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
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!
It's so great to have you with us. This reading would not be the same without what I am sure will be your astute observations of the novel. Thanks for being here. Lori
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
What an honor it is to have you join us. I'm very jealous of the fact that you met Ms. Young and heard her read from the novel. I love what you write about Young "treating each word as an end in itself," and that Young knew that "there was nowhere to get to other than where you already were. I'm excited to listen to your audio version--I can't imagine how many hours that took! And, I really look forward to your comments as we take this thrilling adventure as a collective of readers. Lori
I love this project so much and am looking forward to following along! I love your point about abundance, Lori -- there's SO MUCH in this book, no container or boundary can hold it in, not even the boundary of the individual self.
It's so true. I've been looking at abundance in literary fiction closely over the past year or so. While I've found other abundant novels in my searches, MMMD is the pinnacle. Nothing else like it! (However, if any fellow reader has recommendations on other stylistically abundant novels, I would be grateful!)
Lori and Anthony: Your opening epistles deserve canonizing! The two of you go directly to the important issues, Anthony by citing the crucial passage on 7 ending with the provocative declaration, “The individual is the one illusion” and Lori by addressing the elephant (or white whale, or white elephant in the room)—that the book is “too much.” Where others speak of “excess,” citing the novel’s weight, girth, number of pages, chapters, characters, its inflated and repetitious style, its digressions, diversions, qualifications, contradictions, paradoxes and parenthetical peregrinations, and its seemingly never ending inventories, lists, and itemizations, where others speak of all that, Lori speaks of “Abundance.” One of the great take aways from this book is that there is no “I”, there is only “we.” With this focus, Anthony, using spidery logic, transforms subscribers to this site from faceless words on a page into living, breathing, dying souls, who are here to commune with other faces and souls hoping, one supposes, that all barriers will dissolve, thus uniting us all. A bit floridly put, and certainly excessive, but I reckon that Ms Young would have no quarrel with this way of putting things. Abundance indeed! —Michael Sexson
Thank you for the kind words. I do not like using the word "excess" to describe this, or any other work of art that I love. Excess has a negative connotation, as if someone is wagging their finger and scolding me (or in this case, Ms. Young!). "Excess" also has a socio-economic tone that is just not relevant here. I embrace all of the novel's plentitude. It's the very thing that makes the book extraordinary, as you state! Lori
I’m fine with “Abundant” but I’m not ready to retire the word “excess” if for no other reason than it provokes some very potent and memorable replies such as William Blake’s proverb from hell, “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” and Shakespare’s Orsino in Twelfth Night who says something like “If this be excess, give me more of it!”
Lori (and others in this Bus Stack): In response to your call for recommendations of abundant books, I have come up with the following. First, I would recommend Annie Dillard’s anthology of her own writings titled “The Abundance,” in particular her book titled “For the Time Being,” obsessed with the same things that fascinate Marguerite Young: a) clouds b) the grotesque and (c) everything else. Second, I would recommend John Crowley’s Little, Big, an enormous novel whose central character is, as in MMMD, a decaying house and its seemingly infinite rooms. Like MMMD, Little, Big is concerned with the “organization of illusion, memory” This wildly extravagant novel has as its goal proof that human memory, when properly organized, contains nothing less than everything. Next I would recommend titles from the category of “Usual Suspects,” including: Moby Dick, Tristram Shandy, In Search of Lost Time, and the gold standard for the “Everything book,” James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Special mention to Arno Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream” (available, as with Little, Big, in a deluxe edition from Dalkey Archive) And I would like to sneak in Septology, an 800 page one sentence novel by a recent Nobel Prize winner , Jon Fosse. Finally, I would choose two selections from the world of “Frame Story” collections, the Kathasaritsagara and The Arabian Nights. (The standard promotional page for Miss MacIntosh, My Darling contains this sentence “It is an epic of what might be called the Arabian Nights of American Life.” Extremely enjoyable introductions to these two collections of stories within stories come from an essay by the late John Barth titled “Ocean of Story,” and through a Salman Rushdie novel for children called “Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” Others, of course, will recommend other titles, but I would be surprised if several of them did not contain at least one title listed here——Michael Sexson
I really appreciate these recommendations! You cite Crowley's Little Big (which I read years ago, and now feel the need to revisit!) for its decaying house, and this brings to mind a question I've been puzzling: is there an inherent connection between abundance and gothic literature?
