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Marguerite Young published her first collection of verse, Prismatic Ground, in 1939. In 1945 came the double appearance of Moderate Fable, her last volume of verse, and Angel in the Forest, a history of two Utopian communities in New Harmony, Indiana, in the nineteenth century. Subsequently, portions of the novel to which she was to devote eighteen years, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, began to appear in excerpt. The novel appeared in its entirety in 1965. In the late sixties she abandoned a near-completed life of James Whitcomb Riley to write a brief biography of her friend Eugene Debs, the first socialist candidate for the presidency, which resulted in a large-scale study of Utopian and anti-Utopian trends.

She lives on a quiet tree-lined street in Greenwich Village. The walls of her apartment are painted red and lined with book cases. On one shelf, the room is replicated in miniature sofas and miniature chairs set on easy rugs and lit by tiny lamps and chandeliers. The room in which we sat was dominated by a merry-go-round horse with ribbons streaming free from the pole that reached the ceiling. A life-sized antique doll was seated in a Victorian chair, exquisitely dressed in lace. Miss Young placed an ashtray within easy reach. She smoked continuously. Her voice has a Midwestern flavor, sometimes drawling, sometimes rapid.

 

MARGUERITE YOUNG

I was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, “the Athens of the West,” as it had been called in an earlier day. That was when Booth Tarkington, Meredith Nicholson, James Whitcomb Riley, various writers of the old Hoosier group lived there. We were brought up to believe that to be born in Indiana was to be born a poet—a myth which I can't accept now, but I did then. I remember telling my grandmother, when I was about seven years old, that I intended to be a poet.

INTERVIEWER

She had a literary sensibility, didn't she?

YOUNG

She was a very beautiful, gifted, artistic personality. She painted, she wrote poems. She would never think of publishing. I don't think that she even thought of herself as frustrated. She was a woman who could have been a surgeon, a poet, anything. She was a genius personality.

INTERVIEWER

I know when you were an adolescent your grandmother became ill and that was when you yourself had to assume responsibility.

YOUNG

She had a series of strokes the last year or two of her life. She would speak in a semi-hallucinated way to me and my little sister. We were left to hear these wild hallucinatory statements, and yet maintain a sense of equilibrium, with no one's help. As I remember her now, there were many beautiful speeches; it was like Lear on the heath. She was not mad; she was just in a state between dream and reality, knowing that she was going to die, and speaking and dancing at the edge of her grave.

INTERVIEWER

You mentioned Lear—was it rage?

YOUNG

No! Never! It was always poetic and cosmic. It had a great deal to do with angels and unearthly creatures: I know there were angels in the house. Of course, I had always been taught there were angels, and if you did anything wrong, you were to say, “Get thee behind me Satan” . . . and I was always whirling around to try to catch Satan as he was getting behind me. When she died, I imagined she would call on Anatole France in Heaven. She had introduced me to him along with Dickens, Eliot, Adam Bede, and Victor Hugo, but it was Anatole France I truly loved, I read all of him, his work in French, and when my grandmother died my first thought was, oh well, now she can tell Anatole France that she has a little granddaughter on Earth who adores him. I really believed that she would tell him this. I missed her so much. It was the first death I ever knew. If I had been sure I could find her and Anatole France, I would have joined them.

INTERVIEWER

Anaïs Nin tells the story of your attempting to commit suicide.

YOUNG

Which time? I never really attempted to commit suicide. I used to think about committing suicide when I was about eighteen. I had it worked out that I would do it in multiple ways, all at once. It would take place in a treehouse overlooking the river: I would put a rope around my neck, take poison, shoot myself, and fall into the river all at once. I think I worked this out because of Dorothy Parker's poem: “ropes give . . .”—all these reasons suicide was so difficult. Also I had heard about Cowper's various attempts to commit suicide and how he was frustrated in every one. So I figured out a way to do it. It was not surprising. At the age of eighteen all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21—of old age.

INTERVIEWER

Did your grandmother make you write as a game, or an exercise? Did she direct you?

YOUNG

She praised my writing, and knew from when I began to pick up a pencil that I would be a writer. She said I would be either a writer, or the first woman president of the United States, or that I would become a lawyer who would work to restore the lost family fortune. There were so many lost family fortunes that my little sister and I used to be afraid of kidnappers who would kidnap us for our golden crowns—although, of course, we were not rich, but we didn't know that.

INTERVIEWER

If your grandmother was the great personal influence, the geographical impact was Indiana, wasn't it? Indiana is the center of all your subsequent writing. But you are more interested in the psychology of character than you are in landscape, aren't you? You do not have that love of the prairie grasses and the low horizon line of Willa Cather, for example?

YOUNG

No. It was my fate to be born in Indiana. I probably would have chosen Edinburgh if you had asked me, or perhaps Rome. But I believe we start with what we are, as writers, and Indiana is a land rich in legend. I tried to transmute this legend into a universal and cosmic statement of some kind, and not be strictly a regionalist. If you are asking me if I love nature, I could not really say that I do. I love the sea and the sand, but I am not a person who just loves nature. Yet, I write about it continually because I am interested in the birds and the beasts for their symbolic value—their value as icons, as ways of saying things about people. As a poet, I have been an expert in that realm, studying birds and beasts from Heroclitus onward, and I love the old bestiaries. I wrote my master's thesis at the University of Chicago on the birds and beasts of Eupheus—his England—and for that, I had to study the history of every bird and beast there ever was.