person, a point driven home by the complete absence of any references to Joachim’s life before Peron’s death. The way that life and death and presence and absence dance around each other in this book takes on a dizzying pace at times.
Through Mr. Spitzer, we also learn about Cousin Hannah, a suffragette and union leader who traveled all around the world at a time when women rarely left their homes. Mr. Spitzer is the only person present as Hannah lies on her deathbed, a strange paradox considering her supposed fame and distinguished life. Hannah was once a woman who appeared in the newspapers and now she is dying forgotten and alone. Like Vera’s mother, she is in opposition to Mr. Spizter who stays within his own boundaries. While Vera’s mother goes outside her boundaries mentally in opium induced hallucinations, Cousin Hannah went outside her boundaries through travel and activism.
Hannah’s romantic relationships are a prevailing thought at the time of her death. She was once on the verge of getting married and then disappeared from the public on the day of her wedding. There are overt hints that she is a lesbian. She once fell in love with another woman. They were climbing a mountain together during the winter. After ascending to the peak and starting down the other side, Cousin Hannah lost her skirt. Her lover was waiting for her return and when Hannah came back over the peak without her skirt, her romantic interest insisted on going up and over to get it and bring it back, only she never returned, presumably dying in an avalanche or from something else like hypothermia. Here we are again with love-death-marriage-life-presence-absence and the ubiquitous water in the form of snow, ice, fog, and tears.
Narratively, the stories of Mr. Spitzer and Cousin Hannah are told in the first person omniscient by Vera who probably isn’t even present in the room as Mr. Spitzer patiently waits for Hannah to die. This is a strange trick to pull off since the narrator presumably has no access to the inner workings of the others’ minds. The two of them do soliloquize parts of their story, but these passages are largely told from Vera’s point of view. This is strange also because, even though the two characters sometimes speak in monologues, neither of them actually interacts with each other. This is true throughout most of the book; characters mostly overlap while their actual interactions and conversations are minimal. What this does is highlight the individuality and solitude of each character, emphasizing the empty and impenetrable spaces between people despite how proximate to each other they might be physically. Each character is like a tightly sealed container with massive spaces, heavy with emptiness, between them.
The central passages about Mr. Spitzer and Cousin Hannah get to be redundant, excessive, and sometimes confusing. But we get a break from all that when Mr. Spizter goes to a funeral for a frog that once lived in a deaf mute’s mouth and did all his speaking for him. Presence and absence. After that, Mr. Spitzer has a transcendent experience, reminiscent of James Joyce, in which he finishes composing the silent music in his head and “hears” it in the form of hallucinations. It is like French Symbolist poetry where you need to interpret it according to how it feels rather than what it means.
And then the last 400 pages are the strongest, and weirdest, part of the novel. Vera reappears in her mother’s house and learns the darkest secret of Miss MacIntosh before she disappears into the ocean. The secret involves her inability to grow hair and the absence of one breast. In an earlier part of the book, Vera had a dream in which she learns this secret. Learning the truth in a dream is another plunge into uncertainty and also emblematic of how close fantasy and reality are in our consciousness. This secret acts as a broad framing device in this maximalist novel. After the disappearance of Miss MacIntosh, some odd characters enter into the narrative. One is an insane old woman who insists Vera’s mother hired her to be a new nursemaid even though Vera no longer lives there. And when I say this trollish woman is odd, I really mean she is odd.
Then with another broad framing device, we return to Vera on the bus as it pulls into a town at daybreak in front of a hotel. Vera checks in and encounters more weird people. One is a devout Christian farmer who claims to be making the world a better place by being a professional hangman. His wife committed suicide by hanging herself from a peach tree and his kids amuse themselves by hanging dolls, teddy bears, and a sick dog from the same branch. His moral dilemmas run between the same points of certainty and uncertainty that so much of the book is about. He resolves this moral contradiction by pegging it to the certainty of his religion.
Vera also encounters the senile doctor that the bus driver talks about obsessively at the start of the book. This ties in with a waitress Vera encounters in a diner named Esther Longtree. The waitress tells her life story and we learn she has a unique problem. She gets pregnant over and over again, but each term ends in a miscarriage. Now she is pregnant again, but the baby is long past its due date. Esther’s problems are deeper since as she tells her story it gets more and more contradictory. Her miscarriages may be self-induced, they may be abortions, or she may have committed infanticide, killing the babies after they were born. But she so desperately wants to have a baby even though she may have gotten pregnant while being raped. We never know if she was actually raped or not because she has always been eager to get pregnant even if that means sleeping with complete strangers. She repeatedly gets raped or willingly seduced, we can never know for sure, by different men although some of them might have been the same man wearing different disguises. Esther spends her life in the presence of absent babies, each one stillborn or dying at the time of birth. Death-life-absence-presence-confusion-clarity-fantasy-reality-sanity-insanity-certainty-uncertainty. It’s a whirlwind that never stops until the novel ends.
Overall, Young’s novel is an extended meditation on the previously mentioned themes. And by extended, I mean extended to the limits. This is a maximalist novel if there ever was one. By establishing separate points divided by vast open spaces, say stars and fireflies on the beach or starboard and larboard, a vacuum is created to be filled with an influx of semantics, signs, and symbols to be unpacked and analyzed, but then again, sometimes it is a novel to be experienced more than understood. The contemplative themes are basic enough, but if this novel says anything definite through the way it portrays people, it is that we live ghostly existences permeated by nothingness. We barely exist except in the traces we leave behind in the memories and impressions left in the consciousness of others. Notice how other people like Peron, the senile doctor, and Homer’s ex-girlfriend are all explained through the narratives of characters in the narrative of Vera Cartwheel. In a Hegelian sense they may be real people with imaginary stories, alter egos, or pure delusions. We can never be certain and we can never know what separate, incomprehensible lives we may be living in the minds of other people. And if we live in solitude, we may barely even exist at all. We are barely anything more than nothingness that passes away into death anyways, eventually to be forgotten as all the people we knew in our lives die too. And as Esther Longtree explains, we are largely defined by everything we’ve lost. Isn’t this what Derrida’s deconstruction is all about?
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is an acquired taste. It is not easy to sink your teeth into and it is not easy to digest. Sometimes it is like eating a sandwich that is bigger than your head. Probably most people who attempt to read it will give up. But it’s not impossible to understand and it is rewarding if you make the effort.
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