The example at the forefront of my mind is Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson. Again a decaying house that embodies the generational trauma of its inhabitants. Very gothic in tone. And what about the mansion at Sutpen's Hundred in Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. (A novel that features a sentence with 1,288 words.) Or Ramalhete, in The Maias by Eca de Queiros, also translated by Margaret Jull Costa, a house whose "walls had seen so many domestic misfortunes...as...happened to all walls." These homes, like the "sea blackened house" of MMMD, exhibit a patina of faded or fading grandeur, a magnificence despoiled by familial hubris and decadence. Perhaps Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, too? Other examples? I love thinking about these.
There just seems to be something about the gothic and abundance that naturally fits together. Why?
Lori: thanks for these recommendations. I’ve put Chronicle of the Murdered House at the top of my huge stack of books to read. I’m currently reading Mann’s Doctor Faustus, which strikes me as one of the two greatest novels about (and being) music. The other, of course, is MMMD. My first thought, vague as it may be, about the link between Abundance and the Gothic is that of the feeling of being overwhelmed. Like many on this site, I’m often overwhelmed by the abundance of recommendations of books to read, and thoughts to think—-to the point of wondering if I’m being buried alive—-a Gothic trope indeed, and one that is going to appear in all its horror in chapter five of MMMD. Right now I’m pondering your and Anthony’s demonstrations of how repetition in MMMD is a feature and not a bug. —Michael
Has it occurred go anyone on this bus that everyone in the novel seems to be a version of Schrodinger’s cat—simultaneously living and dead…depending on how you look at it?
Yes! The blurring between different identities and states of being is on nearly every page.
Is Mr. Spitzer also his dead brother? Is Cousin Hannah also Catherine Cartwheel? Is the pregnant girl on the bus also the woman who she accuses her finance of being in love with? Characters' identities are unmoored much like the persistent sliding between reality and dreams.
Searching for an adequate understanding of the term “abundance”, I ran into John Barth, the late John Barth (April 2024), who wrote, if not the final word, certainly the most generous definition of that term in his essay “A Few Words about Minimalism.” The disputes between minimalists (Ray Carver, Samuel Beckett et al) and maximalists (Joyce, Marguerite Young et al) are at heart, not disputes at all but entertainments,, acts of generosity (see Richard Powers’ novel of that name). Therefore, abundance means setting a place for both (and others) at the table. Barth writes: “For if there is much to admire in artistic austerity, its opposite is not without merits and joys as well. There are the minimalist pleasures of Emily Dickinson—"Zero at the Bone"—and the maximalist ones of Walt Whitman; the low-fat rewards of Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing and the high-calorie delights of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. There truly are more ways than one to heaven. As between minimalism and its opposite, I pity the reader—or the writer, or the age—too addicted to either to savor the other.” Abundance does not “privilege” the wordy over the almost silent——it not only accepts but praises to high heavens the glorious gifts they both have to bestow.
How to read Chapter One of Miss MacIntosh, my Darling (with apologies to Marguerite Young and Shakespeare’s Bottom the Weaver:
VERA’S DREAM
I have had a dream. In my dream I thought I was…..I thought I had……. in my dream I was on a bus, or was it a six-sided coach or carriage like that in the old silent movie “Phantom Carriage” where a small group of people gathered to be taken to their destination, only to find out that their destination (and the coach driver) was Death? No, I’m sure it was a bus. And the bus driver was whistling, perhaps in anticipation of his wife, a woman with ample breasts of a realized maturity, for he kept talking about going home to the “old woman.” But wait, that isn’t true, it’s only what my over-active imagination wanted; in fact, the bus driver was headed toward a run down gothic tavern and hotel in Indiana where the old woman who was waiting for him in a bridal suite was not his wife but his mother! And where the walls were so thin between rooms that one could hear the blood-curdling howls from souls in wretched torment. And where it dawned on me that the bus, the coach, the carriage were none of these but actually an undertaker’s hearse bearing the corpses of myself and the others. Due to the driver’s recklessness, my imagination also invented a scenario in which the bus overturned in a horror field and the force of the accident had decapitated all the passengers and our heads rolled about in the weeds. Later, we brushed past a furniture van which had on top of it a woman’s feathered hat bobbing like a bird. I can’t seem to get that image out of my head. The other passengers in this carriage included a sleeping broad faced young man and next to him, a woman, likely his wife, wearing the most outrageous costume I’ve ever seen! It was filled with images of all imaginable outdoor sports, and on the top of her head was a decaying stuffed yellow canary. In my dreams within my dreams I always see this canary flying into a thunderstorm facing inevitable death. All the while the driver’s whistling continued sounding like bird songs and I swear to God, an abandoned baby’s cry in the winter grass. Outside the cold windows everything seemed to pass in depressing sameness and endless repetitions of familiar sites, as if the bus was simultaneously going somewhere and yet going in an unending circle. Finally there appeared the grotesque figure of a two-headed man who shook his fist at us only to be revealed as a man with a child on his shoulders. We travelers were intruders on this grey watery scene robbing the silence of its voice. We were, I feared, in hell.
