I may have had in mind, then, as I
wrote about the supine lady, this beautiful opium lady who
was a kind of figure like the White
Goddess, a source of dreams, images, symbolic love and power
to all her friends, including Thornton Wilder, who
was a frequent bedside caller.
And I think of her as a kind of something more than human,
like a goddess living in two worlds.
When she died, we could scarcely mourn for her
because she had always been so much a part of the other world.
She was like someone who lived in heaven now,
and I'm sure that I must have had
in mind this beautiful lady.
Now, I don't have with me a copy of Angel of the Forest,
but there are themes and relationships
to these poems in that book in one way, and in another way,
they come again in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is a bus journey.
I was writing it when John Steinbeck's The Wayward
Bus came out, and that, I suppose,
might have intimidated many people.
Oh, the bus journey has been done now.
But at least I went ahead with my bus journey, a longer
one than his, I'm afraid.
This is a story of an archetypal poor little rich girl in flight
from a New England fabulous household,
where her mother has been an opium addict.
And she has been away from home for some time
but recalls the one sane, sensible person she ever
knew in life, Miss MacIntosh, her darling, a red headed
nursemaid from What Cheer, Iowa, who
has told her continually of the good life in the Middle West
where all people are middlebrow, of the middle way,
sane, sensible, normal, average, down to Earth,
do not entertain phantoms and dreams.
Certainly, Miss MacIntosh, my darling,
never would-- she said, if ever she
met with the phantom Emperor Constantine
in the fog along that New England seacoast--
he is one of the opium layd's favorite phantoms--
she would give him a whack with her black umbrella.
She would certainly tell him what she thought of him
and ask him why he changed the calendar, because she believes
that we're all off on the wrong day of the week, which we are.
And the trouble with Miss MacIntosh,
as you will find out I think on page 6,
is that she committed suicide.
She's dead before the book starts.
And the whole book, in a way, is an inquiry--
why did this sane, sensible woman
commit suicide and all these mad people live?
Why do they flourish?
Why do they even enjoy their madness?
They have a marvelous time.
They are more involved with Mark Twain than existentialism.
In fact, they were written before Sartre came along
with his pessimistic attitudes.
And I could never accept them being a Mark Twain,
the Middle Westerner, just like Miss MacIntosh, my darling,
I suppose.
Why did she die and the others lived?
There are many, many answers to this question.
And you know when the book starts
that the quest is doomed, that life is not
going to be all that she said it would be in the Middle West.
In fact, when she gets to this tiny town
on the banks of the Wabash, it's the same town
in which my utopias occurred, but I have only one little clue
for a careful reader.
And I don't mention utopia anywhere else.
Everyone there is more involved with whirlpool, illusion,
maelstrom, nightmare, and dream than anything the opium
lady could possibly have dreamed of because,
after all, if you take opium, you
are protected from reality and even
from the ultimate consequences of dreams.
But when you walk around in this world,
then you really are exposed.
So that when this young girl has finally
lived through all the possible ways of approaching
the problem of reality and dream,
when she has exhausted these, she
is ready for her own adult life.
And she marries on the--
20 pages, I believe it is, before the end of the book, she
meets her true love.
And my editor at Scribner's, Mr. Mitchell,
says, the thing about this book, Marguerite,
it's really a girl-meets-boy book.
And he said, I think it's marvelous
the way you pull it off in the last 20 pages.
[LAUGHTER]
So she meets her love and marries
and I'm sure lives happily ever after, as happily as one
can live.
She marries a man who is deaf, and there
is a certain happiness in that fact.
[LAUGHS] If you've ever known a deaf man, as I have,
you know that they are the most--
I think most inclined to be very beautiful and often very happy
people, like my landlady in New York.
She has earphones.
She keeps them off.
I finally got her to put the bottom one down.
I said, President Kennedy has been killed.
She instantly turned them off.
She said, you see why I keep them off?
I don't want to hear the bad news.
So she's just like the opium lady
in that she wears hoop skirts and lives in a world of dreams.
I didn't know this when I moved into the house.
I found a character right there.
You can't escape your characters, either.
Don't ever write about anything unless you want
to meet with it shortly after.
I wrote about a mad shoplifter coming
to the opium lady's house, a big fat lady coming there.
And two or three days later, I met a big fat shoplifter
coming into a great mansion, country mansion where
I was staying, walking in right straight into the front door.
She said, it was a literary--
home of a literary person.
She said, is James Farrell here?
It turned out that she hadn't seen him for 20 years,
but she was looking for him with her big net bag.
I don't know whether she found him or not.
Well, this novel has a great many comic aspects,
although it's written seriously.
And it is written as a poet writes.
And all these images are supposed
to be enjoyed at a sensual level, like painting and music.
The beauty of the word--
I don't care for the plain school of leaving
all those images out.
I've had a few writers tell me that they leave them
in the wastebasket, and I always say--
I don't tell them this, of course,
and they're now in New York, and I'm
sure they're not going to hear that I would rather
read what they left in the wastebasket than the plain "cat
chased dog" or "dog chased cat" school of prose.
That doesn't interest me at all.
I've always said, I thought they should be--
I think they should be bricklayers,
except for one thing--
I wouldn't want to live in the houses
they built because the bricks would soon fall on your head
because they don't lay their bricks very well.
Well, I suppose I might read just
a paragraph or two from the opening scene
as to the opium lady herself.
