WELCOME TO HELL

Photo by Felix Weinitschke on Unsplash

Dear Tara and Lori,

When last we left Miss MacIntosh in chapter 66, she was reduced to a sad collection of emblems washed up on the seashore, and memorialized only by the barking of the dog Friday (a seldom mentioned but crucial character) at the waves. Chapter 67 signals a major shift not only by picking up the tale of the “Phantom Carriage” known in this incarnation as a Grey Goose Bus in its slightly veiled nod to Nietzsche’s “Demon of Repetition, but also in the grand shadow of the book’s approaching end and resolution. Only sixteen chapters to go, bus companions! For those of us who have been on this bus before in its endless circling, we know that what’s ahead ain’t pretty. I often wonder why this book wasn’t banned by the forces and reasons that books are usually banned, but then realized that in order to ban the book someone had to read it, or it needs to have been read by a sufficient number of book banners to create a stir, the kind of stir that made Joyce’s Ulysses the “most dangerous book in the world.”

Chapter 67 takes us back to the bus which is finally arriving (yet once again) at its destination, increasing, as the bus driver says, the population of the place by three: Madge and Homer (remember them?) and our narrator Vera, with her self-described “over-active imagination” which, in its manifestation as an “omniscient narrator,” allows her to invent, let us say, many things without which there would be no MMMD. That imagination takes a sepulchral turn as this chapter and the next two presage the End, here depicted as the Hotel/Tavern, a seedy place with rooms containing walls so thin that one can hear the cries and howls of souls in eternal torment, one of whom is none other than our dotters and dithering Doctor O’Leary who appears to be having a conversation with his sister Sarah, who, in a more conventional timeline, died of pneumonia at the age of one. We are, of course, in Hell and and, in the grand tradition of all other notable depictions of this place, its denizens seem all to have been painted with the brush of Hieronymus Bosch. Vera sees a hearse she describes as “huge and carapaced, an inflated black bug with tissue-colored eyes.” “We three passengers,” she remarks, “seemed to be seesawing into an endless nightmare.” In Chapter 68, as Vera enters the hotel, she sees “A man sleeping with his legs above his head. First I saw his hobnailed bools, then his miner’s hat with a head light attached, but the bulb, seen through the parting of his legs as he sat propped against the wall, had no light in it. He was like a huge insect with long antennae and all his lights out.”

We have seen dark chapters in this book before, especially involving Vera’s over-active imagination invoking the “parent and original” of Miss MacIntosh’s bald head in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Compare the vision of Miss MacIntosh’s baldness (back in Chapters 17 & 18) with this description of Mr. Kurtz in Conrad’s novel: “The wilderness had patted him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball—an ivory ball; it had caressed him, and—lo!—he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation.”

Chapter 67 (mercifully short) and Chapter 68 (inordinately long) with all their pitch-black material (especially the astonishing horrors of the “Christian Hangman”) are no match for what’s coming down the pike in Chapter 69. Previously we have only seen Doctor O’Leary through the lenses of the bus driver who derides the doctor mercilessly for his dedication to bringing babies into the world and for the sorry condition of his automobile. The reader will no doubt be aware that despite the bus driver’s disapproval of the old doctor, there is true affection for the sawbones. Some readers might detect a mite too much affection as the driver, trying to wedge the bus into a parking space occupied by the doctor’s “ghost buggy” intones “Move over Doc!” and compares the situation to a bed partner hogging their side of the bed. Up to now, the doctor has been a figure of derision and good natured fun, his ghost buggy’s failings preposterously laughable. The laughs, however, stop in Chapter 69. When I first read this chapter some years ago in the Dalkey two-volume edition, I thought that fiction had reached its nadir. Nothing could be more depressing.

What does Marguerite Young do when she reaches this point? The answer should be obvious to any reader who has managed to get this far in the book: she goes for cheap laughs. I was initially shocked to see that Chapter 70 with its comic relief character Mrs. Hogden/Logden/Fogden should follow the dark depths of Chapter 69. And then I realized that the entire book was at heart a mad comic opera, the sense of which is only discernible in the biggest of Big Books that communicates the uncomfortable truth that comedy, while not transcending tragedy, relativizes it, exposes it as a narrower vision. Tragedy is rooted in the individual, and, as we learned in the first chapter of MMMD, and noted in the very first entry for this “Involutions of the Seashell” substack, “the individual is the one illusion.” (p. 7).

Comedy need not be funny, but it is necessarily social. It brings as many people onto the stage in the last act as the stage will accommodate and it typically ends with a wedding and a feast. It is not a spoiler to say that this Big Book will also end this way despite the horrors that have been and the ones to come, principally in the multi-part saga of Esther Longtree.

A genuine Big Book in my view is not a search for Truth but for Reality, that which is gotten not by belief but by, as Wallace Stevens (a kindred spirit of Miss Young) says, by believing “without belief/beyond belief” (“Flyer’s Fall”). Such a Reality must be sufficiently immense to contain the far edges of ultimate opposites. A shorter book would not be up to this task. MMMD needs every one of its 1321 pages to really live up to what it needs to achieve—a way to overcome the fear of interconnectedness, a fear eloquently elaborated in Hugo von Hofmanstahl’s “Letter of Lord Chandos”, the fear that language is not up to the task of beholding what is. The greatest of all writers have at some time been crippled by that fear, charging that words are only “shabby equipment always deteriorating,” (TS Eliot), that “I have only words to play with,” (Humbert Humbert in Lolita), and Hamlet, when asked what he was reading, said “words, words, words.” A volume could be filled with such lamentations from the most prominent of writers. Some comfort needs to be taken, however, in noting that in most instances, silence has not been conspicuous. In the end we are left with words, words, words, in this instance, 1217 of them, and in this mammoth book, 750,000 of them.

Michael Sexson