{"id":20,"date":"2015-04-21T21:28:25","date_gmt":"2015-04-21T21:28:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mariannehauser.com\/?p=20"},"modified":"2015-04-21T21:29:38","modified_gmt":"2015-04-21T21:29:38","slug":"the-angel-in-the-forest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mariannehauser.com\/?p=20","title":{"rendered":"THE ANGEL IN THE FOREST"},"content":{"rendered":"

MARIANNE HAUSER’S 1946 REVIEW OF MARGUERITE YOUNG’S
\nANGEL IN THE FOREST<\/em>
\nFirst published in the Sewanee Review, vol. 54, no. 2, Spring 1946.\u00a0 Copyright 1946, 1974 by the University of the South.\u00a0 Reprinted with the permission of the editor.
\n\"030\"<\/a>THE DUAL INTENTION<\/strong><\/em>
\nBY\u00a0 MARIANNE HAUSER
\nIn Angel<\/i> in<\/i> the<\/i> Forest,<\/i> Marguerite Young has found a strikingly regional subject matter, one transcending regionalism, to express both her wit and fantasy to the fullest, to illuminate the American scene with vision. Her region is nearly that of, though it purports to be concerned preeminently with the Indiana corn field and the cultural factors diversely at play there, the lost Atlantis, the city of Campanella, other\u00a0 marvelous\u00a0 matters.\u00a0 The dual\u00a0 intention,\u00a0 reality\u00a0 and\u00a0 unreality, is made clear from the first page-when you cross the Wabash to that land by a “creaking ferry,” the other passengers being only two blind mules.\u00a0\u00a0 Here, myth extends its many branches like an octopus, along with the filling station, along with hollyhocks and “spinsters numerous as hollyhocks.”\u00a0\u00a0 The subtitle, A<\/i> Fai<\/i>r<\/i>y\u00a0<\/i> Tale<\/i> o<\/i>f<\/i>\u00a0<\/i> Two<\/i> Uto<\/i>pias,<\/i>\u00a0<\/i> is thus a meaningful indication of surrealistic\u00a0 and\u00a0 realistic\u00a0 events\u00a0 in a\u00a0 pat\u00ad tern of infinite motion.\u00a0 New\u00a0 Harmony,\u00a0 Indiana\u00a0 village,\u00a0 laboratory, and nameless graveyard of man’s aspiration\u00a0 for the ideal\u00a0 happiness, both social and individual, both of heaven and earth, becomes, under Miss Young’s eyes, the one gloomy, the other prismatic, a spectacle of the world at large, contradictory as the human soul, even more contradictory, since it takes in harsh aspects other than the soul-for instance,\u00a0 the climate,\u00a0 its\u00a0 extremes\u00a0 of\u00a0 hot\u00a0 and\u00a0 cold.\u00a0 A\u00a0 view of\u00a0 life as homely as that of James Whitcomb Riley, Hoosier poet, is combined with a view of life as unhomely as that of Swedenborg or Bishop Berkeley of Cloyne, John Locke’s mind, born into the world as a blank page-here frequently discussed-takes on the wild, eccentric coloration of E. T. A. Hoffmann, German fairy tale writer. There are all kinds of conspiracies going on within a text which escapes its boundaries.<\/p>\n

“What dream among dreams,” Marguerite\u00a0 Young asks, “is reality ?” Such a question sets the key for the entire procedure.<\/p>\n