I was on the bus in the first place because I needed to find the real behind the illusion. I was here searching for the one person in my life who was not only real but sang the praises of common sense, of not having an over-active imagination, my fusty, busty nursemaid, Miss Macintosh, my darling. The last we had seen of her were the paltry emblems left on the beach: eyeglasses, whaler’s hat, an Admiral Dewey corset, a drenched copy of Pilgrim’s Progress, a bent black umbrella, and her red wig draped over a rock. I left my mother’s house of shades and monsters and here I am in this bus, this six-sided coach, this carriage, this coffin, on my way to what is plain and pure and true. I will call my dream “Vera’s Dream” for it is indeed true. But I fear my telling of it might have to bend the truth a bit, so that the telling of it seems, well, slant. ——What Cheers!—-Vera.
Lori and Anthony: the bus ride to nowhere (and everywhere) is picking up steam, and we must consider the advice from Bette Davis to “fasten your seatbelts”, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.” Lori, I appreciated your alerting us to the importance of painting (esp ekphrasis) to this book. Anthony, I liked your remark that “far from nothing happening, everything is happening.” The name I used to give to these “loose baggy monsters” (as Henry James calls Abundant novels) is “Everything Books,” in which writers (and, or, readers) are under the illusion that everything you need is enclosed within this one indispensable book, the one Stephane Mallarme said would “reveal all existing relationships between everything.” We’ve bandied many titles about on this site and invite others to share with us texts that meet Mallarme’s definition. And yes, the Bible, conspicuous by its absence from these discussions, and a text Ms Young was intimately familiar with, is fair game.
As for Miss Macintosh and painting: I defy anyone to read chapters 17 and 18 of this book without conjuring up a famous painting by Edvard Munch.
I would like to make the case that Henry James would not consider MMMD a "large, loose, baggy monster." Here is this now famous quote in further context as found in James' Preface to "The Tragic Muse:"
"A picture without composition slights its most precious chance for beauty, and is, moreover, not composed at all unless the painter knows how that principle of health and safety, working as an absolutely premeditated art, has prevailed. There may in its absence be life, incontestably, as The Newcomes has life, as Les Trois Mousquetaires, as Tolstoi's Peace and War, have it; but what do such large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean? We have heard it maintained, we well remember, that such things are "superior to art"; but we understand least of all what that may mean, and we look in vain for the artist, the divine explanatory genius, who will come to our aid and tell us."
I argue that Young composed MMMD with a premeditated artistic vision. It does not contain elements "accidental" or "arbitrary." When I read Young, I see the artist. And perhaps Young thought that James would see her MMMD as composed art, too, had he lived to see it. In her 1977 Paris Review interview (which I also referenced in my latest post for Young's claim that she has a "muralist's imagination"), Young tells of a dream in which she is working on MMMD while James looks over her shoulder and tells her that she is the modern-day version of his writing. (When the PR interviewer asks Young if she thinks this is true, Young denies this. False modesty?)
MMMD is about life, but it is the life of the mind and spirit, not the life of action and exploit. Its undulating cycles of prose comprise, I believe, a well thought out composition.
Now on your comment of the "everything novel." I don't believe that this description applies to MMMD either. This type of novel brings to my mind the "systems novel," books like "Infinite Jest" or "Underworld" that seek to explain how peoples and processes are connected in an attempt to explain (the externalities? of) life. Not MMMD to me.
The more I think about it, I'm convinced that long length might be the easiest disposed element of an "abundance" novel, at according to my emphasis on the aesthetic. (For example Joris-Karl Huysmans relatively slim "Against Nature" and I'm sure a lot of poetry with which I'm unfamiliar). Rather it is the qualities of the writing style and, to borrow James (who is one of my top three favorite writers) and the artistic composition.
I hope that you and other subscribers will poke holes or elaborate on my arguments, Michael!
