Angel in the Forest: An Epic of Two Utopias

by Marguerite Young

This is the remarkable history of New Harmony, Indiana, which in the last century was the scene of two utopias- Father Rapp's Harmony and Robert Owen's New Harmony, the one negative and dictatorial, the other positive and democratic. Father Rapp, German peasant and fanatical founder of his own heretical sect, based his community on superstition, endless work, and celibacy- thus insuring against its survival. Robert Owen, textile manufacturer and father of the British labor movement and of modern socialism, tried to form a community based on reason and nature, on the division of labor and its fruits.

ANGEL IN THE FOREST is the result of years of study and research, but it is infinitely more than that: it is a work of the poetic imagination, an epic of the nineteenth-century search for social perfection. It is an extraordinary fusion of wit and high seriousness, and its perceptions of human folly and human dignity cut sharp and deep.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Religion, Utopia, American History, American, Literature

331 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1945

About the author

Marguerite Vivian Young was an American author of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and criticism. Her work evinced an interest in the American identity, social issues, and environmentalism.

Her first book of poetry was published in 1937, while she was teaching high-school English in Indianapolis. In that same year, she visited New Harmony, Indiana, the site of two former utopian communities, where her mother and stepfather resided. She relocated to New Harmony and spent seven years there, beginning work on Angel in the Forest, a study of utopian concepts and communities.

Angel in the Forest was published in 1945 to universal acclaim, winning the Guggenheim and Newberry Library awards. Over the next fifty years, while maintaining an address in New York's Greenwich Village, she traveled extensively and wrote articles, poetry, and book reviews for numerous magazines and newspapers. She was also renowned as a teacher of writing at a number of venues, including the New School for Social Research and Fordham University.

Marguerite Young's epic novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, was informed by her concept of history and pluralistic psychology, as well as her poetic prose style with its many layers of images and languages.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Angel in the Forest is the history of two utopias which occupied the same ground in New Harmony, Indiana, in the nineteenth century, written in poetic prose. That is to say, Angel is perhaps an historical novel, or a history written for the readers of novels. Father Rapp established a failed religiously organized utopia. Purchasing the town from Rapp, Robert Owen sought to establish a utopia based upon rational principles. But what is clearly established is that Young has written a book in utopic prose.

Utopia? We, post-twentieth century, are too cynically well-informed to believe in such a possibility. It would seem that a better world is neither possible nor necessary. Even as the thesis concerning the end of history has run its course, I suspect that an even older thesis has taken ahold of us quite unaware ; that we are in fact living in the best of all possible worlds, quite in spite of our voltairian cynicism. The measure of the degree to which we subscribe to such an out-moded thought, despite all of our modern sophistication, is the degree to which we insist that the utopic imagination is stultifying. We know that all such attempts are bound for failure. It is human nature, we believe, and this world is as good as it gets. How fortunate! But even as the socialist dream of a better world is left behind we find our minds slipping into various forms of messianisms ; for the capitalists we are already living in the kingdom of god, and but for those who suffer under such a kingdom, salvation is displaced yet further into the future out of time and out of space.

As with her final great work (of which only a portion was finally published), Harp Song for a Radical, a socio-biography of both Eugene Debs and the movement of labor towards a better world in the nineteenth century, Young leads us back into the past to discover what we have forgotten. We have forgotten that it was not always as it is now ; that where we are now was built upon the backs of failed possibilities, possibilities left unredeemed and now most certainly scorned by our Besserwissen. Nineteenth century America is a forgotten land ; even Pennsylvania, a pacifist attempt at utopia which persisted for 200 years (during which time only six executions?), is scarcely written in our text books. A giant road-block -- the disasters of the twentieth century -- obscure our view of the hopes and dreams of our nineteenth century forebearers. Perhaps this is all pre-ordained, for was it not in that most millennial of years, 1844, that Nietzsche was born?

Young, I am beginning to suspect, is a genius. I do mean a literary genius, her sentence-making ; and too I think she is a kind of moral genius, given that the more I read of and about her as both writer and human being the more I suspect that anyone who interacted with her would be the much-better for it. And today we may still interact with her through the pages of her books where both her mind and her heart may be heard. I feel well prepared for the reading of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling and believe that it may have suffered the same undeserved fate other great works of encyclopedic scope and style from recent decades have suffered ; but I ask, Where is our Jack Green for our Ms. Young?

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What far from average people have walked these streets, in old time! An angel like a hermaphrodite butterfly, a butterfly catcher, a Daniel Boone of the infinite, a finite Elijah, a herb doctor, Lot’s wife, many pastorals, many mechanics, clouded dreamers, a celibate breeder of horses, poor Yahoos, the Spirit of Nature, rational man, irrational man, patriarchs, undertakers. Nor does this list, inclusive as it seems, exhaust the possibilities of nineteenth-century salvationism, as expressed by two Utopias – the first, forerunner of a New Jerusalem, exclusive and arbitrary; the second, forerunner of a New Moral World, to encompass all nations and all governments. Two Utopias comprehended, within a half-mile square surrounded by a vast wilderness, past, present, and future, however abstrusely – the burning of Rome, city planning, explosion of stars, a new calendar, anarchy, a New Jerusalem, repression, expansion, moneyless Eden, exaltation of pearls, a three-hour working day, exaltation of horses, infinite regress, the united nations of earth, the many, the few, Lucifer, lotus-eaters, the falling of autumn leaves, the myths of Narcissus, good dentistry, many fictions. So that such perfectionist orders, which would have excluded much of mistaken life, seem mistaken life itself, with all its infinite variety.”

At times in her prose I hear echoes of the 17th century, in particular that wonderful baroque technique which found its apex in Sir Thomas Browne. At other times I can hear Stein, or DH Lawrence, or Woolf...But, of course, fundamentally she is uniquely herSelf. Her word choice, and her sentence structure, is often unexpected and unusual in its grammar and its lexicon. This is a Good Thing.

The above quote, from page three of this novel?history?prosepoem?, is both a good indicator of her thematic concerns in this text, and her techniques. We have lists, dualism, contradictions, humor, density....and details of these two extraordinary attempts at perfecting human society which took place in the early 19thc. Both failed, of course, as all Utopias must, but the differences in why and how they failed tell us much about human nature and the realities of socio-economic pressure.

And, of course, throughout we have soundings of her major themes - the irrational within the rational, the rational within the irrational, the seeds of dystopia within Utopia, the dreaming of mankind...Impossibly Romantic dreams of a Realist Utopia...We must, it seems, confront and accept our failure as a necessary part of any success. That we are always already broken, and that are lives are riven with disappointment and dissolution. But still such Beauty hiding here and there...

One could, in fact, imagine the whole thing as a prologue to Miss MacIntosh - the final ten pages in particular lead very nicely to the start, and the concerns, of that extraordinary novel.

A beautifully written exploration of a truly fascinating subject. What more could you want? Copies are cheap and all over the interwebs and this seems like a good place to start for those of you hesitant before the size of Miss Mac...

[Zachary Tanner]

"To be engaged in during idle moments, when there was nothing to do but imagine the unimaginable."

Margie is my favorite novelist, and I first read this (call it a) Novel in 2018 in the wake of a life-changing experience with MMMD. At the time I was fairly disappointed, finding in it none of the hallucinatory poetry nor Joycean consciousness-presentation that had so taken me in her masterpiece. Likewise, Harp Song for a Radical, her unfinished Debs book, was not what I wanted it to be in 2018. I am revisiting her ouvre three years later in its entirety (after having visited her archive at Yale in July of 2019) and started with Angel in the Forest. I see now that these two books grow from her lifelong fascination with the art of biographical writing, in both books: the Biography of the Times and the People Who Produced Them/Who Were Produced by Them.

I must say that as a younger reader I missed much of the grace and subtlety of this radiant explosion of nonfiction, told in a singularly periphrastic mode of omniscience, completed "with the assistance of the Kathryn McHale Fellowship, State of Indiana, awarded annually by the American Association of University Women" and published the year before Young would meet Truman Capote and Carson McCullers at Yaddo, nine years after writing a master's thesis on Lyly's Euphues--already we feel the immense timelessness of her working habits, the production of infinity, the life as extension of the work. Marguerite's ambition spans centuries and her sense of story further back in time than there is space enough to see.

Beyond making a terrific art object atop a fireplace or upright piano, the typesetting of my mustard yellow 1965 Scribner's edition is simply rococo, darling. How the pages are the trees of the forest where words set angels winging.

