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Inviting the Muses: Stories, Essays, Reviews
Marguerite Young is best known as the author of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, a 1200-page novel published to great critical acclaim in 1965 and since then considered a landmark of contemporary American literature. But she is also an enchanting essayist and a perceptive critic, and Inviting the Muses gathers all her shorter prose writings, most of which are unknown even to her admirers. Three short stories (one previously unpublished) are followed by essays and reviews on a wide variety of the Midwest in which Young grew up, writers she admires, the act of writing itself, dolls, horses, deaf-mutes, Mormons (Young is a descendant of Brigham Young), and always the primacy of the imagination in all human endeavors. Young celebrates "complex life and complex letters" (the title of one of the essays), avoiding the commonplace to seek out the mysterious unities that bind disparate activities. Her style mixes elegance with whimsy, wisdom with wit, and her attitude alternates between wonder for life in all its bizarre variety and impatience with those blind to that variety. Inviting the Muses reconfirms Young's eminence as a grande dame of American letters.
246 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1994
4 people are currently reading
108 people want to read
About the author
Marguerite Young
16 books76 followersMarguerite 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.
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.
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December 4, 2013Style in writing is nothing but thinking, and yet they disparage style as if it were a pretentious ornament.
Bottom of the barrel scrapings? Yes. And thank-you. Inviting the Muses was assembled by the crew at the Dalkey Archive amidst their republication of Marguerite Young’s massive Miss MacIntosh, My Darling ; just about anything and everything was gathered together so as not to be lost. “Barrel scrapings” is strong language, but ask yourself, What kind of barrel was it? And, are there not such things stored in barrels that after the bulk has been published in bulky books, there remain yet some delicious morsels? Yes. So, by nature, Inviting the Muses is uneven ; three short stories, several essays spanning the years 1945 to 1989, and a bevy of reviews. I’ll review the three sections in the order of my reading.
Essays :: For those intimidated by the size of Young’s big book or by rumors of her prose, an entry point to her work may be found in several of these lovely essays. And so it is as it frequently is with essays though, that one may have a diversity of reasons for reading them ; here, most part, for myself her prose prose prose. Topics come and go ;; but here they are :: the US Middle West ; a wonderful thing on ‘Complex Letters’ which functions as anodyne to those complaints about ‘difficult’ fictions ; an afternoon spent with poet Marianne Moore ; Mari Sandoz ; an Arabian horse conservation ranch ; a longer sketch about Raggedy Ann and related dolls ; who was James Whitcomb Riley’s old sweetheart? ; on being deaf (wonderful! but dated?) ; teaching writing (assignment : a sentence “at least three pages long”) ; The Artist as Wanderer ; three pieces on poets which I could really give only more of a damn than I could about poetry (thank the muses that Young turned early from poetry to prose) ; “I do not think that there is any difference between the works of men and women writers” ; and another thing on teaching writing, regarding which, see the List below. So, but anywhey, half-dozen essays here to prize and plenty of essay=prose to love.
Reviews :: The assemblage of Young’s reviews, ranging from 1935 to 1977, is where the barrel scrapping becomes rather apparent. Typically only authors with an academic paper mill attached to them receive this kind of treatment. We can quickly chalk it up to the independent mindedness over there at the Dalkey Archive.
Quickly, a few reviewed books worth mentioning for some reason (skipping over reviews of poetry) :: Jean Stafford’s Boston Adventure ; Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House and Katherine Anne Porter’s The Leaning Tower ; Dorothy Caruso’s biography of Enrico Caruso ; Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil ; Fawn M. Brodie’s biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History which I would have liked to have seen turned into an essay, Young being herself a descendent of Brigham Young ; Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding ; an evisceration of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason from which I’d like to quote extensively, being a novel I read twice once upon a time and each time struck with, well, with nothing ; Truman Capote’s first novel Other Voices, Other Rooms which rather impressed Young commenting on that rare-bird, individuality of style ; Marianne Hauser’s The Choir Invisible ; the third and fourth volumes of Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence ; Anaïs Nin’s Diary, volume the second and the Nin Reader edited by Philip K. Jason ; a handful of Sherlock Holmes related volumes.
One review made my BURIED heart leap a little :: Alex Comfort’s The Power House struck most strongly through Young to me, a book she reviews more or less twice and mentions a third time in a review of Henry Miller’s Murder the Murderer. An arbitrary selection of a statement regarding Comfort’s book which might situate it :: “Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy, Joyce in Ulysses, Alex Comfort in The Power House, all have employed, astutely and as a result of knowledges which preceded the act of artistic creation, the anarchic principle that reality is given to us only through our sensations, which may be, for that matter, defective, so that no accurate report can be made.” And just to emphasize, the comparison with those two genius fictionists is a comparison on the level of epistemology ; but since Comfort’s novel is BURIED (his sex books not so much) other aesthetic decisions regarding his novel will have to await further study.
