THE WRITER OF TWO COLLECTIONS of poetry, one collection of essays and stories, one massy novel (the recently reissued Miss MacIntosh, My Darling), and one unfinished biography of the turn-of-the-century socialist politician Eugene V. Debs, Marguerite Young (1908–1995) was born near New Harmony, Indiana, the site of two failed utopian communes that would become life-long preoccupations. Now enjoying a minor renaissance, Young’s fables of communal enchantment and disenchantment rhyme with the struggles of the contemporary left to articulate a sufficiently ambitious program of transformation. This is especially true of her most elegant tragicomedy of political imagination, Angel in the Forest, a history of the rise and fall of the two dreaming collectives of New Harmony. Young’s study inclines toward utopia in search of a viable realism.
How to mount a ruthless criticism of everything existing that preserves visions of social potential? Young makes it a problem of style. She mythologizes with one hand and demystifies with the other, building up intricate patterns of imagery and metaphor, puncturing them with irony as soon as they threaten to harden into romance. In this way, Angel in the Forest responds, tacitly, to the enervated political landscape of the 1940s in which it was written. Although concentrated on nineteenth-century utopianism, the book echoes twentieth-century disaffection in the wake of wartime suspension of the Red Decade’s optimistic solidarities. Decline succeeds decline in New Harmony: first comes the settlement of the disciples of the German Father Rapp, who believe they’ve followed an angel to New Harmony. After this city on a hill dwindles, Robert Owen and his followers establish a secular—but no less theological—community in the same location, dedicated to Owen’s scientific socialism, which Marx and Engels had denounced as idealism ungrounded in material realities. With humor, sans mercy, Young anatomizes how individual utopias die, leaving utopian desire to live on. Although skilled in practical economic management, the Rappites proscribe all sexual congress, which foments discontent and diminishes them to nothing. Over the course of a decade, stunning ignorance about farming and engineering, joined to unimaginative organization of labor—productive and reproductive—ensures the Owenite collapse.
Both communities, Young points out, eked out livelihoods with racist, patriarchal brutality on stolen land. Angel in the Forest regards these fatal experiments with satire and wistful romanticism—the latter reserved more for the Owenites than the Rappites and more for the whimsical character of Robert Owen than his works. Of Owen’s last words, “relief has come,” Young comments, “who fails to love this man fails to love humanity.” Dwelling on Owen’s starry-eyed commitment to a rational heaven on Earth, his blind faith in a capacious, human goodness, Young asks how attachment to utopia works when our ways of attaching, like our objects—ideas, things, other people—are profoundly flawed.
Perhaps all descriptions of the utopian impulse draw suffering and sustenance from the attempt to stay loyal to an unsatisfying reality. In The Romance of American Communism, Vivian Gornick compares American communist ardor to Paris’s passion for Helen in the Iliad: “It is all light and heat of such a high order that it is as though all other forms of love he has ever known become dim and cold in memory. . . . In time, Helen herself—the object, the cause, the origin of the hungry, burning need—becomes less real than the need itself.” This form of grand passion—personal or political—begins with fantasmatic desire for an ideal that inevitably dissolves under reality’s pressures.
Utopia, like any lover’s dream, is a story about the people we long to be, tenable only so long as the day after the revolution never arrives with evidence that even though everything is different, some things never change. When one love flames out, the lover may strive to preserve the old ideal from hope that the vessel—and not the fantasy—was lethally unsound, which allows desire to survive its failures. Like this, unobtainable utopia can become an end in itself. But, like eros, utopia promises to draw you out of yourself, toward a life that breaks with the deadening hum of ordinary crisis. Desire, like its enemy, disenchantment, can be easy to feel and impossible to bear for very long. The first offers hope that life need not be “like this,” the second defends us when life proves itself—again, heartlessly—“like this.” Disentangling the will to desire from the will to disenchantment, Young contends, is neither possible nor profitable.
Consider her version of the ostensibly unromantic American Midwest—half myth, half lampoon:
Our Lady of the Rappites, though nonexistent, would have been a colorful character indeed.
A bird’s eye view of a community in New Harmony, Indiana, United States, as proposed by Robert Owen. Engraving by F. Bate, London 1838. Image: Wikicommons/PD-US-expired.
