Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling 

by Marguerite Young

Originally published in 1965

This edition published in 2024 by Dalkey Archive Press

Let’s get the hook out of the way: this is one of the greatest long-form American novels. That it was written by a woman in the 1960s (initially published in 1965) and languished in publication purgatory for decades makes it all the more remarkable because it has since developed a cult status, given new life (in 2024) by the excellent Dalkey Archive Press. This is not to historicize, rather to give a brief contextual overview.

This book is massive, both a world unto itself and a void, which is to say a tautology. You’ll see what I mean, I hope, as this review goes along because one of the central things of this novel is the way that it builds and then almost instantly negates people, places, ideas, feelings, and so on. It is a work that pokes holes in the ideas of signifier and sign, showing the absurdity of language and communication, asking us to find meaning without reference and think about what this whole thing called life is really about; one of its achievements, I think, is that it points at what we call reality and allows us to experience it in a more primal mode/realm. 

The narrative starts with Vera Cartwheel (Young’s names are among the best) on a bus that is traveling through the midwest. She is on the bus with a maniacal driver, Moses Hunnecker, and a young married couple, the wife, Madge, pregnant. The narrator, Vera, is searching for her former nursemaid from What Cheer, Iowa, Miss (Georgia) MacIntosh, a red haired woman who mysteriously disappeared (leaving her clothes and possessions on a beach near Vera’s house, which partially explains the focus on water-soaked descriptions and language) some time ago, and, even though she ultimately knows that Miss MacIntosh is already dead, the spectre of her looms. 

Immediately, we are beset by beautiful description and hallucinatory language, full of the mystical and the mundane. Young establishes the pull of the language, as we are let into the flow. It’s welcoming and mysterious, setting up the oscillating narrative focus between Catherine (Vera’s mom and always-dreaming opium addict), to Mr. Spitzer, to Catherine’s cousin (Hannah), back to Vera’s past and then present day, as characters split into separate aspects of themselves and then back together before, often, completely disappearing. 

As the narrative rolls along, we get the insane ranting and raving of Moses, a staunch republican against any sort of charity or handout, one of the few characters not yet totally dead. He goes to visit a prostitute before taking the bus to What Cheer, all the while talking non stop about the doctor, who everyone calls Doc. Earlier in the book, they come across Doc’s broken down Model T and later his hat on the side of the road, the illusion and allusion of the doctor continues to come up, until we circle back to him, finally, when we encounter Esther in the later part of the novel. This circling, experiencing characters at various times in their lives and at various other times in the lives of the other characters, is a constant, so that time begins to feel less linear, more interwoven with all things happening simultaneously.

The idea of the dream world, of interwoven time, is embodied by Catherine but is also mentioned in various forms over and over: “Reality was that which was unreal and was clothed with the dream of reality, dream within dream, body of this chameleon dream, soul of this dream, the skies and the trees and the hills and the stones of this phantasmagoric world which was nine-tenths imagination and clouds” (848). The unreality of life, given more attention than hard, physical knowing, creates a duality, ultimately left for us to interpret and make our own. All the while, Catherine has visions of phantoms, ghosts, people from the future and past, memories that have happened or are soon to even though, ultimately, she knows that she is alone and that there is no escape  (“Perhaps the greatest love did not find its form of expression, either human or divine – no rose, flame, brook, swam trumpeting down a cloud. For all would fail. The light would go out of all eyes” (560).), but she also sees her dream reality as just as valid as physical reality and chooses to see time as something fluid that can be wound and unwound (i.e., parole) as desired: “Should there be no dream – which was another way of saying – should there be no reality – for were they not commingled and perhaps the same?” (482). She longs to find love even though she knows it is too late, impossible, and fears that her beauty will finally fade (as it, indeed, does). 

Ultimately, the ephemeral nature of existence is brought to bear over everything, extending to small details like Catherine’s black coachman – who she requested to be buried in his uniform and carriage and four white horses – and to big concepts like love (as mentioned). Young continues, “...and thus one died as one, died with his unuttered thoughts and his unrealized loves and his unfinished business, his hope without foundation stone, died wholly who had lived partially, who had lived not as the star but as the day’s firefly lost in the sunlight streaked with the dead iris” (677). No character better embodies the day’s firefly or the struggle of life than Mr. Spitzer. He is given purpose by Catherine. In this way, the conceptual serves real, defined purpose, with Catherine acting as mirror, providing space for others to find purpose in themselves (maybe through their own conceptual illusions). 