Short Stories ;; Only three short stories ; “My Grandmother’s Foot”, previously unpublished ; “The Dead Women” (1943) ; “Old James” (1944). They are almost so small that there seems little to be found to be said about them. But the third story I suspect may be predictive of what one may find in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, that sea-net of the sentence gathering it all in ; a story of Old James writing his autobiography, but in truth an homage to its ghostwriter, Miss Greenwood, who fills in the blank spaces. A nicely non-threatening means into the prose=world of Ms. Young, Our Darling.
______________
Marguerite Young’s reading list for writers ;; from “On Teaching”, originally published : Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1989.
Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, for instance The Ring and the Book
Dante
Coleridge
Blake
T.S. Eliot
Ezra Pound
William Carlos Williams
John Frederick Nims’s Western Wind (for understanding metaphor)
all the great epics of the past
Thrale’s Emblems
Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia
Gerard Manley Hopkins
William Butler Yeats
Herman Melville
and all the beautiful others
Flannery O’Connor
Cynthia Ozick
Let us not forget William Gass, Anne Tyler, and James Merrill
biographies by the ton -- of such as Salvador Dali, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Stekel, Theodor Reik, Jung, Campbell -- and their works.
William James’s Psychology (he wrote psychology like a novelist)
Henry James’s notebooks and novels (he wrote novels like a psychologist)
Saint Augustine’s Confessions and The City of God
Plutarch’s Lives
The Golden Ass
Don Quixote
Dead Souls
The Overcoat
all of Dickens, Dostoevski, Tolstoi, Pasternak
Uncle Remus
The Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights
All of my beloved Laurence Sterne
all of Cervantes
all of Fielding, Richardson, Proust, and imitations of their dragnet sentences
as many of the great masters as [you] please
Bottom of the barrel scrapings? Yes. And thank-you. Inviting the Muses was assembled by the crew at the Dalkey Archive amidst their republication of Marguerite Young’s massive Miss MacIntosh, My Darling ; just about anything and everything was gathered together so as not to be lost. “Barrel scrapings” is strong language, but ask yourself, What kind of barrel was it? And, are there not such things stored in barrels that after the bulk has been published in bulky books, there remain yet some delicious morsels? Yes. So, by nature, Inviting the Muses is uneven ; three short stories, several essays spanning the years 1945 to 1989, and a bevy of reviews. I’ll review the three sections in the order of my reading.
Essays :: For those intimidated by the size of Young’s big book or by rumors of her prose, an entry point to her work may be found in several of these lovely essays. And so it is as it frequently is with essays though, that one may have a diversity of reasons for reading them ; here, most part, for myself her prose prose prose. Topics come and go ;; but here they are :: the US Middle West ; a wonderful thing on ‘Complex Letters’ which functions as anodyne to those complaints about ‘difficult’ fictions ; an afternoon spent with poet Marianne Moore ; Mari Sandoz ; an Arabian horse conservation ranch ; a longer sketch about Raggedy Ann and related dolls ; who was James Whitcomb Riley’s old sweetheart? ; on being deaf (wonderful! but dated?) ; teaching writing (assignment : a sentence “at least three pages long”) ; The Artist as Wanderer ; three pieces on poets which I could really give only more of a damn than I could about poetry (thank the muses that Young turned early from poetry to prose) ; “I do not think that there is any difference between the works of men and women writers” ; and another thing on teaching writing, regarding which, see the List below. So, but anywhey, half-dozen essays here to prize and plenty of essay=prose to love.
Reviews :: The assemblage of Young’s reviews, ranging from 1935 to 1977, is where the barrel scrapping becomes rather apparent. Typically only authors with an academic paper mill attached to them receive this kind of treatment. We can quickly chalk it up to the independent mindedness over there at the Dalkey Archive.
Quickly, a few reviewed books worth mentioning for some reason (skipping over reviews of poetry) :: Jean Stafford’s Boston Adventure ; Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House and Katherine Anne Porter’s The Leaning Tower ; Dorothy Caruso’s biography of Enrico Caruso ; Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil ; Fawn M. Brodie’s biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History which I would have liked to have seen turned into an essay, Young being herself a descendent of Brigham Young ; Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding ; an evisceration of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason from which I’d like to quote extensively, being a novel I read twice once upon a time and each time struck with, well, with nothing ; Truman Capote’s first novel Other Voices, Other Rooms which rather impressed Young commenting on that rare-bird, individuality of style ; Marianne Hauser’s The Choir Invisible ; the third and fourth volumes of Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence ; Anaïs Nin’s Diary, volume the second and the Nin Reader edited by Philip K. Jason ; a handful of Sherlock Holmes related volumes.