Lori: I sent this previously but apparently it got lost in hyperspace. It’s a response to your wonderful high silk hat post concerning Henry James. I’m still trying to get the hang of substacks and the whole enfoldings of comments and replies and nested this and that—-Michael
Lori: I think we may be closer together on some of this than you may think. I share your reservations about what you call “systems novels,” the Pynchons and Foster Wallaces etc. who, while obviously and impressively intelligent, are, to my mind, soulless. I also have great respect for the aesthetic, having read all of Nabokov and laughed at his insistence that his characters are like galley slaves who would be whipped by him if they deviated one inch from his plan to eliminate all that is accidental and arbitrary. Speaking of Nabokov, I also agree that a short book can be as deep, complex, and gratifying as long ones. Pale Fire is 224 pages long! Mostly, I also count Henry James as among my favorite writers. I try to re-read The Golden Bowl and Wings of the Dove each year. If we learn anything from MMMD (and I understand that the word “learn” might get me in trouble) it is that all is illusion. The passage on page 7 which launched our bus ride isn’t a debate about what is illusory and what is real. It’s a given that everything is illusion. The trick is to understand how we “organize” our illusions, our memory. If we can see the world of law and politics are “legal fictions,” we ought to be able to see everything we do and think as fictions, fantasies, which organized in certain ways, produce certain effects. All our beliefs are also fictions. Wallace Stevens (whom I have come to regard as compatible with Ms Young on just about everything, except politics. Stevens thought Eisenhower was a dangerous radical.) Stevens said in one of his essays ‘The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.” What are we left with when we find out that all is fiction? To continue with Stevens, his politics aside, we are left with sounds. Bereft of truth but still chained to words, we must pay strict attention to the sounds of words. He spoke of “The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings which, we are sure are all the truth that we shall ever experience, having no illusions, makes us listen to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling them, makes us search the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration, which it is only within the power of the acutest poet to give them” Alas, perfection and finality, are exposed as merely sounds and vibrations. But then, as the string theorists remind us today, what isn’t? It was thinking like this that led me to believe that MMMD needed to be heard as well as read. Please indulge me. Go to page 86 of our text and read aloud to yourself the last paragraph of chapter four. It is one of my favorites in all of MMMD and it brings together the current principals of our discussion, Mr. James and Ms Young, (as well as the loosest and baggiest of monsters, the Bible) gathered around that golden bowl which, in the fun animal world of Finnegans Wake, becomes a bowl of “memory where every hollow holds a hallow.” As for the question at hand, what Henry James would think of MMMD, I rather imagine, that, looking down from the delicious hot bath waters of his Great Good Place in the sky, he would most likely be baffled by the thought that this would be what he would sound like should he survive into the mid twentieth century. But like you, I enjoy thinking that his inherent magnanimity and generosity, his unsurpassed capaciousness, in a word, his abundance, would approve.
Drew Johnson in a bonkers review of MMMD to be found at Literary Hub writes: “consciousness is more like Marguerite Young’s incessant, recursive repetitions than any well made 19th century novel, or even, say the doyennes of stream of consciousness—Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson.” If he’s right, do we need to seriously rethink what “stream of consciousness” means?
The more one thinks of Marguerite Young being a reincarnation of Henry James, the more plausible it seems. Consider Mr. Spitzer with his high silk hat, cane, and his tendency toward corpulence, and his desire to write music heard so deeply it is not heard at all (with a tip of that hat to T.S. Eliot) Or consider this cryptic line from Chapter 12 of MMMD: “The details must be told only through a veil of oblivion which is itself a medium of memory, for there is no forgetfulness even of the smallest thing. If it is hidden, it is revealed through its absence, the sense of the void.” Put that along side of James’ advice to to writers to “be one on whom nothing is lost.” Or consider this thought from an obviously over active imagination: James died in 1916 when Marguerite was 8. That was enough time for the distinguished man’s spirit to possess the soul of a small girl and encourage her to write a story about a young girl who becomes the pupil of a nursemaid who , for all her kindnesses, was quite mad.
I will try to find Drew Johnson's review of MMMD that you mention. I have been thinking of stream of consciousness in relation to MMMD. In what ways would we differentiate it from Woolf's? James's? It is very interesting to consider. Is it the writing's recursive nature, in addition to the digressions like those of Woolf and James, that make it distinct?
(I'm copying this over to the latest post--June 5--in the hopes that this thread does not get buried. I, too, am unsure how to bring continuing comment threads into new posts!!)
I love the reference to the broken golden bowl! And I did read the entire paragraph aloud. It is really superb. It reminds me that having read the novel aloud for an audio production of it, you have a wonderful intimacy with the book that exceeds what most of us will ever achieve!
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!
Neither can I! For more of the book and more of my cowriter’s brilliant thoughts. And now your thoughts too! I’m glad you’re reading with us, Trevor.
