“Our Lessons Must Go On In Spite of the Storms and the Moon Drowned in the Sky.”
Dear Tara,
Perhaps because there has been a steady rain here today, I’ve been thinking about water in this novel. For example, Chapter 66 opens with Miss MacIntosh conducting her “everlasting” lessons for Vera in the nursery while a storm rages:
“[o]utside, the marble statues in the garden were like people walking in a flood. The house would seem to move, to lurch as the lights dimmed, and only a shadow occupied the nursery with me. Even the stars were blotted out…
“…But our lessons must go on in spite of the storms and the moon drowned in the sky and the carcasses on the beach.”
Continuing the water (or frozen water) theme, Miss MacIntosh tells Vera about the Arctic explorer whom she met at the New York Stock Exchange, which she frequented “in order to make some imaginary money(!)” The Arctic explorer’s eyes never close, having been frozen open in a snowstorm. He urges Miss MacIntosh to go with him to the North Pole not exactly as a wife, “only something akin to it, the spirit without the flesh.” Though he knows about her baldness, her amputated breast, still he compares Miss MacIntosh to an iceberg: though present still impossible to see entirely. “He was sure that Miss MacIntosh was hiding something from his eyes which never closed.” Miss MacIntosh refused his offer to go away with him, but she admits to Vera that had he suggested she go to someplace other than the “snowy cap of the world,” she might have done so.
Is it inevitable that Miss MacIntosh’s life would end in a “watery bier,” “by the waves which return with all but her?” Vera believes that if her nursemaid is indeed dead, hers was not an accidental drowning, but rather that she walked “into the long swells of the surf…her footsteps leading into the waves but not out…” Miss MacIntosh talks often about disappearing into the sea in these final days. Yet, I don’t quite know what to make of her intention to take her life. And to end it in this way.
There is irony and/or contradiction in the fact that while the sea plays such a major role in this book, it is to the country’s interior that Vera is drawn, ostensibly to look for Miss MacIntosh in a place like the latter’s hometown of What Cheer, Iowa, but not precisely that town.
Why not take the bus to What Cheer? Vera needs to maintain the hope that maybe Miss MacIntosh didn’t kill herself in the sea. Perhaps people in What Cheer have knowledge that she’s still alive. But rather than discover this, Vera chooses ignorance in order to avoid something far worse--confirmation from What Cheer that her nursemaid is indeed dead.
Although I’m confident that Young’s incredible skills would have up to the task of describing the cornfields of Iowa with haunting lyricism, surely her talents were best exercised and, really, unmatched, when it comes to writing about the ever-transforming, eternal, and unknowable, mystical sea.
With life jacket, raft, and big black umbrella in tow,
Lori
Lori: I agree with you about the importance of water in this chapter and of the eternal and mystical sea. The tone here is elegiac and I would argue that this is the tone of the entire book. As you know, I have made an audio recording of MMMD, and have become convinced that if any book was written to be heard, it is this one. In all its pages the tone of elegy is most present in the last words of chapter 66 which not only echoes but appropriates the finest pastoral elegy in English literature, John Milton’s “Lycidas.” Terms such as “Yet once more,” “watery bier,” “sunk like the day star,” “no oozy locks it laves,” are lifted directly from the poem, confirming TS Eliot’s assertion that bad poets borrow while good ones steal. In Milton’s “Lycidas,” , as in MMMD, the speaker mourns the death by water of the most important person in one’s life, in this case, a young man, Edward King, whose body was never recovered after his drowning. Milton’s poem mirrors Mr. Spitzer’s opinion that if there is no corpus delicti, it is possible that there was no death, that we need to redirect our gaze toward immortality: “Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth; And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth.” In the simplest terms, Edward King and Georgia MacIntosh still live because someone wrote words about them, words which is our duty to make sure will last as long as Old Friday’s threnody of barking at chapter’s end. —-Michael Sexson