\"032\"<\/a>At the\u00a0 beginning\u00a0 of\u00a0 the\u00a0 last\u00a0 century,\u00a0 two\u00a0 divers\u00a0 dreams,\u00a0 ancient in origin, converged on the banks of the Wabash far away,\u00a0 Father Rapp’s golden New Jerusalem, a city foursquare as measured by the burnished reed-both Biblical\u00a0 reed\u00a0 and\u00a0 Jimson\u00a0 weed\u00a0 which\u00a0 grow today in a still unlegislated country; and Robert Owen’s equally unrealizable\u00a0 rectangular community of reason.\u00a0 Father Rapp, founder of the\u00a0 first Utopia,\u00a0 a\u00a0 Scriptural\u00a0 communism,\u00a0 promised\u00a0 bliss\u00a0 eternal in heaven, “when this green earth should be destroyed by violence, by poisonous hailstones.” Robert Owen, his successor, founder of the second Utopia in a village deserted by the Rappites, made the more difficult promise of bliss eternal on earth, which paradoxically enough was very gray in his era, though he held it to be indestructible. For Father Rapp, the earth was in its springtime–for Robert\u00a0 Owen,\u00a0 the earth was in its autumn.\u00a0 The Owenites had not even enough\u00a0 energy to harvest the hops in that field where, so short a time back, the angel Gabriel had promised that men should be a “confluence of bright sunbeams.” The Owenites were easily discouraged, having\u00a0 no\u00a0 angel. Father Rapp, long-bearded patriarch from cloudy Wurtemberg, a businessman par<\/i> excellence,<\/i> both “mystic and murderer,” planned for his not-too-distant heaven by means of hard labor, the whiskey trade, strictly\u00a0 enforced\u00a0 celibacy\u00a0 on\u00a0 all\u00a0 but\u00a0 pigs,\u00a0 sheep,\u00a0 goats,\u00a0 the\u00a0 animal kingdom (on which celibacy Lord Byron watching from afar, wrote a caustic\u00a0 canto,\u00a0 “Don\u00a0 Juan”).\u00a0 Robert\u00a0 Owen,\u00a0\u00a0 father\u00a0\u00a0 of\u00a0\u00a0 the\u00a0\u00a0 British labor movement and many societies for the real advancement of\u00a0 the human race, visualized an Eden of\u00a0 Children, such as he had established at\u00a0 New\u00a0 Lanark\u00a0 cotton\u00a0 mills,\u00a0 shorter\u00a0 and\u00a0 shorter\u00a0 working\u00a0 hours, mental independence, a\u00a0 triumph\u00a0 over\u00a0 all\u00a0 mythologies.\u00a0 The\u00a0 Devil (perhaps in league with the shades of Father Rapp and company ) was preparing “a hole deep in the polar ice to swallow Robert Owen’s soul,” according to one of the many popular\u00a0 rhymes\u00a0 on\u00a0 the\u00a0 subject\u00a0 of Elysium.<\/p>\n