Throughout, a sense of longing pervades. It lives in Mr. Spitzer as he longs to become his dead twin brother, Peron, as he tries to change his behaviors and image to be more like his shadow self, constantly creating and destroying himself. It’s much the same for Catherine’s cousin, Hannah Freemount-Snowden, a bad-ass leader of the suffrage movement; a well-traveled woman who is described as a king of Arabia, a warrior leader, a woman who has defeated many men in battle. Through the years, she rejects Catherine’s invitations to attend to her and stay with her. This rejection causes Catherine pain and jealousy and speculation about how Hannah, over the many years that she has been gone, might have secretly been searching for a husband or wife or some kind of close connection, which goes against the myth that the family and Hannah have created about her extreme independence. 

Hannah is another opposite; a tough, active adventurer who does not long for marriage, who does not idealize dreams or fantasies, instead living the outrageousness of the world and rebelling against those things deemed untenable, but, in the end, we see that she also cannot escape the same needs and desires that drive us all. This is heartbreaking to Mr. Spitzer, and he decides not to tell others about this, to let the myth of the strong, independent Hannah persist, suggesting that our only real way out of this world is through myth, a conjoining (condensation) of the real with the imagined, the light and dark, the lived and imagined: “Perhaps, indeed, every man must know two worlds – the small world of noise and sunlight, even like a star surrounded by that greater world of infinite darkness and cold silence, a minuscular star turning on its spindle, weaving itself.” (781). 

In opposition, we then come to Miss MacIntosh – a figure of staunch reality, the cold-hard refusal of subjectivity and interpretation. As described, Miss MacIntosh is someone practical, living in the moment of hard truths and hard work, who avoids self pity and flights of fancy, a person who believes in the base facts, the opposite of Catherine, someone who soberly faces the pain of life, rejecting all conceptual things, refusing the imaginative. This is a balm to Vera, who has ultimately rejected her mother’s offer to drop out of life, refusing illustrious unreality. Like Miss Macintosh, she despises mystery but is, at the same time, driven by it (we see this in the Australian headhunter who seeks Miss MacIntosh and in stories of her Christian-missionary brother who has disappeared somewhere on Easter Island).

But Vera and Miss MacIntosh exist in conflict because of an incident that threatens to upend the entire make-up of Miss MacIntosh: Vera goes into Miss MacIntosh’s room uninvited and sees that she is bald, that, in fact, Miss MacIntosh might really be a man (later shown not to be but greatly hinted at nonetheless), and not just any man but maybe one of the cruel, evil-minded men she has warned Vera about. It is insinuated that Vera is sexually assaulted (this on or right after her 14th birthday), but it is incredibly unclear if this is just a dream that represents her fears or if it is a filtered memory, a thing that may or may not have happened, showing the problem(s) with dream, the conceptual, failing memory (this is later mirrored in Esther’s troubled telling of her own sexual assaults). This recounting — Vera wakes up in Miss MacIntosh’s bed. Miss MacIntosh tells her that she was sick and that she acted out and that her dress is torn, then holds up the dress, which seems perfectly intact. MissMacIntosh then says that it is so damaged that it must be disposed of. Is Miss MacIntosh gaslighting Vera? What is real? Just what is going on here? — is intense and fascinating and would be worth detailed study (right around ch. 17 or so) but is beyond the scope of this review.

In the end we learn that, just like every single other character in the book including the mighty Hannah Freemount, Miss MacIntosh is lonely, having once come close to being married (to a crazed, hellfire street preacher), and she wants to right the wrongs of the world but no longer knows how to do it, the result of one disillusionment after another stacking atop her, making her focus on her own deformities (baldness, one breast, no ovaries) as though some twisted representation of the ills of society at large. She takes on all and none of it, yet wants Vera (and us, the reader, as stand in) to learn from her, to recite and infer, to be a humane human able to humble those careless, wealthy bringers of destruction who so ceaselessly and carelessly ruin our world. 