One review made my BURIED heart leap a little :: Alex Comfort’s The Power House struck most strongly through Young to me, a book she reviews more or less twice and mentions a third time in a review of Henry Miller’s Murder the Murderer. An arbitrary selection of a statement regarding Comfort’s book which might situate it :: “Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy, Joyce in Ulysses, Alex Comfort in The Power House, all have employed, astutely and as a result of knowledges which preceded the act of artistic creation, the anarchic principle that reality is given to us only through our sensations, which may be, for that matter, defective, so that no accurate report can be made.” And just to emphasize, the comparison with those two genius fictionists is a comparison on the level of epistemology ; but since Comfort’s novel is BURIED (his sex books not so much) other aesthetic decisions regarding his novel will have to await further study.
Short Stories ;; Only three short stories ; “My Grandmother’s Foot”, previously unpublished ; “The Dead Women” (1943) ; “Old James” (1944). They are almost so small that there seems little to be found to be said about them. But the third story I suspect may be predictive of what one may find in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, that sea-net of the sentence gathering it all in ; a story of Old James writing his autobiography, but in truth an homage to its ghostwriter, Miss Greenwood, who fills in the blank spaces. A nicely non-threatening means into the prose=world of Ms. Young, Our Darling.
______________
Marguerite Young’s reading list for writers ;; from “On Teaching”, originally published : Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1989.
Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, for instance The Ring and the Book
Dante
Coleridge
Blake
T.S. Eliot
Ezra Pound
William Carlos Williams
John Frederick Nims’s Western Wind (for understanding metaphor)
all the great epics of the past
Thrale’s Emblems
Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia
Gerard Manley Hopkins
William Butler Yeats
Herman Melville
and all the beautiful others
Flannery O’Connor
Cynthia Ozick
Let us not forget William Gass, Anne Tyler, and James Merrill
biographies by the ton -- of such as Salvador Dali, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Stekel, Theodor Reik, Jung, Campbell -- and their works.
William James’s Psychology (he wrote psychology like a novelist)
Henry James’s notebooks and novels (he wrote novels like a psychologist)
Saint Augustine’s Confessions and The City of God
Plutarch’s Lives
The Golden Ass
Don Quixote
Dead Souls
The Overcoat
all of Dickens, Dostoevski, Tolstoi, Pasternak
Uncle Remus
The Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights
All of my beloved Laurence Sterne
all of Cervantes
all of Fielding, Richardson, Proust, and imitations of their dragnet sentences
as many of the great masters as [you] please
February 26, 2021
Good for the student of Young, but would not be of any interest to someone who hasn't read MMMD. Three parts: three short stories, fifteen essays (some, like "Complex Life and Complex Letters", "Inviting the Muses", and "The Artist as Wanderer" are particularly interesting when read as manifestos of her great work, while others evoke the sublimely sensational journalism of Djuna), and finally several reviews--most interesting to me: her writings on Anaïs Nin, Marguerite's contemporary feminine iconoclast, whose sumptuous boudoir shots I once found in a box of Marguerite's personal correspondence and whose introduction of the two-volume HBJ paperback of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is my favorite piece of writing about my favorite book.
January 16, 2015
http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/1082492...
Beginning my first study of the highly acclaimed, but seemingly lightly read, Marguerite Young, I chose this Dalkey Archive collection that features three of her short stories, some essays, and a few reviews of books she has read and felt she had something to say about them. It occurred to me that my choice of material for my very first introduction to the “grande dame of American letters” was quite fair, and actually the most direct and honest way into the mind of this talented writer. I think we learn so much about a writer when we read first-hand of the things which make them tick and those that, for one reason or another, fail to generally have the same lasting impact. It was refreshing for me to learn that even in 1945 literature suffered from the same disease it suffers from today, and that popular writers rarely make historical figures, and they, and their works, are often completely forgotten in due time. Marguerite fails to hold back and restrain her negative criticism of these particular writers and the woeful ones who read them. I like also that she found Jean Paul Sartre a bore and as meaningless as his concepts are. But it did not surprise me at all that she felt Carson McCullers a writer worthy to spend valuable time reading her work and entering into the worlds she creates in her brilliant and intelligent fiction.
Marguerite Young can herself also write a fine short story. All three offerings included in this book were extremely sophisticated and have now expedited my enlarged expectations for my sooner, rather than later, reading of her behemoth of a fiction titled Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.