Trevor,
It's so great to have you with us. This reading would not be the same without what I am sure will be your astute observations of the novel. Thanks for being here. Lori
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
Dear Michael,
What an honor it is to have you join us. I'm very jealous of the fact that you met Ms. Young and heard her read from the novel. I love what you write about Young "treating each word as an end in itself," and that Young knew that "there was nowhere to get to other than where you already were. I'm excited to listen to your audio version--I can't imagine how many hours that took! And, I really look forward to your comments as we take this thrilling adventure as a collective of readers. Lori
I love this project so much and am looking forward to following along! I love your point about abundance, Lori -- there's SO MUCH in this book, no container or boundary can hold it in, not even the boundary of the individual self.
Dear Rebecca,
It's so true. I've been looking at abundance in literary fiction closely over the past year or so. While I've found other abundant novels in my searches, MMMD is the pinnacle. Nothing else like it! (However, if any fellow reader has recommendations on other stylistically abundant novels, I would be grateful!)
Thanks for joining us, Rebecca!
Lori
Lori and Anthony: Your opening epistles deserve canonizing! The two of you go directly to the important issues, Anthony by citing the crucial passage on 7 ending with the provocative declaration, “The individual is the one illusion” and Lori by addressing the elephant (or white whale, or white elephant in the room)—that the book is “too much.” Where others speak of “excess,” citing the novel’s weight, girth, number of pages, chapters, characters, its inflated and repetitious style, its digressions, diversions, qualifications, contradictions, paradoxes and parenthetical peregrinations, and its seemingly never ending inventories, lists, and itemizations, where others speak of all that, Lori speaks of “Abundance.” One of the great take aways from this book is that there is no “I”, there is only “we.” With this focus, Anthony, using spidery logic, transforms subscribers to this site from faceless words on a page into living, breathing, dying souls, who are here to commune with other faces and souls hoping, one supposes, that all barriers will dissolve, thus uniting us all. A bit floridly put, and certainly excessive, but I reckon that Ms Young would have no quarrel with this way of putting things. Abundance indeed! —Michael Sexson
Michael,
Thank you for the kind words. I do not like using the word "excess" to describe this, or any other work of art that I love. Excess has a negative connotation, as if someone is wagging their finger and scolding me (or in this case, Ms. Young!). "Excess" also has a socio-economic tone that is just not relevant here. I embrace all of the novel's plentitude. It's the very thing that makes the book extraordinary, as you state! Lori
I’m fine with “Abundant” but I’m not ready to retire the word “excess” if for no other reason than it provokes some very potent and memorable replies such as William Blake’s proverb from hell, “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” and Shakespare’s Orsino in Twelfth Night who says something like “If this be excess, give me more of it!”
These two quotes are so good, Michael, that you just may have convinced me of the rightness of "excess!"
Lori (and others in this Bus Stack): In response to your call for recommendations of abundant books, I have come up with the following. First, I would recommend Annie Dillard’s anthology of her own writings titled “The Abundance,” in particular her book titled “For the Time Being,” obsessed with the same things that fascinate Marguerite Young: a) clouds b) the grotesque and (c) everything else. Second, I would recommend John Crowley’s Little, Big, an enormous novel whose central character is, as in MMMD, a decaying house and its seemingly infinite rooms. Like MMMD, Little, Big is concerned with the “organization of illusion, memory” This wildly extravagant novel has as its goal proof that human memory, when properly organized, contains nothing less than everything. Next I would recommend titles from the category of “Usual Suspects,” including: Moby Dick, Tristram Shandy, In Search of Lost Time, and the gold standard for the “Everything book,” James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Special mention to Arno Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream” (available, as with Little, Big, in a deluxe edition from Dalkey Archive) And I would like to sneak in Septology, an 800 page one sentence novel by a recent Nobel Prize winner , Jon Fosse. Finally, I would choose two selections from the world of “Frame Story” collections, the Kathasaritsagara and The Arabian Nights. (The standard promotional page for Miss MacIntosh, My Darling contains this sentence “It is an epic of what might be called the Arabian Nights of American Life.” Extremely enjoyable introductions to these two collections of stories within stories come from an essay by the late John Barth titled “Ocean of Story,” and through a Salman Rushdie novel for children called “Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” Others, of course, will recommend other titles, but I would be surprised if several of them did not contain at least one title listed here——Michael Sexson
Michael,
I really appreciate these recommendations! You cite Crowley's Little Big (which I read years ago, and now feel the need to revisit!) for its decaying house, and this brings to mind a question I've been puzzling: is there an inherent connection between abundance and gothic literature?
