Miss MacIntosh, My Darling discussion
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a review of her Dalkey books by Gregory Feeley, orginally pub'd in Washington Post (1994) ::http://gregoryfeeley.blogspot.com/201...
A blog post about our novel ::http://towardgrace.blogspot.com/2017/...
"Allez, parlons une fois de plus du plus beau livre du monde: Miss Macintosh, My Darling, de Marguerite Young, ce fabuleux roman de plus de mille pages que l'auteur mit dix-huit ans à écrire et qui parut en 1965, éblouissant les rares lecteurs qui eurent la force d'âme de s'y noyer."
Wish I had stuck to my French lessons.
Nathan "N.R." wrote: "A blog post about our novel ::http://towardgrace.blogspot.com/2017/..."
The googlation ::
The most beautiful book in the world, over and over again
Come on, let's talk once more about the most beautiful book in the world: Miss Macintosh, My Darling, by Marguerite Young, a fabulous novel of more than a thousand pages which the author wrote for eighteen years and which appeared in 1965, dazzling The rare readers who had the strength of soul to drown themselves there.
Died at the age of eighty-seven, Marguerite Young, who began her career as a poet quite soon, soon became a legend, not only in Greenwich Village. It was said of her that she had the haircut of W. H. Auden and wrote like James Joyce. Between a breakfast with Richard Wright, a car with Dylan Thomas, a light flirt with Carson McCullers, she found time to devote nearly two decades to writing a novel that never knew its place authentic and Deserved in the pantheon of American letters - and letters in short.
Though admired and supported by Anaïs Nin, Djuna Barnes, John Gardner, Anne Tyler, William Goyen, his only novel, described in turn as a "gigantic epic", as a monumental fable, Young never had the satisfaction of See his masterpiece recognized as a Ulysses or a Moby-Dick.
Young, who claimed to frequent the ghosts of Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf and Dickens, and Edgar Poe's tutorial, remains the author of the most beautiful and neglected book in literary history. Addressing the reasons for this injustice could be the subject of a thesis per se. Is it the length of the work? Go tell Proust that. Is it the fact that Young was a woman, and moreover a feminist? We're burning, surely. The fact is that, from reading this book, nothing makes it possible to understand why it is not among the ten most beautiful literary monsters of the century.
What is there in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling that can frighten the reader (apart from its dimensions)? No doubt this book is too ardent, too hypnotic, too dense, too fascinating, too sensual, too ambiguous, too loving of beauty - too powerfully Orphic. To immerse ourselves in it is to no longer be able to emerge (and fear to no longer want) to emerge from it, as in a dream-book which would produce its own atmosphere and leave you no hope but that of losing oneself, Drowned, dissolved. Yet, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is not a book on anything - far from it. It swarms, winds, carves, shapes and tells, it affirms, denies and goes beyond, it seems absolutely autonomous and supremely surreal, stirring a thousand textures, a thousand lights, a thousand shades of textures and lights, treating the tiniest Affects and the most virulent passions with the obstinacy of an entomologist / paleontologist / engraver / musician / biologist / adventurer who would have been proposed to describe the world and who would have preferred to sing the mysterious and invisible lining. And to double this lining of the magical knowledge of death and rebirth, which are the ever-declining themes of this literary vortex.
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling - of which no French publisher has yet dared to envisage the publication in translation, alas - remains, for those who read it, the incandescent proof that the literary world had no desire even in 1965, To recognize that the most beautiful book in the world was the work of a woman, poet, socialist and feminist critic. What Nin and Woolf knew on their scale, Young had to live with his own. Eighteen years of labor, a manuscript of 2500 pages and, in spite of fervent support, an indifference confining to censorship. Who knows Marguerite Young today? Men would have to imagine a world where Joyce's name would be unknown, where Rabelais would not interest anyone, a world where Melville would be just an eccentric and David Foster Wallace a phraser.
However, every time I open Miss MacIntosh, My Darling and plunge into it, I know that I have in my hands the best kept secret of literature. His tomb of shadow and light. A diamond that feeds its innumerable reflections and engenders grandiose and intimate myths, such as a flower-world that orgasms its contagious pollen to the stupefied mouth of the individual become pure vibration. An organism as generous as blinding, as prodigious as it is concrete. The work of a life, of course, but above all the life of a work finally illuminated from the depths of an incredibly familiar abyss. That of the human soul? Better than that: that of Marguerite Young, true queen of the night.
Great find, Nathan. This Claro guy is a genuine fan, and everything he says makes sense. The googlation has a few wonderful nonsenses howsoever. Claro says Marguerite Young had a 'biture' with Dylan Thomas which means they went on a drinking spree rather than a trip in a car;-)
Claro also says she claimed to be on 'intimate terms' with Poe's phantom rather than attending his 'tutorials'.
Google also gives her masculine pronouns here and there - after the mention of William Goyen, for example. She'd have laughed at that, I'm sure, and Claro might too. He was definitely getting warm when he blamed her neglected status on her not being a man.
On the other hand, google does a pretty decent job with some sentences: 'It swarms, winds, carves...'
Very impressive.
Reading the comments on the blog page, it's clear that there's a little bunch of interested French readers who'd love to see MMmD translated. One person even offered to do it.
And one person said, 'Who's Joyce?'
Fionnuala wrote: "Google also gives her masculine pronouns here and there"Consistently :: I made the following correction "who began her career as a poet" but then I said, Let it be! And I had my suspicions about that Dylan car ride too! ; )
I don't know that much about translating, but I do wonder if Miss Mac would even qualify as difficult-to-translate. Maybe it'd just be a matter of finding that correct long=sentence rhythm and getting the words to hop that stream from bank to bank.
I've got a Claro on my bookshelf that Brian Evenson translated from French called Electric Flesh: A Novel. Yet to be read but this further intrigues me
As of today's date, the reception on goodreads (apparently these folks mostly knew what they were getting into) contrasts rather sharply with a few of the Reviews on amazon, a few of which Reviewers should have been reading something else more safely.