\"sewanee.angel\"<\/a>Both\u00a0 Utopias\u00a0 failed\u00a0 dismally–Rapp’s\u00a0 being\u00a0 a\u00a0 financial\u00a0 success\u00a0 but a spiritual loss, Robert Owen’s being a financial loss\u00a0 though,\u00a0 in the last analysis, perhaps not a spiritual loss. The\u00a0 paradox\u00a0 suggests\u00a0 a poem of Browning’s. At any rate, the exodus of the Rappites was followed by the disintegration of the Owenite settlement before it was hardly established in what was perhaps “a fatal atmosphere.” For instance, the germs of malaria had already been released. Our heroes are not, in fact, Rapp and Owen-but populations, inclusive of the Rappite hens and roosters who dwelt outside Utopia, inclusive of the community of drunks which built its citadel at the gates of Owenite Utopia, inclusive even of “the little goat who, in 1940, cried and cried with its fleece caught on a thorn bough.” All that remained\u00a0 of\u00a0 New Harmony, in 1940, was human nature and the spectre of two enchanting dreams which, Jehovah’s and Rousseau’s, could not pass away. An angel’s footprints in stone, the maze where the Rappites had wandered, the black locust trees which the Rappites had left standing as their most macabre monument.\u00a0 Of the\u00a0 Owenites,\u00a0 fewer\u00a0 relics, fewer monuments, since their contribution to society had to do with legislation and government in all nations. Of the Owenites, only the golden rain trees which were to cast their shadows over “a new moral world,” when there should be\u00a0 neither\u00a0 crime\u00a0 nor\u00a0 punishment-\u00a0 not one\u00a0 sentient\u00a0 creature\u00a0 crying.\u00a0 “Utopias\u00a0 of\u00a0 the\u00a0 past\u00a0 seemed,\u00a0 in\u00a0 spite of their shade trees, not so tangible, finally, as Miss Hobbie and Miss Duckie, old sisters carrying their\u00a0 feather\u00a0 pillows\u00a0 to\u00a0 the\u00a0 show where the seats were hard to set on-sneaking in to see Clark Gable. All mankind seemed not so real as one lonely, frostbitten\u00a0 character, like the man who died with his feet in the ashes of\u00a0 the cold\u00a0 stove last winter, or was it winter before last ?” People were still betting on imaginary\u00a0 horses-like\u00a0 those\u00a0 at\u00a0 the\u00a0 race\u00a0 track\u00a0\u00a0 at\u00a0 Dade\u00a0 Park,\u00a0 like those\u00a0 of\u00a0 the\u00a0 Apocalypse,\u00a0 too. Roosevelt\u00a0 was\u00a0 a\u00a0 white\u00a0 man\u00a0 riding\u00a0 on a\u00a0 white\u00a0 horse.\u00a0 Hitler\u00a0 was\u00a0 a\u00a0 brown\u00a0 man\u00a0 riding\u00a0 on\u00a0 a\u00a0 brown\u00a0 horse.<\/p>\n

\"038\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In fact, the phantasmagoria\u00a0 of\u00a0 life persisted, above and beyond the crystalizations of\u00a0 lost Utopias.<\/p>\n

\"040\"<\/a>Marguerite Young does not relate the dilemma of two Utopias\u00a0 for the sake of an easy maxim. Life is viewed in its irrational diversity, and no judgment is passed. The narrator of an epic, cosmic and psychic, she speaks and sings her tale, words and visions rising and falling with the rhythm of life, which has,\u00a0 she implies, more agents, seen and unseen, than can be mentioned in even this spacious contest. We must consider, for example, in\u00a0 considering\u00a0\u00a0 New\u00a0 Harmony\u00ad whether the whale swallowed Jonah or Jonah swallowed the whale-the effects of such translucent matter on the present fluctuation of Wall Street. We must consider the woman “who buried her baby, no bigger than her hand, in a hollow tree stump, filled with old cocoons and autumn leaves.” ‘When she came\u00a0 back\u00a0 next\u00a0 spring, they\u00a0 all\u00a0 were gone. From the shadows who people\u00a0 New\u00a0 Harmony\u00a0 in\u00a0 1940, from “the walking dead,” rise, by subtle, implicit innuendo, the living shapes and voices of a still persistent past, bevies of kings, emperors, clowns, cotton lords, cotton workers. Human progress is shown in\u00a0 many shapes, through Father Rapp’s golden rose\u00a0 of\u00a0 Micah,\u00a0 to be\u00a0 enjoyed only by the dead, through Robert Owen’s toy pyramids which rep\u00ad resented, he said, the edifice of human society at that date, his toy blocks which represented human society when it should be conducted according to the light of reason only. “Alas, however, for the best of plans! We are all, finally, perhaps the best of us, mistaken human beings, like our human life, which\u00a0 may\u00a0 be\u00a0 another\u00a0 mistake,\u00a0 due to the aboriginal whirlwind.” Father Rapp spent his old age as a million\u00ad aire growing peach trees.\u00a0 Robert Owen\u00a0 spent\u00a0 his\u00a0 old\u00a0 age discoursing with those spirit voices whose existence he had previously denied, in arguments\u00a0 with\u00a0 Coleridge at\u00a0 Manchester.<\/p>\n

