Dear Lori,
One of literature’s greatest works of fiction is that it’s a solitary activity. With that in mind, I’m glad your name precedes my thoughts here—or, rather, your name is my first thought. A letter, whether physical or electronic, plays in absence, invoking someone who isn’t there, first for its writer and later its reader. I was thrilled when after hearing my interview on Unburied Books, you reached out to ask whether I would like to collaborate on a project to bring Miss MacIntosh, My Darling to the attention of more readers. I already had tremendous respect for the work you do across multiple literary fronts. All I knew of Miss MacIntosh before I started reading was a vague sense of its quality and its size, and I’ve benefited when approaching books of such scope from not going it alone.
That would have been enough reason for me, but literature’s inherently communal nature has become a particular interest over the last several months. A number of recent and ongoing projects (books, magazines, podcasts, the endless waking nightmare of social media) that have embraced coauthorship highlight literature and reality’s dialogic essence. It doesn’t surprise me that this would be the case as people, especially the creative class, are more and more physically atomized and virtual interconnection accelerates.
One of the many pleasures I’m experiencing in my initial foray into Miss MacIntosh’s highway fog is the novel’s challenge to individualism in its almost sentence-to-sentence insistence on the hazy boundaries of self and identity. Here even the self is a group project. And this is a novel initially published in 1965!
What was the organization of illusion, of memory? Who knew even his own divided heart? Who knew all hearts as his own? Among beings strange to each other, those divided by the long roaring of time, of space, those who have never met or, when they meet, have not recognized as their own the other heart and that heart's weaknesses, have turned stonily away, would there not be, in the vision of some omniscient eye, a web of spidery logic establishing the most secret relationships, deep calling to deep, illuminations of the eternal darkness, recognitions in the night world of voyager dreams, all barriers dissolving, all souls as one and united? Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one illusion. (7)
I could say a lot more, and I’m grateful for just such a chance, but before handing you the baton I wanted to say that an additional surprise I’ve had is, despite being made up of page long sentences and catalogs of hallucinations, how approachable and easy to understand the novel is. Every word is poetry and a fever dream, and yet I follow along.
I’m grateful for the way this book and your taking a chance to read it with a stranger has allowed me to see part of my heart in yours, and I’m optimistic about sharing that experience many times over with the fellow travelers who decide to take this bus ride with us. Though “dreams, visions, phantoms, some from the shore of Hades” (14), I see them here in the room with me now.
With “a happiness such as I could not imagine to be real,”
Anthony
Dear Anthony,
I am so excited to be reading Miss MacIntosh, My Darling alongside you, and it feels significant that you begin our correspondence with the idea that reading need not be a solitary activity, a notion that has special relevance given that this enormous, exuberant novel is indeed generous in its structure, style, and articulations of human perception.
Over the past year I have been thinking deeply about why abundance in literary fiction is especially compelling to me. In his wonderful book on aesthetics, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art, the critic and scholar Alexander Nehamas writes that when a work of art beckons, it is because we do not fully understand it, but feel the strong desire to do so. Borrowing Nehamas’ parlance, I find abundance in literature beautiful because it holds the promise that I will, over time, come to understand it better. And it is this process of understanding why Miss MacIntosh is beautiful and extraordinary that I want to express, both for myself and to share with you and other readers.
The word “abundant” derives from the Latin word “unda,” meaning wave. And in Miss MacIntosh we find waves on every page—of memories, impressions, ideas, emotions, birds, excursions, and objects: so many objects! (Twelve grand pianos (p.19); five hundred saltshakers not one of which would work, (p.305)). These waves wash over me while I read. They have an innate, slow rhythm; never still. Yet, the profusion of these things allows me to sink into the text, to luxuriate in the prose. The “many-ness” gives a thickening or layering aspect to Young’s writing, and minimal white space on the page makes me feel submerged (another aquatic term!) inside it. Young’s inventories create a lyrical depth greater than the sum of their parts.
…we should find some other task to keep the cobwebs out of our brains, to keep the birds from nesting in our hair, much though she admired the leisurely pace of the slow-flying seagulls and the stilt cranes, the kingfishers flying over the golden discs in the evening clouds, the pearl-catchers diving over distant oyster beds, the fishing birds flapping their fish-silver wings when the grey sky was like a sea filled with fish-colored clouds and silver fins of light like the wings of moths and scarcely distinguishable from the darkening waters. (p.45)
I look forward to the abundant joys of this collective journey,
Lori
a note to readers:
We’re grateful you’d traverse Miss MacIntosh, My Darling with us. Because of its scope, both in size and merit, we’ve decided to forego a reading schedule. We plan to progress through the novel from beginning to end, and every Wednesday provide an exchange about our reading and the thoughts it inspires, for as long as this project lasts, which we anticipate will extend beyond the day we read the last word on the last page. Our letters to each other will advance through the book from front to back. Sometimes we will cover more ground, and sometimes we will slow to consider a passage, a scene, an image, an idea at length. Please share thoughts and favorite passages from your own reading with us, both in the comments here on Substack and on social media. Most of all, have fun! That’s what we plan to do anyway. Happy reading!
P.S. All page numbers that we reference refer to the print edition of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young, Dalkey Archive Essentials edition, 2024.
I've been so excited for this first correspondence, and I'm so excited for the promise of more and of more over time. What a book this has been for me so far, and I think you cover two of the most important things straight away--the blurry lines between us and the abundance! I can't wait for more!
Lori and Anthony:
First, let me thank the two of you for embarking on this impossible (and therefore necessary) voyage of finding words to do justice to this long neglected literary work. My own voyage started in the late 60’s when I was introduced to the book by a good friend Wayne McEvilly, who taught philosophy at Montana State University. Obsessed with the book (as all good readers usually are over books important to them) he passed his enthusiasm along to me and, for the past fifty plus years it has been a constant companion, especially when I need a book to do what Walter Pater says all good art does: “gives to our passing moments their highest possible quality.” I’m hoping that our collective reading manages to reach yet another impossible and necessary goal: making sure her work will endure. Professor McEvilly arranged for Miss Young to visit our campus in the early 70’s and I had the pleasure of hearing her read passages from MMMD. She treated each word as an end in itself, even the most humble and trivial. She knew that there was nowhere to get to other than where you already were. Reading MMMD is not about getting to the end, as many readers think, it is about getting to where you are. After Miss Young’s visit, I was tasked with the chore of getting her to the local train station. From the train window she asked me if I thought her work would endure. I replied, “I promise you, it will.” In furtherance of that promise, I recently completed an audio version of the entire book which is currently under review at Deep/Vellum-Dalkey. I tried to the best of my ability to model my reading after her calm yet passionate reading she gave a half century ago. Now I discover that I am not alone in my possibly Quixotic efforts to, at long last, be a small part of a larger quest to give her masterpiece the attention and respect it deserves. I look forward to joining many other voices in this exciting voyage——Michael Sexson