These characters and their intricate interplay makes up the bulk of the novel, but there are several other characters with interesting stories and conceptual implications worth a mention. For example, the deaf mute that we meet via Mr. Spitzer. Through this character, Young asks us if he is not better off having never heard all the chaos of the world, and is not Mr. Spitzer better off for never having anyone to hear his illusory symphonies, composed of the silence between things, of the void of the universe? What are we to make of the loss of understanding through verbal communication, the way in which language forms our interpretive understanding of the world all while, in the text, so much emphasis is placed on silence, a return, a need to compose within this lack of referent? 

It goes on and on. Miss MacIntosh’s double, Mrs. Hogden. Vera’s double, Lisa Lunde. Mr. Weed, and, finally, in the last quarter of the book, we get an account of the terribly sad life of Esther Longtree, waitress at the Greasy Spoon, a woman fated to be eternally pregnant, a woman who was raped and devastated, who becomes wholly overcome by the abuse of her mother and her subsequent tragedies (refer to p. 1182 and 1183 for some beautiful but crushing passages). It is insinuated that Esther tries to kill her own babies in the womb, to force stillbirth in an act of revenge against the rapist/would-be fathers, harkening back to a sentiment expressed at the beginning of the book: “There was no heaven, but there was earth, surely, and we were put here to be tested. This earth was but a testing ground for the squids, for the starfish, for the sea urchins, the chambered nautilus, the periwinkle, the hermit crabs, the horseshoe crabs, for herself, for Mr. Spitzer, for us all. Man was but a broken shell. Woman’s heart was folly” (58). That is to say nothing about what Young is showing about the primary perception of women as carriers for progeny or how men abandon women as soon as they are pregnant and expect them to rear children (only to swoop back in years later to play the part of father, demanding ownership over the woman yet again). This last portion of the book is especially dark and pulls no punches, giving teeth and grounded reality to a narrative that so often exists in the ethereal. It is a key that makes the book work as a whole and helps pull together the work as a unified piece. More the shame, then, that so few people will make it this far because it really shines light on Young’s brilliance, assuring you that she is calmly in control and has been all along. 

I hope it’s clear at this point when I say that the book is massive, a tautology, because, rather than trying to tell you what this book is about, I want to give you a feel for the constant push/pull between grounded reality and conceptual, imaginative thought, between the possibilities of life and of figurative doors that remain open against those permanently closed (while not discounting the possibility of both being forever in contention). In the work, we experience platonic realities versus abstract sensation as interpretations of phenomenon. We see people who have all repeatedly made wrong choices in life in one way or another, people agonized by life who wonder the unanswerable: what does any of it (he winds, the rains, the dreams, the baldness, the yearnings) matter? Or, as Vera agonizes, “Where was the truth which should not fail?” (254). 

The whole book is an erasure, each character constantly eliminating themselves or a certain aspect of the other — the text as mirror. All of this leads me to want to equate metonymy (as the delay of meaning, the constant unfurling of différance) with displacement and metaphor with condensation (rhetorical/grammatical = condensation/displacement) to use as an interpretive lens, which I would suggest for this particular work because, I think, it easily asserts itself – the following passage as example (though, of course, you don’t need to do any of that): 

“Among beings strange to each other, those divided by the long roarings of time, of space, those who have never met or, when they meet, have not recognized as their own the other heart and that heart’s weakness, have turned stonily away, would there not be, in the vision of some omniscient eye, a web of spidery logic establishing the most secret relationships, deep calling to deep, illuminations of the eternal darkness, recognitions in the night world of voyager dreams, all barriers dissolving, all souls as one and united? Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one illusion” (7). 

In all of these 2,700 words I feel as though I have said almost nothing about this book (a neat trick in and of itself: writing something that is so hard to write about in turn). The whole work is like a dream, a representation of the structured language of the unconscious, but rather than having two sides that work together, we, the reader, are built into the equation or structure of the dream/unconscious, so that rather than the work representing a Freudian condensation or synthesis, it represents displacement with us, the reader, left to do the condensing. It’s a longing and lonesome work and something that I very much enjoyed. Whether you want to take it on is worth consideration because it’s otherwise all too easy to get lost in this spidery logic. Still, I hope this review gives you motivation to push through, continue on, experience this text. Live as the star. Endure as only silence can endure. 

Heavy Lit rating: Masterpiece