\"iowa\"<\/a>The level of\u00a0 perpetual\u00a0 change is\u00a0 expressed\u00a0 in\u00a0 Indiana’s\u00a0 shifting landscape, one of many symbols.\u00a0 “For thousands of years, what is now the state of Indiana was a vast plain of granitic rock covered by a deep, salt, tideless sea.”\u00a0 When man arises at last, he is “already old and corrupt, like the earth before him-a creature with a history.” There was “never a first dawn”-“never a pristine Eden but that where the ants performed their marriage flight and lost their wings”-a state\u00adment which profoundly expresses the basic conception of the cost of life.In juxtaposition\u00a0 with the lost sea of Indiana, we witness moments no less ghostly, drawn from the\u00a0 largesse\u00a0 of\u00a0 time\u00a0 and\u00a0 space: old, deaf, blind, dreaming George III, playing a harpsichord\u00a0 or rather a series of\u00a0\u00a0 harpsichords–or\u00a0 barking\u00a0 like\u00a0 a\u00a0 mad\u00a0 dog\u00a0 at\u00a0 Windsor; the unacknowledged death of Anne Bronte in a seaside hotel; the Pope of Rome dressed as the Pope’s valet and become, by this shift in costume, God’s truest representative on earth ; the fat Emperor of Russia, entertaining “a cancerous tutor or a ballet\u00a0 dancer\u00a0 from\u00a0 an\u00ad other sphere,” Abraham Lincoln, Queen Victoria, Frances Wright, Audubon, Raffinesque, John Quincy Ada ms, Coleridge, Shelley, many other notables ; indeed, many disrelated\u00a0 people\u00a0 and events drawn into a complex system which seems, in each instant, unity.<\/p>\n

\"a<\/a>Values fluctuate; effects may precede cause; there is the fact\u00a0 of chaos, negative and positive. There is\u00a0 always\u00a0 a\u00a0 question\u00a0 mark\u00a0 and what Margueri te Young calls “a joker in the philosophic pack.” She does not see life as, in fact, a given system. Yet by\u00a0 doubting each accepted value, each norm, each convention, by\u00a0 examining the fragments and splinters, she creates out of a manifold diversity of impressions and artistic unity, a roundness of strange beauty, a most distinguished work of art. Her vision is, for all its strangeness, not willfully solipsistic, the refuge of an unfounded individualism. As evidenced by her poetry, l<\/i>mm<\/i>oderate<\/i> Fable,<\/i> a fable moderate because it omits narcissism, her thinking has been conditioned by philosophers\u00ad Democritus, for example, Locke, William James, many others to whom she makes, indeed, a constant though unobtrusive reference. Fewer idealists than skeptics. She has humanized,\u00a0 however,\u00a0 the\u00a0 unhuman fable.\u00a0 What\u00a0 may\u00a0 in\u00a0 Angel\u00a0<\/i> in<\/i> the<\/i> Forest\u00a0<\/i> appear\u00a0 to the\u00a0 unschooled or biased reader a singular display of mental acrobatics for their own sake must seem, to the schooled, the generous, the end-result\u00a0 of amoral\u00a0 mental\u00a0 discipline.\u00a0\u00a0 Only an artist of her stature can\u00a0 afford to clothe her keen, realistic, nudist deductions in the glittering brocades of such a baroque, unreal, out-of-this-world fantasy. She philosophizes with her tongue in her cheek.<\/p>\n