In a style that makes David Shield's 2010 collage manifesto Reality Hunger seem 65 years too late, incorporating, without credit, a paella of source materials in one sweeping narrative-as-particle-wave tsunami, such as quotations from poets, philosophers, and our characters, themselves once living persons--a baroque bric-a-brac of sermons, letters to Uncle Blackwell, chapter epigraphs in verse both borrowed and fabricated, lyrics SUNG BY THE OWENITE PARTY ON THE BOATLOAD OF KNOWLEDGE, again, none of it credited anywhere, and innocuous thoughtspeech rendered in free indirect style (in 1945!)--we follow the changing landscape of Harmony, Indiana into New Harmony, Indiana and then a century beyond to paint the picture of "old New Harmony," the geological metamorphosis of the burgeoning American west bringing to mind the wild peregrinations of Vollmann's Seven Dreams, specifically the insanely-nested autobiographical Quebec chapters that frame Fathers and Crows. Father George Rapp crosses the Atlantic in 1804 and attempts to establish the German prototype of American Puritanism. Give it a couple decades (time enough for a utopia to blossom and wilt) and "The Rappite property was sold, in short, to a man named Ziegler for $100,000, a great sacrifice, although it represented $85,000 profit over the original investment." When Georgie flies the coop to hitch it further up the Wabash, no life in God in an easy existence, we are left wondering what significance we really need offer Our Lady of the Rappites, that is to the eponymous "angel" who left footprints in the "forest," as we stay in New Harmony during its transition from sexless theological work camp to squalid proto-communist live-in, and are introduced to the golden-red idealism, the obsessive political poetry of Harp Song for a Radical (to be treated there in a later review). Between the two books is an excellent condensed history of the plight of feeble working-class dreamers in postcolonial North America.

"What is man but a series of competing mythologies, most fearful and wonderful, and what would man be if these were taken away from him? Is there, indeed, any statement as to universality which can be made with certainty--that all men are, by their nature, rational, or even that all men are, by their nature, mortal...One black swan upset the hypothesis, faithfully believed in for so many generations, that all swans were white."

Those fatigued and bored by the rhetorical redundancies of MMMD's epic structure will find here a good foray into Marguerite's unparalleled lists of symbols and prosody of pluralism in a more accessible, journalistic style. Here too such phrases as "congregations of crows," "music of the spheres," "the golden fleece," and "city of glass" are repeated ad nauseam and might be taken as cliche by those forever deluded by their high school English teachers into believing that a piece of English writing should not repeat itself, who do not see into the infinity of her imagery, so I would caution the critic of Marguerite to brush up on their Rousseau, Pope, Coleridge, Blake, Poe, Browning, Milton, Locke, Hume, Dickens, Dreiser, etc. before embarking upon a detailed analysis of her idiosyncratic way with metaphor and repetition, used quite singularly by Young throughout her books to set her apart from every other writer in the multiverse.

As we read on the penultimate page of the text, "There will always be as many flours as there are millers"--"every man an archipelago"--and this is where I find joy in reading and rereading and loving Marguerite Young, that my consciousness is accepted as the plurality of Us (author:reader-participant), her careful craft a tremendous comfort to my heart, something to love in a hateful world. My consciousness is forever your sounding board, Marguerite. Rest in peace, sweet angel in the forest.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

very much a poet's history in terms of how it conveys information, but, paradoxically, this approach allows for a very effective depiction of various viewpoints around the utopian communities being covered, in addition to other contemporary historical events and figures(e.g. george III, abraham lincoln). the book is far more attentive to the material base of history and the development of capitalism than i would have expected from her other writing, and while she is very sympathetic to the owenite project and particularly to owen himself she also highlights the problems they encountered and the opposition to it from various quarters. one of the last chapters, dealing with owen's later life and death is genuinely moving:

"In a strait between two worlds, had he not always desired the better? He saw that each moment was eternity. He saw that there was nothing beyond beyond. He saw the poverty of heaven. He saw hundreds, thousands of little children chained like castrated dogs in coal mines and iron foundries, beatings, imprisonments, wounds of the spear, the stunted adult, the dwarfish mind, the soul without body, the body without soul. He saw, he hoped he saw the crumbling pyramids, when the workers of the world should be united. These were his Episcopalian communions, his Unitarian church membership, his marriage bed, his human family, his self-love, and his essential loneliness. For as long as one sentient being suffered, he would suffer, too. Were they English? So was he. Were they Russian? So was he. Were they German? So was he. Were they French, Polish, or Negro? So was he. Were they Jews, Indians, or Irish? So was he. Yea, and he was nothing of himself, he knew, with his life hanging on a single thread. Poor Maria Pears, a featureless stuffed doll in a wooden coffin, the huge parody. These were his peacock gardens, his crystal palaces. These were his long weekend in a green country, where he had seen the Pope of Rome in an old henhouse, the House of Lords in the Rappite maze. How cast off that withered garment, the spell of the past? Charity was still the goal. “And even things without life giving sound, whether pipe or harp, except they give a distinction in the sounds, how shall it be known what is piped or harped?” The world’s confusion was still the world’s confusion. “So likewise ye, except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? for ye shall speak into the air.”"

