“A Creature of Compounded Illusions”
Dear Michael and Tara,
What a relief to leave the (un)living Hell of the Tavern where poor Vera is suffering a night of fitful rest and to return to the great, sea-blackened house where Catherine Cartwheel still reigns, perched upon her great bed in an opium fog. There we are introduced to two, new characters who arrived on the scene after Vera’s departure: Lisa Lunde, a would-be physicist, hired companion to Catherine; and Mrs. Hogden/Mrs. Logden, a purported teacher of arithmetic, hired to replace Miss MacIntosh. The description of Mrs. Hogden/Mrs. Logden’s dress the day that she arrives at the Cartwheel’s is reminiscent in its lush detail to that of Madge’s in the novel’s opening (now some dense 1,074 pages ago!):
“…she was arrayed in the most diverse objects, a smashed hat with a wilted-ostrich feather, snub-toed velvet slippers covered with sand, a beaded bag, cardboard boxes, a silk stocking which crawled out of a capacious pocket. She was wearing at least four coats of seemingly graduated sizes, the one fitting snugly over the other, and all contributing to the illusion that she was not so tall as she was wide. Oh, she was a creature of compounded illusions. Every coat pocket seemed to be burdened with packages or even such unwrapped objects as the silk stocking and a fluted teapot. Her dress, visible where the coats did not meet, was purple lace which seemed, in view of the fact that she had been driving in a cold wind all afternoon, an extravagance like the ostrich feathers. Cardboard boxes, held together by numerous strings, were ready to burst out from all over her squat person, just as she herself seemed ready to burst out of her coats and her lemon-colored gloves from which twisted strings extended. She was carrying, among other precarious objects, an empty bird cage, held in the crook of her little finger, and a package of bird seed. Draped around her rotund shoulders was a row of Javanese temple bells which whispered as she spoke. There was a tape measure around her stubby neck. Innumerable strings of beads made her look more like a Christmas tree than a human being…”
As we’ve experienced before in this novel, Mrs. Hogden/Mrs. Logden seems to stand in relation to Miss MacIntosh as both her opposite and doppelganger, simultaneously, as is the case with the Spitzer twins, Joachim and Peron, and arguably, Catherine Cartwheel and Cousin Hannah. In fact, Vera admits to mentally “substituting” Mrs. Hogden/Logden, as she images her to be (having never seen her in person, only as described to her by Lisa Lunde), and Mrs. MacIntosh. But Vera is puzzled by this involuntary substitution, a “trick of imagination,” because the two women are so different, in physical appearance, affectation, and philosophies. Mrs. Hogden/Logden wished Vera to grow-up “a kindly extrovert.”
How fantastic that Mrs. Hogden/Logden previously lived on Long Island, in an old Dutch windmill “with winking eyes and broken arms,” where an Arctic tern with a black-rimmed eye was her companion!
I’m looking forward to learning more about this “bizarro” Miss MacIntosh, who has arrived at the great, sea-blackened house by invitation or imposture, who can be sure?
Trying to fit a fluted teapot into my coat pocket,
Lori
I am on record as having dismissed Chapter 70 of MMMD as “filler” and “low comic relief,” principally due to the character of Mrs. Hogden who I found tedious and superfluous. After reading Lori’s posting on that chapter, I have revised my opinion. Her posting along with a random opening of the novel to the page where Mrs Hogden is assuming her role as arithmetic instructor, has shown me how shortsighted my criticism was. Mrs. Hogden invents a situation familiar to every elementary school student who ever lived: “If Farmer Brown had four apples,” Mrs. Hogden said, seraphically, licking her lips, “and you took two apples away from him—dear, dear, that would be unkind!—how many apples would Farmer Brown have left? There is no Farmer Brown, of course.“ Immediately, my mind flashed back to Chapter One, where we as readers believe our narrator Vera is riding on a train and observing the other passengers. This is the passage: “I had been too long half sleeping, cut off from communication with others, asking no more reasonable questions than a patient asks under the ether mask which seems like a train riding among the trackless stars or where there are no stars, no signposts any longer, and no one has ever seen the other person. All the other passengers, Negroes with white roosters crowing in their laps, beings unseen, merely sensed, each with his own dark and private heart, the darkness everlasting, their questions like my own, and no answer heard, for God is the loneliest of all, and there is perhaps no God but what we dreamed, and there is no train.” There is no train because Vera was half asleep and compares herself to an etherized patient on a table and further compares the situation as being “like” a train riding “among the stars.” Once the train materializes in her fantasy it immediately begins to be filled with passengers, all of whom, of course, are imaginary, the product of one with an “over active imagination.” While Mrs Hogden’s rudimentary imagination is no match for Vera’s, it still is operative in the most commonplace way: illustrating a math problem by inventing a scenario. Somehow Mrs. Hogden’s brain began to travel toward a modicum of self-awareness as she says, “There is no Farmer Brown, of course.” For a brief moment, the imagined became real as Mrs. Hogden began to feel sorry for Farmer Brown who had two apples taken away from him. Then quickly she recovers by exposing the tale as merely an instructive fiction:” There is no Farmer Brown, of course.” And, the reader might add, no apples and no Mrs. Hogden licking her lips, seraphically, or any other way. And there is no train. Or Vera Cartwheel, whose job as narrator is to use her over active imagination to tell tall tales, the kind that are crucial for our genuine existence and well being. —MS
She's a hoot! But remember what happens to everyone who spends any time in the great mansion by the sea... XD