Now, someone might say, oh, you have a marvelous imagination,
but I can assure you that the opium lady I knew
was exactly like this, even to the pearls
that she used to count.
And she had an imaginary chauffeur named James.
She used to say, "home, James," every once in a while--
"home, James."
And I'll never forget-- one time I
was talking to Truman Capote, who had read this,
and he was in the hospital.
And he said that he was just coming out from the ether,
and he heard this lady say, "oh, James--
isn't that-- isn't that Henry James walking along
the street there?
Well, how do you do, Mr. James?
Aren't you coming to tea?"
and so forth.
And he said, "where am I?"
He started screaming, "Nurse!
Nurse!
Get me out of here!
Get me out of here!"
He said, "who is that?"
It was Mrs. Astor, who waa--
a Mrs. Astor was dying, and she thought
she was out riding in Newport, bowing to Henry
James and other friends.
And Truman said, "I can't afford to be in this wing.
Get me into the poor man's ward."
[LAUGHTER]
So these things happen every day if you're a close observer,
you see?
They really do.
"Home, James."
You know, I'll never forget the time I heard it in reality,
and there was actually a James there.
That was more shocking to me than old ladies
imagining they're going out riding when they're not.
Well, I'm not going to be able to get to James in this,
but that will be something to, oh, inspire you
all to go and buy Miss MacIntosh and find out about James.
[LAUGHS]
Let's see.
I'll just read a paragraph.
You know, I'd really rather not read it all,
except that I'm confronted with an educated audience.
They're all used to hearing a reading.
My mother was oblivious to the realities of flesh and blood,
those creatures of chance.
Apparently, even to Miss Macintosh, loud-mouthed
though she was, unimaginative, no possible rival
in the world of invisible dreams,
the prosaic, fusty, busty old nursemaid
with reddening cheeks, her red-marcelled hair
gleaming like the sand, streaked with sunset, when
the sandpipers wade in the glassy surf
as the last light fades, her footsteps
always certain, the last person who would ever disappear,
the moral guide to the pale, rejected child whose eyes
had not craved reality.
My mother trusted no one, nor was she
ever to be surprised, it seemed, by unusual transformations
or transport, shiftings of form by anything that might ever
transpire, by anything protean, for the opium dreams
surrounding her had provided no pillar of strength,
no rose which did not eventually fade,
no voice which did not fail.
She presumed always that things were not
what they seemed, that all forms must change their shapes,
that all characters must bear, even
to those most familiar with them,
an element of cold surprise, even of horror,
that her life was this play of illusion,
that there should be nothing certain but uncertainty,
no pavement more secure than the glassy surface of the evening
tide and the far wash of waves.
All her days were her night, and all her nights were her day,
and there was an eternal twilight,
an obfuscation of faces, a crucial bewilderment.
If servants were known as she was known, would not
their lives appear more monstrous than hers
and terribly extrahuman, so she would ask, talking half
in her enchanted sleep, often when there was no one present
but the dream of who was not.
Heavily laden with jewels as a Greek corpse,
my mother, she who had retired from the brutal world, whose
eyes were shielded against the vulgar sunlight,
slept for tideless years which were her vast excitement,
surrounding herself with a world of dreams,
visions, phantoms, her bedroom as filled with visitors
as the Grand Central Station, some from the shores of Hades,
voices of the dead, faded movie stars of the silent flicker
films, imaginary telephone operators plugging
in an imaginary switchboards, spirits like long-nosed bird
dogs, drowned pearl divers, old kings, old queens, figures
older than Oedipus or Troy, New England spinsters with faces
checkered like chessboards, jockeys riding the skeletons
of dead horses, angelic birds.
Her sleep was a form of watchful, wide-eyed
wakefulness.
Her wakefulness was a form of sleep.
Nothing would have amazed her so much
as nothing, the complete deprivation, the absence
of being, for that was something, too,
and always present in her eyes, as familiar to her as human
frailty.
She hovered for years between life and suspended death,
enjoying both, her eyes refulgently shining,
her eyes opened at times when she profoundly slept,
one cheek always toward the shadow, her dark hair arranged
in such a way that this cheek was always concealed.
It was because of this shadowed cheek
that she had gone to bed in the first place
so many years ago, because of a blemish,
a stain, a birthmark which was invisible to others
and which, besides, was always covered with fine white rice
powder, shadowed even then, she standing
only for the shadow fell.
Now that she was always apparently in the bloom of some
strange extension of health, though she was yet the eternal
invalid, the horizontal person, one whose heart,
as she believed, was not centralized but scattered
through every nerve cell, shining like sourcless
starlight, lying still in a sumptuous bed,
carved with faceless dolphins and cherubim and kingly faces
and heraldic devices, a box of sweets always within her reach,
numberless pearls running through her ivory-colored
fingers, a white satin coverlet covering her to the waist,
her shoulders swathed in gauze and velvet and delicate
cascades of ancient lace, she believed that she had died
in her youth and was yet alive, that there were two selves--
the dead, the living--
that though she lay still this beautiful corpse, or effigy,
upon a marble sarcophagus, this was the living being,
this with the bright luminous eyes,
the distracting visions, the endless stream
of imaginary company, of fawns crowned with flowers,
men who were birds, women whose heads were turrets,
that the one who was dead was walking, walking by the sea,
or riding a white horse through endless surf.