Narrated by the aptly named Vera Cartwheel, who indulges in nonstop verbal and mental gymnastics during a 948-page bus ride from coastal New England to the heartland of America - and the interior of the author's mind - it describes the narrator's largely imaginary quest for the illusory truth about her childhood nursemaid, Miss MacIntosh, who is bald, single-breasted and may or may not have drowned when Miss Cartwheel was 14 years old. It is a reflection of the book's decidedly mixed reception that while the daily review in The New York Times dismissed it with a sneer, Miss Young's friend, William Goyen, turned a Times Sunday review into a page-long paean. It is "Miss MacIntosh," sure enough, that the hero of Miss Tyler's "Accidental Tourist" carries with him to dip into for consolation from time to time. Too rich for a repast, it is better savored, they say, like a bedside dish of candy, one bite-sized bonbon at a time. Indeed, even Miss Young's most ardent admirers (and her admirers, from Anais Nin and Djuna Barnes to John Gardner, Anne Tyler and a prolific band of feminists, tend to be ardent) concede that the book, variously described as "a mammoth epic," "a massive fable" and "a work of stunning magnitude and beauty" (not to mention "hallucinatory," "ethereal" and "utterly stupefying"), is rather much to take in a single season.
Surely one of the most widely unread books ever acclaimed, it has actually been read by comparatively few by fewer still all the way through. By her own account, she welcomed the advances of the poet Allen Tate but rebuffed those of Miss McCullers, telling her at Yaddo in 1946, "Well, Carson, if I could love any woman, it would be you."Īnyone who has not heard of Miss Young, nor read her magnum opus, "Miss MacIntosh, My Darling," need not feel ashamed. Auden, wrote like James Joyce, strode through the Village in her signature serapes, had breakfast at Bigelow's with Richard Wright, got drunk at the White Horse Tavern with Dylan Thomas, palled around with Truman Capote and Carson McCullers, kept a vast collection of dolls in her Bleecker Street apartment and regaled intimates with tales of her romantic conquests.īut for all her range, Miss Young drew a line. Miss Young, a longtime New School writing teacher who began her literary career as an award-winning poet and ended it as a critic, essayist and biographer, was a respected literary figure and cherished Greenwich Village eccentric well before Scribners published her one and only novel, "Miss MacIntosh, My Darling," in 1965.Īfterward she became a legend: the woman with the pageboy haircut who looked like W.
Marguerite Young, the Indiana-born writer who became a darling of the avant-garde and inspired a devoted cult following even as she infuriated and confounded mainstream critics with a single gargantuan novel, died on Friday at the home of a niece in Indianapolis.
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