\"MY.1\"<\/a>To combine cold, unsentimental thinking with quick, lively tragi\u00adcomedy, the commonplace like the old outhouse with beautifully mad imagery like “the asexual angel Gabriel in a hop field”-therein lies the genius of the adventuresome performance. The book is, as so many critics have pointed out, “wild,” perhaps because made up of “wild” data, angels, drunks. The writing seems free of literary scheming, too, as if the writer needed no sly skill.\u00a0 Readers looking for neatly swept sidewalks, road signs, traffic lights, will find themselves engulfed in a precolonial wilderness, a fertile abundance of many-faced trees and flowers-in the hollow of every tree, a man, on every treetop, an angel. If there is in Miss Young’s book\u00a0 a\u00a0 “too\u00ad much,” as the more\u00a0 literal\u00a0 minded\u00a0 may\u00a0 argue,\u00a0 it\u00a0 is\u00a0 the\u00a0 “too-much” of the Renaissance imagination which delighted in excesses, the “too\u00ad much” of a modernist Rabelais,\u00a0 a John Webster. The writing, from first to last, shows a dynamic force, stronger than the neat rules of literary perfection. ‘It is a piece of banal, sacred life, not anemic. (And some of our most gifted writers suffer from anemia, perhaps because they have made the\u00a0 mistake\u00a0 of\u00a0 worshiping\u00a0 perfection,\u00a0 the one thing never worshiped by Marguerite Young, who writes: “Our perfection\u00a0 is\u00a0 our\u00a0 death.”)<\/p>\n

\"036\"<\/a>It is just because of its unusual range of experience that Angel in<\/i> the<\/i> Forest<\/i> may appeal to many diverse readers as Utopia, as mock Biblical, as Americana, as essay on human character. The book is too vivacious to be written down as “rare,” for the few only.\u00a0 Nothing is here esoteric or invented for the sake of invention.\u00a0 Every figure is human or the project of the human imagination, of the greatest con\u00ad sequence in ordinary life, partaking, too, of that life. As to the angel Gabriel, for example (and he is another barefoot boy on Wall Street)-<\/p>\n

Evolved out of ether and air, tears and sorrow, an angel stood in the hop field. He was big, massive, corpulent. He carried a rainbow on his back . . . . He was taller than an oak full grown, and of a diameter exceeding the oak, the beech, the sassafras. . . . He was grass and fire and homely as an old shoe. He was a farmer with a golden book in his hand. . . . His voice was like the river Wabash, loud and wild, rolling between the buff-colored hills.<\/p>\n

\"Dark<\/a>
Dark Dominion Author Photo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Perhaps Miss Young agrees, to some extent, with the crucial angel she despises. Like Voltaire in Candide,<\/i> like Dr. Johnson in Rasselas<\/i>,<\/i> she affirms that this is not the best of all possible worlds, that there is no perfect happiness attainable.\u00a0\u00a0 Yet even this formula fails-for it is Shelley’s bright hair, the ghost of Shelley, Robert Owen’s friend, who rides in the wind with Robert Owen on his last journey of man’s redemption from crime and punishment. Perhaps the drama is still going on?<\/p>\n

Indeed, it is a very grim fairy tale Marguerite Young has written\u00ad grim and glorious.<\/p>\n

ANGEL IN THE\u00a0 FOREST:\u00a0 A\u00a0 FAIRY TALE\u00a0 OF\u00a0 TWO UTOPIAS.
\nBy Marguerite Young.
\nReynal and\u00a0 Hitchcock.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 313 pages.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 1945.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 $3.00.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MARIANNE HAUSER’S 1946 REVIEW OF MARGUERITE YOUNG’S ANGEL IN THE FOREST First published in the Sewanee Review, vol. 54, no. 2, Spring 1946.\u00a0 Copyright 1946, 1974 by the University of the South.\u00a0 Reprinted with the permission of the editor. THE DUAL INTENTION BY\u00a0 MARIANNE HAUSER In Angel in the Forest, Marguerite Young has found a … Continue reading THE ANGEL IN THE FOREST<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[12,3,5,13],"class_list":["post-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marianne-hausers-reviews","tag-angel-in-the-forest","tag-dark-dominion","tag-marguerite-young","tag-sewanee-review"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p64Cqc-k","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mariannehauser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mariannehauser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mariannehauser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mariannehauser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mariannehauser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.mariannehauser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35,"href":"https:\/\/www.mariannehauser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions\/35"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mariannehauser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mariannehauser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mariannehauser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}