In February 2010, Clark became the subject of a series of reports on msnbc.com, which said caretakers at her three residences had not seen her in decades, and that her palatial estates in Santa Barbara, California, and New Canaan, Connecticut, had lain empty throughout that time, although the houses and their extensive grounds were meticulously maintained by their staff.
The great, sea-blackened house with golden spires and cornices and towers peeled by the salt air, dark allees, hidden interiors, the empty drawing rooms where the hostess had not set foot for many years, as many drawing rooms as tideless years, the rooms too many for mortal use, chambers within chambers, the gilded, mirroring ballrooms where no one danced, the hangings of scaly gold and rain-stained velvet, the heathen monsters everywhere, the painted, clouded ceilings illuminated by partial apparitions of the gods, the silken, padded walls, the ropes of rusted bells, the angels and the cherubim and the immortal rose, the dream of heaven, the lily-breasted virgins sporting in fields of asphodel, the water-gurgling gargoyles or those coated by dust, the interior and exterior fountains, the broken marble statues in ruined gardens sloping towards the sea, the disc throwers, the fat cupids, the thin psyches with flowing curls, the mute Apollo Belvedere, the king's horsemen, the life-sized chessmen seeming to move against the moving clouds that moved above the moving waters, the sea light lighting their wooden eyes, the seagulls perched like drifts of snow upon their heads.
Mr. Spitzer . . . would lean forward to cover my mother's dimpled foot with a purple drapery . . .
With thunders loud and terrible: so Milton's shadow fell
Precipitant loud thund'ring into the Sea of Time & Space.
Then first I saw him in the Zenith as a falling star,
Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift :
And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, enter'd there,
Miss Macintosh... weighs somewhat less than half a gallon of water and a little less than somewhat less than a half a gallon of oil--identical volumes of different liquids of varying weights.Fuchs goes on to claim that
The conversion of text to page numbers, page numbers to pounds, pounds to gallons, and gallons to corresponding volumes of water and oil is an appropriate start for examining the structure and stylistics of MM, a novel in which things appear in equivalent or corresponding forms.Because, to complete the chain of thought:
Oil mixed in water will diffuse, divide into smaller parts, and the particles will suspend in the liquid before they rise to the surface.
At once a detailed map of the mind and heart of a sensitive, intelligent, loving woman, and a dazzling meditation on the inexorable forces of history and destiny, Pacific Transport is a novel that sends one into literature's Hall of Fame in search of comparable experiences with the printed word. In its focus on woman's sensibility and its portrayal of human thought processes, it is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway; in the breadth and depth of its observations on the tide of human affairs and and its comprehensiveness, it is the fictional equal of Edmund Wilson's magnificent exercise in the philosophy of history, To the Finland Station. It is possible to go on and on with a list of giants whose work is in some degree echoed by Pacific Transport, but only at the cost of minimizing author Marguerite Young's prodigious originality and ingenuity.
Her protagonist, a woman of middle years named Aimee, is portrayed from within and without at various stops along a journey with her husband Henry, a brilliant physician. In the manner of a picaresque novel, the places and people encountered, and the ideas, memories, hopes, and fears they inspire in Aimee are portrayed with great insight and virtuosity. Aimee looks back – into her own past as a newspaper reporter, and into the American nation's historical and artistic past – and ahead – up to the Moon, across the Pacific to China – to her own, and our, destiny.
Brilliant in both conception and execution, Marguerite Young's Pacific Transport is a Bicentennial book that will be pertinent at the time of the Tricentennial.
dan visel said... Ed Park said... Will said... Ed Park said... Will said... Levi Stahl said...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 at 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.
The red floor and the many angels, seen and unseen, do not stick in my memory as vividly as the two penguins, stuffed and preserved under a glass bell, which she told me she had had for years. She had never owned a television set; when Nixon and Kennedy were running for the presidency, a friend gave her money to buy a television set so that she could watch their debates. Instead, she bought the penguins and named them for the candidates, who had debated without her attentions.
Her dress of sleazy silk was bright burned orange painted with black sail-boats sailing over purple trees and red football players playing over steeples and white skiers skiing over sail-boats cascading to the hem and locked acrobats, the entire field of outdoor sports, it seemed, being on her body, for her scarf was painted with spidery tennis players and tennis nets and ice-skaters skating on silver ponds and red polo riders riding red horses, and there were little footballs hanging from her charm bracelets, tennis rackets and ice-skates and gold clubs and numerous other trophies, some of field and stream, satin fishes running around the hem of her chiffon petticoat edged with yellow lace, butterflies embroidered upon the knees of her thin silk stockings, and her skirts came up high above her knees, higher when she moved, showing her yellow satin garters and pairs of stuffed red valentine hearts dangling from ribbons and faces which were painted powder puffs, and the coat seemed shrunken or a size too small like something she might have worn in a remote youth. (pp. 2–3)
In the beam of our anarchic head lights which barely cut through mist and darkness, there stood, by the side of the road, a tall man with a child perched on his lean shoulders, a double-headed man, staring at nothingness or beyond it. We were the intruders upon this plain of silence., and he shook his fist, listlessly, perhaps figuring the danger of walking on this road which now, suddenly turning, seemed to go back the way it had gone before. There was now no landscape.
The bus-driver was whistling, perhaps in anticipation of his wife, who would be a woman with ample breasts, those of a realized maturity.I read (past tense) that sentence as a future -- his wife whom he would someday find and marry. But the next sentence recasts it into a subjunctive (or conditional? grammar mavens?) in the present: the narrator imagines him as currently having a wife, who must perforce be bodacious. I go back to re-read and find again that word "anticipation," which threw me so to speak into the future, but the driver may merely be looking forward to getting home to his extant wife. In English, "would be" seems to allow for both. It's a beautiful oscillation of future and fictional present with which to start a novel.