I did wholesomely welcome her gargantuan fervor as I read her words. I thoroughly enjoyed her strength, and the intelligent arguments and positions she took to make her stand on. There was also a confidence portrayed that bodes well for the relationship we both will share in the coming months. Though she herself is sadly gone from the physical world that I live in today, she is certainly still present and accountable through the published works she has left for us to be enjoyed, examined, and more generally uplifted as these whispers of her genius grow.
Beginning my first study of the highly acclaimed, but seemingly lightly read, Marguerite Young, I chose this Dalkey Archive collection that features three of her short stories, some essays, and a few reviews of books she has read and felt she had something to say about them. It occurred to me that my choice of material for my very first introduction to the “grande dame of American letters” was quite fair, and actually the most direct and honest way into the mind of this talented writer. I think we learn so much about a writer when we read first-hand of the things which make them tick and those that, for one reason or another, fail to generally have the same lasting impact. It was refreshing for me to learn that even in 1945 literature suffered from the same disease it suffers from today, and that popular writers rarely make historical figures, and they, and their works, are often completely forgotten in due time. Marguerite fails to hold back and restrain her negative criticism of these particular writers and the woeful ones who read them. I like also that she found Jean Paul Sartre a bore and as meaningless as his concepts are. But it did not surprise me at all that she felt Carson McCullers a writer worthy to spend valuable time reading her work and entering into the worlds she creates in her brilliant and intelligent fiction.
Marguerite Young can herself also write a fine short story. All three offerings included in this book were extremely sophisticated and have now expedited my enlarged expectations for my sooner, rather than later, reading of her behemoth of a fiction titled Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.
I did wholesomely welcome her gargantuan fervor as I read her words. I thoroughly enjoyed her strength, and the intelligent arguments and positions she took to make her stand on. There was also a confidence portrayed that bodes well for the relationship we both will share in the coming months. Though she herself is sadly gone from the physical world that I live in today, she is certainly still present and accountable through the published works she has left for us to be enjoyed, examined, and more generally uplifted as these whispers of her genius grow.
December 10, 2018
I love Marguerite Young, but most of these pieces seem secondary/a little slapdash and probably didn't need to be collected. Read Angel in the Forest
June 21, 2024
Well, deadline prose is deadline prose….
The three short stories included in this volume are forgettable and exhibit none of the charm of Young’s opus, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. A few of the essays, such as the titular “Inviting the Muses” and “The Artist as Wanderer,” are worth reading but are not strong enough to sustain the volume as a whole. Several of the reviews are practically advertisements for Alex Comfort’s novel The Power House for some reason, which is kind of funny now that Comfort is remembered solely as the author of The Joy of Sex. (In the piece “Excursus on War,” a review of Henry Miller’s book Murder the Murderer, Young spends more time talking about Comfort than Miller.) I also got a kick out of “To Be or Not,” where she eviscerates Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel The Age of Reason and lambasts existentialism as a whole. Most of the other essays and reviews are readable, but they never approach the profundity you’d expect from the author of a novel like Miss MacIntosh.
Overall I’d say this book is a big ole skip unless you’re trying to read Young’s complete works.
The three short stories included in this volume are forgettable and exhibit none of the charm of Young’s opus, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. A few of the essays, such as the titular “Inviting the Muses” and “The Artist as Wanderer,” are worth reading but are not strong enough to sustain the volume as a whole. Several of the reviews are practically advertisements for Alex Comfort’s novel The Power House for some reason, which is kind of funny now that Comfort is remembered solely as the author of The Joy of Sex. (In the piece “Excursus on War,” a review of Henry Miller’s book Murder the Murderer, Young spends more time talking about Comfort than Miller.) I also got a kick out of “To Be or Not,” where she eviscerates Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel The Age of Reason and lambasts existentialism as a whole. Most of the other essays and reviews are readable, but they never approach the profundity you’d expect from the author of a novel like Miss MacIntosh.
Overall I’d say this book is a big ole skip unless you’re trying to read Young’s complete works.
January 5, 2022
What a discovery! Amazing writing that evokes alternative realities in such a masterful way. In the author's reviews and essays, I discovered other writers which made this book a real find.
December 10, 2008
This is a good read, lots of interesting tidbits. Young is a very intellectual writer so some of her stories take time to read; the mind has to be completely engaged. In this book there are a few reviews that have led me to Amazon.com for a refill of reading material; kudos there. Over all however, this book is nothing more than table scraps from a very dynamic writer. I can’t wait to take on Miss MacIntosh, My Darling; the main meal.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews