A Delicate Aggression Read online

  Parallel Universes

  Stalking campus in the Iowa dusk like a figure out of Edgar Allan Poe’s imagination, Marguerite Young’s “presence was in her cape.” Her mystique had a magnetic appeal to budding novelists and short story writers in the program, whom she commonly invited to her home. Once inside, they could see signs of the parallel universes she occupied. Her quirky blend of antebellum Gothic mysticism and Virginia Woolf stream of consciousness appeared in the form of a huge Civil War diorama. Figurines on horseback and tiny bugle boys populated “a plaster of Paris replica in living color of some battle scene or another,” as Murray remembered.10 Perched menacingly on a hill in the miniature scene was a stuffed raven. In the mid-1950s, she was “about forty-five and with a face like a friendly basset hound, lank hair chopped off in a long Buster Brown or Prince Valiant bob,” favoring “wide skirts and crisp blouses and often some eccentric necklace or brooch.” Under the tutelage of Gertrude Stein, Young carried “a massive handbag over her shoulder always stuffed with food and manuscripts,” Kellner observed.11 Although her tastes in attire and writing deviated from Stein’s, Young had sat at her feet in Chicago working toward a master’s degree in 1936, drawing confidence from the example of her radical individualism and unbridled creative expression.

  Besides Stein, the other figure at Chicago who had the greatest impact on Young was Minna K. Weissenbach, whom she called “the most remarkable person I’ve ever known in my life.”12 Young had contacted the employment office at the University of Chicago in search of work to help with her finances, since her fellowship did not cover accommodations, and Weissenbach, known as “the opium lady of Hyde Park,” hired Young to be her secretary. To Young’s delight, Weissenbach was one of the first patrons of the university to support Edna St. Vincent Millay’s career by providing her with free room and board during a key phase in her development. Millay went on to write what Richard Wilbur and other critics called “some of the best sonnets of the century,” which earned her the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923.13 Young recalled how “the idea of sleeping in Millay’s bed seemed to be the most marvelous thing that could ever happen to any young person.”14 The employment office, however, neglected to tell Young that the wealthy heiress who had financially underwritten Millay’s spectacular career spent the majority of her days in alternate universes, hallucinating fantastic dreams.

  In order to make these dreams as lyrical as possible, the aging matron requested that Young read Shakespeare to her, thereby accompanying her opium-fueled visions with the sounds of the greatest dramatic verse ever written. At first shocked, Young soon warmed to the only task Weissenbach set for her as personal secretary. “I’m looking for someone to take a vacation with me away from the modern world. Would you like to come?” With some trepidation, Young replied with a guarded, “Yes.” Her only instruction was, “If I am passing into an opium dream,” she said, “pay no attention. Just go ahead and read—or go home.”15 Young proceeded to read, soon growing comfortable and by degrees exhilarated at providing the verbal passport for the old woman’s journey to another time and place, setting the keynote for her hallucinogenic experience. This was precisely the role she wished to play as a novelist leading readers into parallel universes. Like the fiction Young aspired to write, every detail of the Opium Lady’s house exuded allusive literary wonder, especially “a silver drinking cup” on the night stand “which had belonged to John Keats, a little mosaic Persian letter set, and a beautiful bird with a seashell.”16

  When Young remarked on how “everyone fell under the spell of the opium lady” of Hyde Park during her graduate apprenticeship at the University of Chicago in 1935–1936, she could have been describing her own effect on the Workshop student body when she served on the faculty from 1955 to 1957.17 She transfixed students with a combination of close journalistic scrutiny of human behavior and a penchant for lofty flights of ethereal mysticism. Unlike the perpetually high matron of Hyde Park, who depended on chemical stimulus, Young’s passport to her fictional worlds relied on no foreign substances. “She drank little or nothing alcoholic” and took no drugs, according to her protégé Kellner. This was because she had naturally inhabited another realm, even as a girl growing up in Indianapolis. There, “she had known a doctor who delivered imaginary babies” and “a virtuoso violinist who played without strings on his instrument,” as well as an electric-chair factory with a garden whose flowers wilted with every execution.18 Right out of high school, Young accepted employment with a chair manufacturer, which she recalled was “the most interesting, strange, horrifying experience.” Her friend Carson McCullers, the southern gothic novelist, “thought it would be smart to tell everybody that I used to work in an electric chair factory.” She used to imagine that “Indiana apples fell up as easily as they fell down if you held them the right way.”19

