GHOSTLIER DEMARCATIONS

Dear Lori and Tara,

In the most recent involution, Vera Cartwheel, in her quest for the “real,’ has arrived at her destination only to find that it is, if anything, more claustrophobic than the world she had left. In her tiny room, she hears through the paper thin walls the old doctor speaking to his sister Sarah, who died at the age of one, but nightly haunts the old man and apparently shares his bed. Vera, faithful to her role as omniscient narrator, transcribes exactly the words he uses to characterize the host of problems confronting the present moment: “cancer, tuberculosis, and the kidney trouble, Sarah, the kidney trouble, the bowel trouble, head, nose, throat, eye, ear trouble, venereal diseases, scales, foam, old age creeping up on you?”

The words Vera uses to describe her room reflect her “over-active imagination,” which transforms the room into a coffin and then into the sea-blackened house she had left to find what was real: “The room was long and narrow, a box with a lid, the walls stained, and yet during the night of sleeplessness, the room had expanded like the dream of space, memory and future entering, and had included, though the world remained and the house was gone, a sea-blackened house with gold towers and cornices and black flags flying.” This is the dark double of the notion that we ultimately arrive where we started, and come to know the place for the first time. This is where we find that, in the end, we know nothing at all. It is where we are compelled to imagine the unimaginable. In this chapter, 71, Marguerite Young gives us her contribution to the task of imagining the worst, rivaling, in my mind, the atrocities depicted by Aeschylus in his Oresteia where Tantalus serves up his own son Pelops in a stew presented to the gods to test their omniscience. Vera Cartwheel, not sure whether she was in the room where it happened, or perhaps just dreamed it, overhears the Christian hangman describe the death of his first wife, Marie, who, while pregnant, hanged herself: “for she had been cut down like a fruit too heavy for the green bough, had been cut down with the child hanging from her, the child strangled by the umbilical cord and hanging like the criminal in the bell tower—“ I have cited this passage in Lori’s “Big Books” discussion of the novel The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, which serves up the atrocities of Babi Yar as prime example of the “worst that can be imagined.” The book’s title, “Kindly Ones” refers to ”The Eumenides,” the third play of Aeschylus’ trilogy. Though I have on several occasions cited Miss MacIntosh as a comedy, this in no way suggests that the book does not bore into the dark heart that is tragedy. This image, of the hanged mother and child, once seen, cannot be unseen.

Dear Readers: this book has what all great literature has: gravitas. An earned dignity. To characterize it as merely gothic or horror literature is to minimize and trivialize its importance as a major composition worthy of sharing the same shelf space with Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Euripides’ Trojan Women, and Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, to mention only three profound investigations of the worst that can be imagined, and each of which presents as a central event the death of innocent children. Here, the “still point of the turning world” has become the desolate and ruined landscape where, as Vera notes on many occasions, echoing Keats, “no bird sang.”

Investigating the corridor beyond her room, Vera finds herself in the bedroom/office of Dr. O’Leary. She finds mis-matched women’s shoes, obstetrical instruments, and a bookshelf whose titles deserve mention in Umberto Eco’s Infinity of Lists, among which are “The Causes of Ejaculatory Praecox Among the Great American Elks” and Keats’ “Ode to the Grecian Urn.” “Few fantasies,” Vera concludes, “are so externalized as the doctor’s mind. But oh, I had wished to discover order, as if it were a beautiful island in the midst of life, island I might never reach.”

The order Vera seeks, obviously, is not that of the tidy room or even of the well-wrought urn, but of the interconnection of all things, an order stemming from a “blessed rage” as Wallace Stevens puts it in his poem “The Idea of Order at Key West.” An order which reveals at the end not tidy divisions but “ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.” The reader who is concerned about the apparent disorder of this novel is well advised to visit this highly available if often bewildering order of words by Mr. Stevens. We have noted in previous involutions the chemistry that bring the odd couple Miss Young and Mr. Stevens, together.

At the end of Chapter 71, we are introduced to Tabitha, the hotel’s maid, an apparent mute, who is offered to the reader as an explanation for why the mad doctor has a one-sided conversation with a person he calls Sarah, his long dead sister. Tabitha, this chapter suggests, visits the doctor nightly in his room and plays the role of his sister Sarah to console him. The reader should be wary, at this point in the book, of such convenient explanations for the unexplainable. What we assume is “evidence,” this novel insists, is simply finding what we wish to find, and our “clue”, like the black poker chip of a previous chapter, leads nowhere. This is why the enigmatic Tabitha, at the end of the chapter remains enigmatic with her unexpected words, “Good Morning.”

With these words, the novel, in Chapter 72, begins its denouement and we are introduced to one of its major characters, the astonishing Esther Longtree, the only teacher we need to fully understand the business of parturition. —-MS