One More Indiana Writer - Marguerite Young

I had known nothing about Marguerite Young until I got back to Indianapolis and the halfway house gave me internet access. Now I also know Indianapolis was known as the Athens of the West.

The Athens of the West moniker I learned from Ms. Young interview in The Paris Review:

MARGUERITE YOUNG

I was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, “the Athens of the West,” as it had been called in an earlier day. That was when Booth Tarkington, Meredith Nicholson, James Whitcomb Riley, various writers of the old Hoosier group lived there. We were brought up to believe that to be born in Indiana was to be born a poet—a myth which I can't accept now, but I did then. I remember telling my grandmother, when I was about seven years old, that I intended to be a poet.

The Review describes her like this:

Marguerite Young published her first collection of verse, Prismatic Ground, in 1939. In 1945 came the double appearance of Moderate Fable, her last volume of verse, and Angel in the Forest, a history of two Utopian communities in New Harmony, Indiana, in the nineteenth century. Subsequently, portions of the novel to which she was to devote eighteen years, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, began to appear in excerpt. The novel appeared in its entirety in 1965. In the late sixties she abandoned a near-completed life of James Whitcomb Riley to write a brief biography of her friend Eugene Debs, the first socialist candidate for the presidency, which resulted in a large-scale study of Utopian and anti-Utopian trends.

While the interview raises interesting points (Ms. Young knew Anais Nin?), this is the part I'm quoting since it intrudes on my own ideas on writing about Indiana.

INTERVIEWER

If your grandmother was the great personal influence, the geographical impact was Indiana, wasn't it? Indiana is the center of all your subsequent writing. But you are more interested in the psychology of character than you are in landscape, aren't you? You do not have that love of the prairie grasses and the low horizon line of Willa Cather, for example?

YOUNG

No. It was my fate to be born in Indiana. I probably would have chosen Edinburgh if you had asked me, or perhaps Rome. But I believe we start with what we are, as writers, and Indiana is a land rich in legend. I tried to transmute this legend into a universal and cosmic statement of some kind, and not be strictly a regionalist....

The Poetry Foundation discusses her poetry here. 

In  Dalkey Archives I found A Conversation with Marguerite Young By Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs which has its points of interest

I: You have strong political views. Have critics recognized them, or have the poetic qualities and eccentric characters in your writing diverted critics from your sociopolitical points? Does “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling” show a social conscience?

MY: Some of the reviewers recognized the social and political implications of “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.” It isn’t that Miss MacIntosh has a social conscience, but the book does. If you understand hallucination and illusion, you don’t blindly follow any leader. You must know if the person is sane or insane, over the abyss. Mr. Spitzer’s adventures and the passages on the little frog musician investigate the nature of illusion, and if there is no certain reality, the idea of following a leader must be scrutinized. Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them and revert to realism. I don’t believe there can be a poetic novel without political consciousness. I have a strong political conscience, and the Debs book shows this as well.

I: Why do you project reality as tenuous?

MY: When you have examined all the illusions of life 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. The reason I had Esther Longtree in “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling” marry the little bond salesman was that he was the most demented person of all. The reason Vera married the stone-deaf man was that she could not marry a perfect being. She had to marry a flawed creature because she knew that all creatures are flawed, but out of the flaw may come the universe. Like the crystal flaw that is in “Moderate Fable,” my book of poems. Because it was imperfect it came into being.

And now I am wondering who was this woman?

I: Will you describe your obsession?

MY: I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered. This is true of “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling,” “Moderate Fable,” “Prismatic Ground,” “Angel in the Forest,” and my Debs manuscript. All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.

Writer Marguerite Young, Eccentric Documentarian of Utopias provides background on Ms. Young and on her Miss MacIntosh, My Darling has audio as well as an annotiation that includes:

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965), a mixture of history and fiction, overlaps in some ways with Young's earlier Angel in the Forest (1943), a more factual study of the two successive utopian communities founded in the town of New Harmony. This ambitious book, 18 years in the making, created a sensation when it was published, both for its rambling Joycean style and its length (1,198 pages). It has been called the longest American novel to be published in one volume. Critics charge that, despite its cult status, few if any people have actually read the novel all the way through. In this talk, Young certainly makes the Rappite and Owenite experiments in communal life sound fascinating. Her own other-worldliness is also on display. After narrating how George Rapp castrated one son (who died from the procedure), and then caused the death of another, she pauses to announce that she will now address some of the community's "flaws." 

 I cannot tell if Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is still in print but it has its own Wikipedia page and The Paris Review calls it The Most Unread Book Ever Acclaimed which contians this paragraph that I might print when I have a wall of my own:

I came across Young by way of her essay “The Midwest of Everywhere,” a short piece about a series of bizarre sights she claims to have witnessed firsthand in the American interior: elephants browsing the banks of the Wabash River; an entire town populated by deaf people; a dead whale in a boxcar, stranded in the middle of a cornfield. Young was born in Indiana and spent many decades in the Midwest—at the University of Chicago, where she studied Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, and at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she taught fiction—but in the essay, she writes about the region in a way that is entirely unfamiliar. “For me, a plain Middle Westerner, there is no middle way,” she writes. “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.” I read the essay last winter at my home in Wisconsin. At the time, I was in a slump that was probably seasonal but felt dire and endless and linked, in a vague way, to the fact that I lived in a region that was bound up in the American imagination, and increasingly my own, with the television reboot of Roseanne. I have always lived in the Midwest and had often defended it against reductive stereotypes. But the notion that it was an economic and political wilderness had become such an insistent article of national consensus that I’d begun to doubt my own frames of reference. I was not in a particularly ambitious mood that winter, but I kept thinking about the strange consciousness I’d glimpsed in the essay. A couple days later, I found a copy of Miss MacIntosh. 

And that article concludes this way:

 What statement she intended is not entirely clear. In the end, whatever meaning the story contains is diluted by its sheer excess—which is by design. Miss MacIntosh is a novel as infinite and mystifying as life itself. Having finished it, I experienced no sense of triumph at having conquered something difficult; I felt no closer to proficiency or understanding. In a way, the critic who comes to the novel with the desire to master it, to figure it out, falls victim to the same delusions as its characters, with their quixotic, Utopian quests. Any reader who hopes to survive the book must forget about telos, abandon all hope of destination. Accept that the bus is going nowhere. This is, in any case, what I took from the novel, at a time when I had come to see the place where I lived—a region that has largely outlived its purpose—as a dead end. Young reminded me that many strange and wondrous things once came out of the void. If we could see the world as it truly is, we would realize that they still are, that it’s happening all the time.

By now I am thinking of Ross Lockridge, Jr. and wondering what is it about Hoosiers writing these huge novels and being forgotten. Is it the curse of Indiana? Do we need to leave to find our ambition? Or is that we who do write about Indiana are all driven mad by the task?

What I still have not had time to peruse fully is Who is Marguerite Young?, a webiste dedidcated to this writer.