The example at the forefront of my mind is Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson. Again a decaying house that embodies the generational trauma of its inhabitants. Very gothic in tone. And what about the mansion at Sutpen's Hundred in Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. (A novel that features a sentence with 1,288 words.) Or Ramalhete, in The Maias by Eca de Queiros, also translated by Margaret Jull Costa, a house whose "walls had seen so many domestic misfortunes...as...happened to all walls." These homes, like the "sea blackened house" of MMMD, exhibit a patina of faded or fading grandeur, a magnificence despoiled by familial hubris and decadence. Perhaps Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, too? Other examples? I love thinking about these.
There just seems to be something about the gothic and abundance that naturally fits together. Why?
I would love everyone's thoughts on this.
Lori
Lori: thanks for these recommendations. I’ve put Chronicle of the Murdered House at the top of my huge stack of books to read. I’m currently reading Mann’s Doctor Faustus, which strikes me as one of the two greatest novels about (and being) music. The other, of course, is MMMD. My first thought, vague as it may be, about the link between Abundance and the Gothic is that of the feeling of being overwhelmed. Like many on this site, I’m often overwhelmed by the abundance of recommendations of books to read, and thoughts to think—-to the point of wondering if I’m being buried alive—-a Gothic trope indeed, and one that is going to appear in all its horror in chapter five of MMMD. Right now I’m pondering your and Anthony’s demonstrations of how repetition in MMMD is a feature and not a bug. —Michael
Has it occurred go anyone on this bus that everyone in the novel seems to be a version of Schrodinger’s cat—simultaneously living and dead…depending on how you look at it?
Yes! The blurring between different identities and states of being is on nearly every page.
Is Mr. Spitzer also his dead brother? Is Cousin Hannah also Catherine Cartwheel? Is the pregnant girl on the bus also the woman who she accuses her finance of being in love with? Characters' identities are unmoored much like the persistent sliding between reality and dreams.
Searching for an adequate understanding of the term “abundance”, I ran into John Barth, the late John Barth (April 2024), who wrote, if not the final word, certainly the most generous definition of that term in his essay “A Few Words about Minimalism.” The disputes between minimalists (Ray Carver, Samuel Beckett et al) and maximalists (Joyce, Marguerite Young et al) are at heart, not disputes at all but entertainments,, acts of generosity (see Richard Powers’ novel of that name). Therefore, abundance means setting a place for both (and others) at the table. Barth writes: “For if there is much to admire in artistic austerity, its opposite is not without merits and joys as well. There are the minimalist pleasures of Emily Dickinson—"Zero at the Bone"—and the maximalist ones of Walt Whitman; the low-fat rewards of Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing and the high-calorie delights of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. There truly are more ways than one to heaven. As between minimalism and its opposite, I pity the reader—or the writer, or the age—too addicted to either to savor the other.” Abundance does not “privilege” the wordy over the almost silent——it not only accepts but praises to high heavens the glorious gifts they both have to bestow.
How to read Chapter One of Miss MacIntosh, my Darling (with apologies to Marguerite Young and Shakespeare’s Bottom the Weaver:
VERA’S DREAM
I have had a dream. In my dream I thought I was…..I thought I had……. in my dream I was on a bus, or was it a six-sided coach or carriage like that in the old silent movie “Phantom Carriage” where a small group of people gathered to be taken to their destination, only to find out that their destination (and the coach driver) was Death? No, I’m sure it was a bus. And the bus driver was whistling, perhaps in anticipation of his wife, a woman with ample breasts of a realized maturity, for he kept talking about going home to the “old woman.” But wait, that isn’t true, it’s only what my over-active imagination wanted; in fact, the bus driver was headed toward a run down gothic tavern and hotel in Indiana where the old woman who was waiting for him in a bridal suite was not his wife but his mother! And where the walls were so thin between rooms that one could hear the blood-curdling howls from souls in wretched torment. And where it dawned on me that the bus, the coach, the carriage were none of these but actually an undertaker’s hearse bearing the corpses of myself and the others. Due to the driver’s recklessness, my imagination also invented a scenario in which the bus overturned in a horror field and the force of the accident had decapitated all the passengers and our heads rolled about in the weeds. Later, we brushed past a furniture van which had on top of it a woman’s feathered hat bobbing like a bird. I can’t seem to get that image out of my head. The other passengers in this carriage included a sleeping broad faced young man and next to him, a woman, likely his wife, wearing the most outrageous costume I’ve ever seen! It was filled with images of all imaginable outdoor sports, and on the top of her head was a decaying stuffed yellow canary. In my dreams within my dreams I always see this canary flying into a thunderstorm facing inevitable death. All the while the driver’s whistling continued sounding like bird songs and I swear to God, an abandoned baby’s cry in the winter grass. Outside the cold windows everything seemed to pass in depressing sameness and endless repetitions of familiar sites, as if the bus was simultaneously going somewhere and yet going in an unending circle. Finally there appeared the grotesque figure of a two-headed man who shook his fist at us only to be revealed as a man with a child on his shoulders. We travelers were intruders on this grey watery scene robbing the silence of its voice. We were, I feared, in hell.
