On wedding dresses and purple prose.

Dear Tara,

Continuing our readings on Mr. Spitzer, we learn more about the “unreal persons” in his and Catherine Cartwheel’s lives. For instance, Eustace, who only Catherine could see but whose existence Mr. Spitzer seemed to indulge. Eustace “was many persons, varying according to her [Catherin’s] whims…in fact, he might be simultaneously many persons.”

Often Catherine would “invite” a long-deceased relative to play cards, and a favorite “guest” was Cousin Hannah Freemount-Snowden, a truly remarkable woman. While Mr. Spitzer and Catherine disagreed about many things, they were bound by their admiration for this old cousin, an “adventurer making their own adventures seem forever unfulfilled,” “the acme of forlorn romance.”

In addition to being an adventurer, Cousin Hannah was a New England suffragette, and she lived a nomadic life traveling great distances across continents and high seas. In Chapter 30 and the pages that follow, we learn a great deal about (the imaginary or long-deceased) Cousin Hannah. My favorite of the colorful depictions of Cousin Hannah is her collection of never-used wedding gowns, which Mr. Spitzer discovers in an old trunk while itemizing her things following her “death.” It’s a Miss Havisham moment!

“He had been trapped by wedding gowns winding around his feet like seas, seas of hissing silks, skirts hemmed by marsh flowers, skirts blowing like waves, skirts drifting around his head or over his head like the sails of boats, short trains and long trains, tents of cobweb where one fire burned like the eye of this mystery, skirts like glacial snow drifting from a ledge of stone, skirts which were shrouds, skirts like white umbrellas floating over him…” (p. 748).

There will be much to say in future posts about Cousin Hannah, her mysteries and ambiguities, and what role she plays for the other characters and for this novel, but for now I want to reflect on this wonderful description above, like so many capacious descriptions in the pages before and after, and Young’s abundant style of writing.

Recently I came across a 1985 NYT article by the late author Paul West that beautifully describes the type of prose style the Young employs and the attractions of it. (You can read it in its entirety, and I recommend that you do, here: IN DEFENSE OF PURPLE PROSE - The New York Times). As you can determine from the tile of the article, West celebrates the way that an abundant (my word) writing style, “heed[s] the presence of all our words and the chance of combining them in unprecedented and luminous ways.” He relishes “a pandemonium, a seething nuclear pile of words.”

I find his theory about why this style of writing is attracts me (and I hope many others), compelling:

“The ideal is to create a complex verbal world that has as much presence, as much apparent physical bulk, as the world around it. So you get it both ways: the words evoke the world that isn't made of words, and they - as far as possible -enact it too. The prose, especially when it's purple, seems almost to be made of the same material as what it's about.”

This is prose that “has mass, texture and shape. It calls into play all the senses, and it can interact at the speed of ionization with the reader's mind. HOW extraordinary: our minds loll in two states, ably transposing words into things, things into words. What goes on in this hybrid mental shuttling to and fro is something passive but active, a compromise in affairs of scale, dimension and abstraction.”

West offers many examples of where readers can find purple prose. I’m sorry that he did not include Miss MacIntosh, My Darling among these, and I wonder if he knew of or had read it? It’s hard for me to believe that he would not have loved Young’s writing, “a paste as thick as life itself, a stream of phenomena delighted in for their own sake.”

In loving memory of Prince and grape Bubble Yum,

Lori