[Simon Robs · Rating 4 out of 5]

"On the banks of the Wabash, early in the nineteenth century, two Utopia's attempted to erect, each in its own way, the character of the extreme perfection, socially considered." A religious sect and a prototype full-on socialism were communities, neither long in waiting for collapse and yet, their legacy of spirit and morphed emphasis of purpose to reinclude man's nature outside construct remains today, an example of human ingenuity and spirit still outside mainstream time. This is a fascinating early example of literary non-fiction written by an equaling fascinating author whose few works of poetry/novel builds on her carefully harvested material while living in New Harmony.

Socialism it appears is rearing its ugly head again in these recent years, ever more so now as this country grapples with the rapidly changing demography and flux of political change more than just mulling at longstanding status quo's, the clamor especially the young, so many of whom seem to embrace this abundantly failed system of cohabitating institutions that history has exposed time and again. Cooperative organization(s) are wonderful constructs with varying degrees/kinds have provided advancements in the progressive march of time, but not pure socialism; it never works.

[ReemK10 (Paper Pills) · Rating 5 out of 5]

#MYoung22 #AngelInTheForest
If you're going to read a historical account of two utopian communities in the United States, you're going to want to read one written by Marguerite Young. Just fascinating!

[Matthias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marguerite Young is, if at all, remembered for her astonishing novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, which is not an easy read. Twenty years earlier, in 1945, appeared her Angel in the Forest, a historical study, which tells about the founding and failing of two Utopias at the same place, in New Harmony, Indiana. The first was run by a German sect, the Rappites, who were economically successful, but left the followers wanting. Part of the doctrine was celibacy -- the lack of children was coped with by admitting adults to the community.
The second, who took over after the Rappites gave up, were the Owenites, attempting an early communist society, which, for very different reasons, left their followers also wanting.

Young's description of the various protagonists and her commentary are a pleasure to read today, after 200 years, and it is frightening to see how little progress has been made.

[Caroline]

I LOVE THIS.

[Cathie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five sparkling shiny stars for this beautiful beautiful book.

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

With Angel in the Forest, Marguerite Young again proves herself to be among the most underrated authors. While Miss MacIntosh, My Darling was a fictional whirlpool of opium dreams, Angel in the Forest is the non-fiction roots that fed the brilliant excesses to come, the crystal-clear reality that birthed the hallucinogenic dreamscape of MMMD. Young approaches her setting of Harmony (and New Harmony) in her present tense, seeing it thus: "It is difficult to visualize this secluded area as once the scene of two Utopias, like the Cartesian split between body and soul—the Rappite, a scriptural communism, founded by Father George Rapp, a German peasant, who believed his people to be future angels—the Owenite, founded by Robert Owen, an English cotton lord, who believed all men to be machines." And so Young reaches into the past of the early ninteenth century, exploring these two attempts at reaching the same goal with vastly different systems of belief and organization driving them.

Much like the last book I read, The Ice-Shirt by William T. Vollmann, we find the accumulation of myth and dream inspiring a vision of what could be. The visionary seeks to impose that vision on the vast unmapped regions that lay westward, beyond the settled lands; out of reach of society settled into an order incongruous with the dreamers' visions. And like Vollmann's novel, we find a reluctant reality that refuses the manifestation of the visions. But the dreamers are revealed to be fascinating subjects under Young's scrutiny. In the modern age, Rapp's approach is perhaps easiest to criticize. His religious zeal, which lead to the death (after being castrated) of his only genetic son, and perhaps the murder of his adopted son, pushes far beyond rationalizing. It was a society doomed to fail. "Why build up a world so soon about to end?" Young muses. And so the Rappite society, with their vows of chastity, crumbled. Among their numbers was a man named Jacob Zundel, who went from Rappite celibacy, broke off into a splinter group and married, then joined the Mormons, "Thus he would encompass within one lifetime celibacy, monogamy, polygamy—going from extreme to extreme."