I was on the bus in the first place because I needed to find the real behind the illusion. I was here searching for the one person in my life who was not only real but sang the praises of common sense, of not having an over-active imagination, my fusty, busty nursemaid, Miss Macintosh, my darling. The last we had seen of her were the paltry emblems left on the beach: eyeglasses, whaler’s hat, an Admiral Dewey corset, a drenched copy of Pilgrim’s Progress, a bent black umbrella, and her red wig draped over a rock. I left my mother’s house of shades and monsters and here I am in this bus, this six-sided coach, this carriage, this coffin, on my way to what is plain and pure and true. I will call my dream “Vera’s Dream” for it is indeed true. But I fear my telling of it might have to bend the truth a bit, so that the telling of it seems, well, slant. ——What Cheers!—-Vera.
Lori and Anthony: the bus ride to nowhere (and everywhere) is picking up steam, and we must consider the advice from Bette Davis to “fasten your seatbelts”, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.” Lori, I appreciated your alerting us to the importance of painting (esp ekphrasis) to this book. Anthony, I liked your remark that “far from nothing happening, everything is happening.” The name I used to give to these “loose baggy monsters” (as Henry James calls Abundant novels) is “Everything Books,” in which writers (and, or, readers) are under the illusion that everything you need is enclosed within this one indispensable book, the one Stephane Mallarme said would “reveal all existing relationships between everything.” We’ve bandied many titles about on this site and invite others to share with us texts that meet Mallarme’s definition. And yes, the Bible, conspicuous by its absence from these discussions, and a text Ms Young was intimately familiar with, is fair game.
As for Miss Macintosh and painting: I defy anyone to read chapters 17 and 18 of this book without conjuring up a famous painting by Edvard Munch.
Hello @Michael Sexson!
Thanks as always for your interesting insights.
I would like to make the case that Henry James would not consider MMMD a "large, loose, baggy monster." Here is this now famous quote in further context as found in James' Preface to "The Tragic Muse:"
"A picture without composition slights its most precious chance for beauty, and is, moreover, not composed at all unless the painter knows how that principle of health and safety, working as an absolutely premeditated art, has prevailed. There may in its absence be life, incontestably, as The Newcomes has life, as Les Trois Mousquetaires, as Tolstoi's Peace and War, have it; but what do such large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean? We have heard it maintained, we well remember, that such things are "superior to art"; but we understand least of all what that may mean, and we look in vain for the artist, the divine explanatory genius, who will come to our aid and tell us."
I argue that Young composed MMMD with a premeditated artistic vision. It does not contain elements "accidental" or "arbitrary." When I read Young, I see the artist. And perhaps Young thought that James would see her MMMD as composed art, too, had he lived to see it. In her 1977 Paris Review interview (which I also referenced in my latest post for Young's claim that she has a "muralist's imagination"), Young tells of a dream in which she is working on MMMD while James looks over her shoulder and tells her that she is the modern-day version of his writing. (When the PR interviewer asks Young if she thinks this is true, Young denies this. False modesty?)
MMMD is about life, but it is the life of the mind and spirit, not the life of action and exploit. Its undulating cycles of prose comprise, I believe, a well thought out composition.
Now on your comment of the "everything novel." I don't believe that this description applies to MMMD either. This type of novel brings to my mind the "systems novel," books like "Infinite Jest" or "Underworld" that seek to explain how peoples and processes are connected in an attempt to explain (the externalities? of) life. Not MMMD to me.
The more I think about it, I'm convinced that long length might be the easiest disposed element of an "abundance" novel, at according to my emphasis on the aesthetic. (For example Joris-Karl Huysmans relatively slim "Against Nature" and I'm sure a lot of poetry with which I'm unfamiliar). Rather it is the qualities of the writing style and, to borrow James (who is one of my top three favorite writers) and the artistic composition.
I hope that you and other subscribers will poke holes or elaborate on my arguments, Michael!