  Young’s historical imagination was also uncanny. “On occasion she saw Edgar Allan Poe hurrying along the street in Greenwich Village,” Kellner said.20 “Once I dreamed that I was in Iowa City at my house,” she recalled. Present in the dream was Henry James, “sitting in a corner pouring whiskey into his high silk hat.” The frequency of his visits rose when she was in the throes of writing Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. His muse-like presence spurred her on, infusing her with the courage and confidence to continue with the unwieldy, increasingly amorphous manuscript constantly on the verge of slipping from her control. “He would come to me in my dreams . . . and read what I had done,” she recalled. “Sometimes I was typing, and sometimes I was writing in long hand beautiful pages.” “That’s beautiful,” the apparitional Henry James whispered gently, gazing at her with kind, loving eyes, “go right ahead . . . go right ahead. You’re the late twentieth-century development of what I was doing.”21 She used precisely this assuring parental hush with her students, never hesitating to say, “that’s beautiful,” when their writing warranted it.

  In class, Young would startle her pupils by alerting them to the presence of impossible visitors. “When I’m teaching, I often say, ‘Come in, Mr. James . . .’ My students love this. I will stop . . . ‘Oh, how do you do, Henry James, won’t you be seated.’ ” Her classroom full of creative writers, obsessed with configuring fictional characters and worlds of their own, were invariably transfixed: “they all look, [thinking] he’s really there.” A parade of select literary luminaries made cameo appearances in Young’s class. “Boswell will come; Cervantes, I spend a great deal of time with him. I entertain: I see Emily Dickinson, quite often, Virginia Woolf and Dickens.” Poe was a favorite. She would see him not just as a novelty to enliven the drab teaching environs of Iowa’s corrugated steel army barracks, but “all the time. I see him on misty nights on Sheridan Square, when the rain’s falling; he’s going into that little cigar store to get a cigar. I am on very close terms with Poe.”22 While living in Greenwich Village, the literary past surrounding her was palpable. “Oh, how I love our contiguity to the sacred past!” she effused in a letter to Engle. “I am right around the corner from Melville, Henry and William James, E. A. Poe, Whitman, Elinor Wylie. Would you believe these ghosts could mean so much to me?”23

  Despite such conjurings, Young’s journalistic bent grounded her in reality. A vast portion of her writings appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Vogue, Mademoiselle, The Kenyon Review, and The Conscientious Objector. Although the complex interiority of the characters in her fiction seems otherworldly, she maintained that all of them “are recognizable, true to life.” They provided an imaginative entrance into the subjectivity of real people such as those disembarking the midnight bus in downtown Iowa City she and her students silently observed. In addition to such observation of strangers and intimates in her life, “I get my characters from the daily newspapers, and from biographies and medical histories and thousands of sources.” The journalist in her proclaimed, “I believe, like Browning,” whose poem “The Ring and the Book” is based on an actual murder in Rome, “that the
poet is a reporter.”24 In this sense, she tied her fantastical flights to lived events and human history according to her insistence that “I do not believe in inventing characters.” Kellner later confirmed that “Under every fantasy there was a hard truth; under every illusion, there was a reality.” Crucially, these were “not always the same reality, and nobody else’s but hers.”25 The opium lady of Hyde Park, for example, was integral to the formation of Young’s Catherine Cartwheel, a drug-addicted heiress living in a cavernous mansion on the Atlantic, a stormy coast that serves as a creative extension of Lake Michigan’s windy shore.