Then came Robert Owen. Owen's thesis that "man is solely the creature of his circumstance" inspired his settling of a new attempt at a Utopia in New Harmony, buying the Rappite lands in hope of imposing his vision upon those lands that had already betrayed one dreamer. I found a lot more to admire in Owen's philosophy, an atheistic and materialist perspective. Yet, good intentions and interpretations go only so far without concrete pragmatism, and Owen's declaration that "The old errors of conduct were here abandoned" rang hollow. The critiques of Owen were voiced as his society failed: he "look[ed] upon society as a manufactured product and not as an organism endowed with imperishable vitality and growth," "know[ing] nothing of man's unquenchable thirst," and he had "not understood that the vast majority of mankind endure the battle of life not so much through the love of life as the fear of an external death." His optimism, his belief in his ideals were held to his very end. And despite his deficiencies, maybe even because of them, he has the aura of the heroic—perhaps with lance angled at windmills. Young's postmortem perfectly summarizes his place in history, obscure though he may be: "We see Robert Owen as one who stands between two tidal movements—the withdrawing French Revolution, the rise of dialectic materialism. A nineteenth-century man, his roots are in the eighteenth century, his branches in the twentieth."

[Mandel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this shortly after completing Young's massive novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. I don't think I would have picked it up otherwise, since I had no previous interest in the subject matter. But Young's novel impressed me so much, I just had to read more of her writing.

I'm very glad I did. This book recounts the early history of New Harmony, Indiana, a town that grew out of two successive, failed utopian communities in the early 19th century. Originally, it was founded as a Christian utopian community headed by the preacher George Rapp. Once this experiment failed, though, Rapp sold the town to another utopian visionary, Robert Owen, who attempted to create a secular, socialist utopia there - one that also quickly collapsed.

What struck me the most about this book was how it juxtaposed religious and secular utopian visions, while at the same time telling many stories of the strange people attracted to them: charismatic would-be prophets, their reluctant family members, dreamers, failures, quacks, con artists, religious seekers, and those with messianic aspirations of their own - all described in Young's beautifully nuanced, phantasmagoric prose.

This is definitely a narrative of the now-lost American frontier. But in it, that distinctively American myth of the pristine, untouched 'new world' becomes a dreamscape. Those who enter it have been exiled into dreams, having found nothing but heartbreak and failure in the 'old world'. Both utopian dreams fail spectacularly, but not entirely in vain. As Young recounts in the final chapters of the book, Owen's socialist utopia, in particular - a dream of a world without slavery, a world of gender equality and free love, a world without capitalist oppression - became a source-point for the anti-slavery and women's suffrage movements in America, and for the labor movement in England. Perhaps the lesson is that utopian dreamscapes are prone to failure, but are of essential value nevertheless. They give us a space in which we can envision something new, and gather our energies to undertake the hard work of realizing those visions.

I will probably take a break from Young, having devoted the better part of three months to her writing already. However, I will definitely be reading her biography of Eugene Debs, and collections of poetry and essays in the near future.

[Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Visited New Harmony and read a couple of chapters of this fine work of historical "fairy tale"! It was lively, funny, and full of rich detail--"A boat load of knowledge" as they said.

This is an excellent book to read when visiting New Harmony.

[Simone · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastic. no words

[Adrian Alvarez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Question - what is the nature of experience - what dream among dreams is reality?

Two utopian communities founded and failed in America and Young gives us a spectacular account of both using dazzling prose and the kind of poetic insight her style made possible.

They converted, consciously or unconsciously, hallucination into fact and fact into hallucination, wherever they could. Their religion, while they grew fatter, was centered upon themselves, magnified unto eternity, as a body both male and female - which phantom seemed to them a virtue, not a vice, naturally.

Overall I was taken by this book. I find the subject endlessly fascinating and Young's prose was something I enjoyed, even if it was easy to get a little lost in it. That's a hallmark of this author, I believe. It's the make or break point for any reader. I was comfortable losing the thread and following her virtuosic sentences wherever they may lead but I could also understand someone getting a little fed up with it. In my opinion, each part of this book justified itself and the endings of her winding thoughts often gave way to artful vistas. For example:

Man, Robert Owen said, is the best of all possible machineries, the most delicate, but is still a machine, of whom all the parts may be known and studied, and whose requirements are simple and few - food, water, shelter, clothing, the love of our fellow beings - beyond which, there is nothing but the dance of the golden atoms in the void.

If you're like me, hitting the phrase "dance of the golden atoms in the void" elevates what might otherwise be a relatively simple idea. The book is full of these moments and depending on your tolerance, kink, whatever, the book will be more or less successful.