With appreciation,
Lori
Lori: I sent this previously but apparently it got lost in hyperspace. It’s a response to your wonderful high silk hat post concerning Henry James. I’m still trying to get the hang of substacks and the whole enfoldings of comments and replies and nested this and that—-Michael
Lori: I think we may be closer together on some of this than you may think. I share your reservations about what you call “systems novels,” the Pynchons and Foster Wallaces etc. who, while obviously and impressively intelligent, are, to my mind, soulless. I also have great respect for the aesthetic, having read all of Nabokov and laughed at his insistence that his characters are like galley slaves who would be whipped by him if they deviated one inch from his plan to eliminate all that is accidental and arbitrary. Speaking of Nabokov, I also agree that a short book can be as deep, complex, and gratifying as long ones. Pale Fire is 224 pages long! Mostly, I also count Henry James as among my favorite writers. I try to re-read The Golden Bowl and Wings of the Dove each year. If we learn anything from MMMD (and I understand that the word “learn” might get me in trouble) it is that all is illusion. The passage on page 7 which launched our bus ride isn’t a debate about what is illusory and what is real. It’s a given that everything is illusion. The trick is to understand how we “organize” our illusions, our memory. If we can see the world of law and politics are “legal fictions,” we ought to be able to see everything we do and think as fictions, fantasies, which organized in certain ways, produce certain effects. All our beliefs are also fictions. Wallace Stevens (whom I have come to regard as compatible with Ms Young on just about everything, except politics. Stevens thought Eisenhower was a dangerous radical.) Stevens said in one of his essays ‘The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.” What are we left with when we find out that all is fiction? To continue with Stevens, his politics aside, we are left with sounds. Bereft of truth but still chained to words, we must pay strict attention to the sounds of words. He spoke of “The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings which, we are sure are all the truth that we shall ever experience, having no illusions, makes us listen to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling them, makes us search the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration, which it is only within the power of the acutest poet to give them” Alas, perfection and finality, are exposed as merely sounds and vibrations. But then, as the string theorists remind us today, what isn’t? It was thinking like this that led me to believe that MMMD needed to be heard as well as read. Please indulge me. Go to page 86 of our text and read aloud to yourself the last paragraph of chapter four. It is one of my favorites in all of MMMD and it brings together the current principals of our discussion, Mr. James and Ms Young, (as well as the loosest and baggiest of monsters, the Bible) gathered around that golden bowl which, in the fun animal world of Finnegans Wake, becomes a bowl of “memory where every hollow holds a hallow.” As for the question at hand, what Henry James would think of MMMD, I rather imagine, that, looking down from the delicious hot bath waters of his Great Good Place in the sky, he would most likely be baffled by the thought that this would be what he would sound like should he survive into the mid twentieth century. But like you, I enjoy thinking that his inherent magnanimity and generosity, his unsurpassed capaciousness, in a word, his abundance, would approve.
Drew Johnson in a bonkers review of MMMD to be found at Literary Hub writes: “consciousness is more like Marguerite Young’s incessant, recursive repetitions than any well made 19th century novel, or even, say the doyennes of stream of consciousness—Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson.” If he’s right, do we need to seriously rethink what “stream of consciousness” means?
The more one thinks of Marguerite Young being a reincarnation of Henry James, the more plausible it seems. Consider Mr. Spitzer with his high silk hat, cane, and his tendency toward corpulence, and his desire to write music heard so deeply it is not heard at all (with a tip of that hat to T.S. Eliot) Or consider this cryptic line from Chapter 12 of MMMD: “The details must be told only through a veil of oblivion which is itself a medium of memory, for there is no forgetfulness even of the smallest thing. If it is hidden, it is revealed through its absence, the sense of the void.” Put that along side of James’ advice to to writers to “be one on whom nothing is lost.” Or consider this thought from an obviously over active imagination: James died in 1916 when Marguerite was 8. That was enough time for the distinguished man’s spirit to possess the soul of a small girl and encourage her to write a story about a young girl who becomes the pupil of a nursemaid who , for all her kindnesses, was quite mad.
Dear Michael,
I will try to find Drew Johnson's review of MMMD that you mention. I have been thinking of stream of consciousness in relation to MMMD. In what ways would we differentiate it from Woolf's? James's? It is very interesting to consider. Is it the writing's recursive nature, in addition to the digressions like those of Woolf and James, that make it distinct?
(I'm copying this over to the latest post--June 5--in the hopes that this thread does not get buried. I, too, am unsure how to bring continuing comment threads into new posts!!)
Lori
Hello Michael,
I love the reference to the broken golden bowl! And I did read the entire paragraph aloud. It is really superb. It reminds me that having read the novel aloud for an audio production of it, you have a wonderful intimacy with the book that exceeds what most of us will ever achieve!
Lori