Her face, the face of an American male squatter. Her feet, the feet of a blacksmithing asexual angel. Around her neck, a string of pearls as big as goose eggs, to indicate the New Jerusalem and New Orleans . . . Her pockets, variously concealed, are filled with billiard balls, mortgages, horseshoes, fables, marked cards, chunks of coal, false premises, diamonds, inductive leaps, sleeping powders, dualism, a wheat field, lost causes, political campaigns, knitting needles, slogans, gold nuggets, manna, etc. Withal she is not weighted down but is the palest abstraction deducible from herself, a realist who has been stung by bumblebees and who fights on both sides of every war, providing ammunition from a safe distance.
Young imagines “Our Lady of the Rappites” as an expression of the conflicts of severe, Protestant theology mingled with the spirit of capitalism. In Our Lady, elements of the workaday and the fabulous constellate without cohering. This embattled realism, struggling to integrate actuality and fantasy, maps onto Young’s: Our Lady’s pearls are as strict as the New Jerusalem and sensuous as New Orleans. Her coal and diamonds, opposite in symbolism, can’t be disentangled from their commodity functions. Bee-stung, mythic realists hedge their bets, peddling, at their most cynical, false premises and manna without distinction. But mythic realism also exposes the irresolvable contraries of reality’s debts to fantasy (a sadder, wiser accomplishment), which can’t be—yet must be—adjudicated. No wheat fields or mortgages without golden roses and lost causes, no transcendent syntheses of material and ideal.
Like Herman Melville, another mythic realist, Young deploys medieval and early modern literary strategies and allusions to Thomas More, Shakespeare, Donne, and Chaucer, references that trouble the relationship between the fantastical and the possible. My favorite, a pastiche of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel and its marvelous archipelago: “Alas, how many islands this world contains,” goes Young’s version, which describes “an island ruled by the Goddess of Co-operation, half woman, half fish, who sits combing lice as big as raspberries out of her long green hair, as she tells of the wonders of materialistic socialism.” Is materialistic socialism as fanciful as a speechifying mermaid or as communicable as lice? The image asks for a verdict, but Young suggests certainty would mean ignorance of the history of social change, which is also a history of the improbable. Her turn to poetics centuries removed from the twentieth isn’t mere whimsy. For her, the contradictions of utopian desire require euphuistic ambiguity. Named for John Lyly’s Euphues, a sixteenth-century prose romance known for its opulent rhetoric, “euphuism” means both a modish exercise of wit—and excessively mannered writing. Young, who wrote a master’s thesis on Lyly, euphuizes in both senses. Angel in the Forest revels equally in vulgarity and acuity, since the mythic realist’s art can dispense with neither.
The most fantastical aspects of Angel in the Forest often hew most closely to life. In one sequence, Robert Dale Owen, the son of the Owenite founder, receives a stranger called the “Page of Nature.” All in green, the visitor wears a string of onions around his neck and carries reams of green paper on which “nature’s secrets were written in black ink, although by right it, too, should have been green.” This surreal scene actually paraphrases Robert Dale Owen’s autobiography. Young’s 1940 conversation with a resident of New Harmony, the last “true Owenite,” also seems too mythic to be anything but real. “Dust of pollen in his beard . . . mad as King Lear in a dry season,” the last true Owenite tells Young he assisted an undertaker as a boy; he could prepare corpses for burial in every way but one: “he didn’t have a license to cut the jugular.” At book’s end, he offers its only glimpse of Marx, “sitting in the British museum . . . under the bust of Queen Anne.” The last true Owenite continues: Robert Owen “was like me. He loved the world.” But Robert Owen “didn’t have a license. Marx cut the jugular.” Perhaps these are the limits of mythic realism. It can’t truly bind utopia to reality; it has no license; someone else has to cut the jugular. Love of the world can become so great it betrays its object, the world.
In the living room of her Greenwich Village apartment, Young kept a diorama of her living room, recapitulated down to the red walls and chandeliers. When she was dying, her niece, Daphne Nowling, took Young back to Indianapolis, duplicating there, for her aunt’s comfort, the Bleecker Street apartment’s scarlet rooms. The diorama may have served as reference for the replica, though I’ve been unable to verify this. Nonetheless, it’s deeply moving that Young’s dedication to remaking the world in microcosm invited this utopian collaboration with her niece, moving to think no one was fooling anyone. Indianapolis wasn’t Greenwich Village. New Harmony was neither the New Jerusalem nor utopia. Still, utopia’s illusions belong to the unlicensed. To re-create this world as if it could be merely loved is a desecration. To re-create it as if it could be lived in entails love, but also a great many things love isn’t. Such acts of realism demand a hard-won allegiance to things as they are that never mistakes fidelity for affirmation, affirmation for the despotic command to love whatever is, because it is.
Rebecca Ariel Porte is a core faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
