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
Tara & everyone,
Hi, sorry I've been an intermittent poster. I'm glad to see the question of length has been raised again. I hope it isn't too hopelessly gauche to re-phrase some things I contributed back in June or July.
Tara, I'm especially fascinated by the problem of length; for the last five years I've been moderating a couple of reading groups on long novels. One of the groups is on Arno Schmidt's doorstop of a book, "Bottom's Dream." We've been reading that for almost four years now, and we're only halfway through. I think our consensus is that he wanted to write something a magnitude longer than the book he was rivaling, "Finnegans Wake." Schmidt's book had to be 10 times the length of FW, because if it had only been, say, twice as long, people would have said it was "inspired" or "influenced" by FW. It had to be a creature of a different color. I wish Lucy Ellmann's "Ducks, Newburyport" was at least 2,000 pages, for the same reason: its stream of consciousness needs to be not just slightly greater than the nearest equivalent (recently, that would be Mathias Enard; earlier, Woolf), but an order of magnitude greater.
Back in June or July I suggested Stein's "The Making of Americans" as a parallel to "Miss MacIntosh." In Stein's book the level, uniform, repetitive, nearly faceless prose resulted in a novel more famously unread than Miss MacIntosh. (Examples: E.O. Wilson said he didn't think it was possible to finish it; the first book-length monograph on it, George Moore's, didn't appear until 1998.) Stein had a modernist interest in repetition and the dismantling of grammar and reference, and in Young I think there's a romantic impetus to incantation and immersion.
So here are three tentative reasons why some books might be long:
(1) Their authors feel their novels need to be an order of magnitude larger than whatever models they had in mind, in order to overwhelm their predecessors. (Schmidt, "Finnegans Wake," "Making of Americans")
(2) Or their authors felt they needed to pass a certain mark, say 1,000 pages, to be considered alongside their models. ("Infinite Jest," "2666," "Ducks, Newburyport")
(3) Or -- and this is what I suspect for Miss MacIntosh -- length isn't really an essential property, because the novel is the result of continuous writing without concerted planning or comparison.
But if something like that is true of Miss MacIntosh, then we're justified in thinking about excerpts, or portions, or chapters, that could represent the whole in an ideal edited version.
I remember reading but would have to go hunting for the source that Young had described what was cut and why she agreed with the cuts. I couldn't get into poetry until I looked at paganism and wicca and then suddenly it clicked. Paganism also helped me understand Miss MacIntosh and her anger over calendars. I look forward to reading this again and delving into more and also the main point, which for me is exploring creativity or creativity unhindered. Young was also raised in a Christian home through her grandmother and she said in an interview when people said - devil get thee behind me she would whirl around to try and catch a look at the devil behind her!