The Rule of Threes

Dear Lori & Anthony –

If ever a novel made the case for ebooks, it is Miss Mackintosh, My Darling. That is to say, it’s not the kind of book I’ll carry around in a tote bag and read on the subway. I’ve always been suspicious of excessively long novels. They reek of self-indulgence. Someone should have told David Foster Wallace, James Joyce, and (I’m trying to think of a third since examples should always be given in threes) -- Haruki Murakami! --  that even the Bible was split into two parts.

I didn’t do any research before ordering my copy of Miss Macintosh, so imagine the neighborhood mail carrier and my surprise when the box landed on my doorstep like an Acme anvil. Too late, I researched to see what I was getting myself into. I learned Marguerite Young first presented her idea (and forty pages) to Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribner’s Sons, and it was he who encouraged her to continue writing. When she finally delivered the manuscript, two decades had elapsed, Perkins was long deceased, and editing her 3,449-page magnum opus fell to Burroughs Mitchell. The story reminds me of the scene in the film Genius when Thomas Wolfe’s manuscript for O Lost, which was eventually carved into Look Homeward Angel, arrives in multiple boxes on Maxwell Perkins’s desk. I wonder what Perkins would have done if he’d been there to receive Miss Macintosh, My Darling, which is said to have filled (an exaggeration, I think) seven suitcases. Would we all be reading a different version of this strange but beautifully written novel if he had touched it?

And there is something beautiful about Young’s compulsive cataloging of objects, her commitment to run-on sentences, don’t you think? Here is a writer who never met a comma she didn’t love. Take, for instance, Catherine Cartwheel’s dream of/meeting with the drowned Egyptian sailor (page 30). Young describes “his exact position in the inexactitude of space, to a table of the second empire, a bishop’s stone chair, the dreaming chandelier lighting with circles of golden light, she having listened attentively to every muffled word, his abject apologies that he had wandered into this inner sanctum, not knowing his path, that he had not been in control of events, that he had reached Boston Bay in an old-fashioned sail-boat out of Egypt, which had been headed for New York Harbor but had gone off its course,” etcetera, etcetera. Lori, what you wrote in your last letter about Young seeing her prose as a logical progression of her poetry was incredibly helpful. Re-format the excerpt above, and the rhythm is not so different from Bishop Berkeley of Cloyne. I also like Phil Bevis speaking to the “immeasurable tonnages of metaphors” in her work.

Reading reviews of Miss Macintosh, My Darling, I worried I’d be bogged down in repetitions. But this novel flows. The prose forms a current that pulls you along so fast that the real danger is missing some critical point, some clue that unlocks the text and reveals the broader meaning of Young’s project. Because there must be a reason, a purpose, for all these words? I highlight passages and sentences and references to particular objects I see repeated. Young has already mentioned a chess set three times. Why? The house by the sea reminds me of the Vanderbilt mansions in Newport, Rhode Island. Is there a connection? It’s hard not to feel like an archeologist (or conspiracy theorist) attempting to decipher some hidden message or code where there may ultimately be none.

When a writer produces a book of this size, demanding so much of a reader, the finished work has to justify the expected investment. Why did Marguerite Young require 1,321 pages to make her point? Did Young do herself and her book a disservice in the long term? Would there have been more scholarship if Miss Macintosh, My Darling had been edited to a more manageable length? And, ultimately, would anything have been lost? There is a long history of researchers going back to study the chapters cut from notable works of literature and resurrecting all the butchered little darlings. So we have Sartoris and Faulkner’s original Flags in the Dust. We can read Look Homeward Angel and the restored edition of Wolfe’s O Lost. And let’s not forget Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow County (which doesn’t exactly make my case, but, again, that pesky rule of threes).

It’s fun following the path you’ve cleared ahead of me, recognizing markers from your previous letters – lists, abundance, poor Mr. Spitzer. I hope to find a key to understanding it all somewhere within this text. Thank you, Lori and Anthony, for letting me participate in this mad project.

The truth is out there,

Tara