As for its content, it is hard not to view the American project as a static and unmoving struggle of Utopias and there were times reading Young's account was discouraging in light of where the country is today. That said, both for it's excellent way of organizing arguments and the artful prose style that drives home certain more poetic points, and for the very basis of this long form essay, I thought this was essential reading.

Now to decide whether I am ready for Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.

[Parker]

I had no idea what to expect going into this, a Historical Study (that I feel stretches the boundaries of "Historical Study" to a beautiful extreme) of two real utopian projects that existed in New Harmony, Indiana, and the people involved. Beautifully written prose touching on theological and philosophical ideals of "utopia", a slice of the US and fragments of the greater world in the early-mid 1800s.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marguerite Young writes in a way that feels like how Chloe Zhao directs!

Very grounded in nature, there's so much close up examination, the details are important, it's humane and expository, but also sarcastic and sly and funny.

[Jon Frankel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published in 1945, Angel in the Forest is Marguerite Young's first book of prose. She would go on to write Miss Macintosh, My Darling, a novel of over 1,000 pages, with a cult following, and considered by some to be the American Ulysses, and Harp Song for a Radical, her biography of Eugene Debs. Young new absolutely everyone. She was a great New York eccentric, living for decades in a Bleeker Street apartment, surrounded by dolls and piles of books. She spoke as she wrote: as a rambling, brilliant romantic poet. Angel in the Forest is a non-fiction book about the utopian community New Harmony, located in Young's native Indiana. There were many utopian communities in the US in the 19th century. This was one of the first. It began in the teens of the 19th century when a German preacher, Father Rapp, received a sign that he was to go to America, found a community and wait for the end of the world. He and his diligent flock settled in the rolling farmland near the Wabash river and soon had their hive going: lumber and grain mills, whiskey stills, foundries, barrel making, fruit, vegetables, you name it they grew it and sold it and became wealthy. It was a theocracy. Rapp lived in a grand house linked to the others by tunnel, so he could spy on his followers. Absolute celibacy was enforced. Many wondered how the community would survive without children; Rapp didn't worry about that, the end times were near. When his own son impregnated a woman he had him publicly castrated, a wound the son died from. He raised the child as his own. In ten years Rapp tired of the location and picked up and left. Several years later he sold it to an idealistic English industrialist, an atheist who believed in the fundamental goodness of people named Robert Owen. Owen founded New Harmony with an ad in newspapers. The ad attracted a horde of people with different skills, no discipline and no common purpose. He believed through goodness and exhortation alone he could build his ideal world, but it foundered when the ideals of anarchy collided with human selfishness and the need to get in a harvest. This is Young's story, and she tells it in long, gorgeous sentences, drifting back and forth through history, philosophy, and an examination of the human soul and how theories about the nature of that soul, or lack of it, weave a world of fantasies and brutal fact. She delights in the multiple paradoxes of her two utopians. It is a loving book. She doesn't shrink from the cowards, the fools, or the violence of the American frontier and the American experiment. Young loves lists and the book is full of Rabelasian catalogues of ideas and things. There are no footnotes. She writes, of Owen's passage to America: "The voyage, although long and perilous, was happy, except that the ship's passengers included a cruel Spanish overseer and his company of dwarfs. These dwarfs were forced, at his command, in cloud and mist above the vast sea rolling, to walk like wingless cherubim a tightrope between mastheads, in training for their jobs as acrobats in America. During an abusive scene, seeing that dwarfs are human and can never fly liike blackbirds, Robert Owen rose up as if, at last, he had been admitted to the presence of the British Parliament, that body before which he had yearned to speak. His words were simple and few, almost casual. If this master spirit should once more maltreat his children, he would pitch him into the sea and let the vast sea roll over him. Fortunately, a warning sufficed--murder was not, at this point, necessary....There were otherwise the usual storms, starless nights, dolphins at play, the chimney of the glider whale on far horizons."

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was first published in 1945, a history book written by a poet.

In the early 19th Century, New Harmony, Indiana, was established by a radical German religious fringe leader. The community was moderately successful for about a decade but then the land was sold to Robert Owen, the "father of British socialism," who established a new community there based on his own theories -- this failed quickly.

History written by a poet is an appealing idea but Marguerite Young's meandering, run-on style was hard to take, especially in the first half of the book, about Father George Rapp's community, which seems to have been more of an apocalyptic patriarchal cult than a utopian Christian community. The second half, about Robert Owen's community-building attempt was better.

Overall, the subject matter is interesting and you have to respect Young's commitment to her eccentric, unique vision.