  The two-room Iowa City apartment Young occupied overflowed with the accouterment of her imagination. “In what should have been her kitchen,” Kellner observed, “stacks of typing paper in various stages of completion crowded a trestle table for space with her typewriter; books spilled over shelves into stacks against the walls.” With the air of a used bookshop, the other room in the apartment contained a myriad of assorted models, gadgets, and figurines, “a remarkable collection of gimcracks and doodads, including a lot of toys and ornaments” crowding every surface. Throughout the apartment were books of all varieties amid ubiquitous stacks of manuscripts. Sleeping and eating seemed secondary, if not entirely unnecessary, to the life of creative imagination that sustained her. None of her friends recall her ever preparing a proper meal; nor could they discern what served as the bedroom. “I don’t know where she slept,” Kellner said.26

  “That Well of Energy”

  Among Young’s special gifts was the capacity to defuse hostility. This attribute served her well when tensions ran high during group workshop sessions at Iowa. Young’s own experience as a professional writer had taught her that the publishing industry, populated by potentially disapproving editors and critics, could be devastating to an author in the early stages of a career. She therefore made every effort to mollify, and in some cases preempt, critical resistance to her students’ writing. In the process, she avoided bland universal approval that might have washed out the diverse continuum of responses to literature represented in the mid-twentieth-century reading public. Instead, she intended to generate supportive feedback in place of savage attacks that euphemistically passed as “constructive criticism.” She identified with Virginia Woolf’s predicament as a woman writer who faced profound resistance from the male-dominated critical community. Woolf dramatized such resistance in To the Lighthouse through the character of Lily Briscoe, an artist struggling against “Mr. Tansley whispering in her ear, ‘Women can’t write, women can’t paint.’ ”27 Young’s predilection for rescuing writers from unfair criticism appears in her review of Woolf’s posthumous Haunted House. In it, she “resurrects Virginia Woolf from the dust which has been thrown on her by a number of critics who think, like Dr. Johnson and Bishop Berkeley’s nonmaterialism, that material is real because one cannot walk through a closed door or who feel that such a view of life is precious or exclusive.”28 The impulse came from her desire to remove rather than erect barriers to the creative process. She believed the elaborate world of her ornate imagination, like those of her students, was worth defending.

  The sort of critical resistance embodied by Woolf’s Charles Tansley left Young humiliated at the hands of an unfair review in Time magazine. Fortunately, she had been buoyed by praise from the far more reputable New York Times Book Review, which was a major arbiter of literary taste. Time magazine’s assault on Miss MacIntosh, My Darling represented the sort of destructive criticism she tried to protect her Iowa students from. The worst critical abuse she endured consisted of sexist slurs that left her the “victim of some brutal male reviewers. ‘If she had gotten married, she never would have done this,’ they would write,” as she recalled in an interview.29

  The highest praise of her career came from Nona Balakian, one of the four original founders of the National Book Critics Circle. The Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing was known as “the most prestigious award for book criticism in the country.”30 At a celebration in honor of Young held by the American Professors of Creative Writing in 1983, Balakian delivered the keynote address, affirming that in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, “with all its dirge-like moments, there is a salutary, nourishing quality about this book that links it to the great classics of American literature.” “Only an American could have written it,” she claimed, describing Young as “a remarkable woman of wide vision, humor, compassion and enduring strength.”31 In an earlier essay, Balakian lauded the novel as “the crystallization of an historical evolution in the novel form and of the shake-up of the notion of reality that has occurred in our life-time.”32 Anaïs Nin, Young’s longtime friend and fellow novelist, claimed the book spoke with a collective conscience, representing “nocturnal America, just as Don Quixote became the spirit of Spain, and Ulysses that of Ireland.”33

  Young’s acute concern for literary reception originally mounted with the publication of Angel in the Forest, a novel that began as a collection of sixty interrelated ballads she first crafted in blank verse in 1940 as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Iowa. There she met Paul Engle, who alerted her to the professional potential of her poetry. After a brief stint teaching with the Indiana Writers’ Conference at Indiana University and Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, Young returned to Iowa City in 1942 on a creative writing fellowship arranged by Engle in conjunction with a lecturer position in the English department. By transforming Angel in the Forest into prose under the influence of the Workshop students and faculty, she began to master the style that made her famous, eventually honing it into the byzantine circuitous prose poetry that became the signature of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Her mention in Angel of “being tired of the Sinclair Lewis view of middle America as a continual Main Street” led to an unexpected encounter years later at the Algonquin Bar, where she “was accosted by a red-faced man who told me he was Sinclair Lewis.” She recalled how Lewis was “so grateful that I was seeing the Middle West from my own point of view and not as an imitation of his.”34 Concurrent with Angel in the Forest was her work on a book of poetry titled Moderate Fable. Combined with teaching responsibilities as a lecturer and doctoral study, these projects made for a life in Iowa City fully immersed in literature. The stacks of typewritten manuscript pages sprouted and mushroomed, gradually taking over her apartment as the fruits of her playful creative spirit and hard-won literary labor. She loved those stacks, as can easily be seen in the most well known photograph of her, embracing four thick bundles of manuscript pages, resting her head lovingly on the massive heap. Her face bears the unmistakable look of an author’s simultaneous relief and joy at the offspring of her creative mind.35

  The first major break of Young’s career came when Engle brought her in contact with Frank Taylor, an acquisitions editor from the New York publisher Reynal and Hitchcock. As she headed home on an empty street in Iowa City during a midnight snowstorm, a stranger in a trench coat emerged from the shadows. She wheeled around, darting in the opposite direction. “Miss Young?” Taylor called in a cosmopolitan tenor. She glanced over her shoulder at her future editor gliding toward her. He smiled broadly, extended his hand to introduce himself, and breathlessly explained that in his attaché case was the book contract that would spring her career.36 Angel in the Forest earned Young an American Association of University Women fellowship for 1943–1944, an award that prompted her temporary leave from her lectureship and doctoral studies at Iowa. She was on her way to Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, the heart of literary bohemian culture in New York City. Her ascendance into the powerful inner circle of American letters was imminent. The next five years would bring a Guggenheim fellowship and inclusion in a group of twenty-seven of the nation’s most prominent authors, led by the Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis. New York began to look and feel like home to her, as she rapidly made herself a prominent figure in Greenwich Village. “In the Village I seem to be known as that ‘well of energy,’ ” she wrote in a letter to Engle in F
ebruary 1945. Unmarried and without children, her outpouring of production had more than filled that void in her solitary life. Writing made her life rich with the wild opportunity of radical independence. “My aim is to support myself by writing,” she told Engle, admitting, “though that may be a rather foolish aim.” The romantic in her could not resist. “Who knows, I might swing it?” she said, peering into her future, “especially as I have neither chick nor child?”37

  In a densely typewritten single-spaced letter to Engle from New York, with her signature coffee stains in half circles at the corners, Young referenced her emergence into professional authorship as a sort of literary maternity. Writing weeks before the publication of Angel in the Forest, she realized that her book of poems, Moderate Fable, was to appear simultaneously with the novel. “All of a sudden, I was rather overwhelmed. It’s like being the mother of twins!” Ecstatic, she could see how suddenly “everything doubled, and you hardly realize the full significance of the fact.”38 She intended not only to receive strong reviews, but also “fat sums” to realize her dream of economic autonomy, in the spirit of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. She therefore charged Engle with the task of lobbying on her behalf for a Guggenheim fellowship. Both Angel in the Forest and Moderate Fable “have earned high praise from critics, which fact pleases me more than anything,” raising her expectations. “I am so anxious that it sell! They predict that it will, but you know the old saying—many a slip betwixt the cup and the lip, etc.” In this mood of self-advocacy—justifiable on behalf of her literary children she was sending out into the world—she turned the subject to Iowa. Her matriculation toward the Ph.D. there had slowed due to a new classical language requirement instituted by Norman Foerster, one of the founders of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. “Can’t you get Foerster to let down the restrictions as to the Greek and Latin?” she demanded. “I hate to think of myself as memorizing verbs when I could be writing.” Writing was her highest priority. Despite her insistence that “I am going to get the Ph.D.,” she never did. She made true on her other plans. “I don’t want to teach for years to come. I am planning on returning to New York” after a trip to Europe.39 Engle had wanted her to return to Iowa City to take on a faculty position at the Workshop, but at this stage in her career, New York, Naples, and Rome occupied her through the early 1950s. She finally landed in Iowa City in 1954 after being lured to the Workshop on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship secured by Engle.