She has come to the Midwest to search for her childhood nursemaid, Miss MacIntosh, a sensible Iowan whom Vera calls her “steersman,” as she was the sole adult in her rather unusual, aristocratic upbringing who offered her practical guidance. Her name can be read literally: she is a young woman whose most cherished truths have recently been upturned. The third passenger is Vera Cartwheel, the novel’s protagonist and narrator.
Two of the passengers, a young couple, doze through the chaos, the girl pregnant and reciting somniloquies about the mysteries of birth and death. He is careening through Indiana’s Wabash Valley, a landscape that is dark and covered in mist, drinking openly from a bottle of whiskey and calling aloud upon the angel Gabriel. Miss MacIntosh begins with a bus that has gotten off its track, though it’s unclear what species of madness has overtaken its driver. When questioned by journalists, he answered that he’d been overcome by a “spring-time urge.” One March afternoon, a Bronx bus driver veered off his daily route and continued south until he reached Florida. In 1945, a chicken in Colorado allegedly lived for eighteen months after its head was cut off, and a Los Angeles woman gave birth to a healthy child she had gestated for over a year. Its plots, if they can be called plots, are inspired not by the headlines of that era but the stories one might have encountered in the back of the regional dailies, dispatches from a more uncanny America that lurked on the margins of postwar optimism. Its characters seem to exist in a holding chamber that stands outside of history, an imaginative space that has absorbed the general atmosphere of the 20th century, its aroma, its texture, but none of its content. None of these events appear in the novel, which is not interested in cultural or political landmarks, or, for that matter, linear time. She was working on Miss MacIntosh at the time of Jackie Robinson’s first game, and throughout the spring of the McCarthy hearings, and the winter the Beatles first arrived in the US. She wrote at Yaddo, where she spent summer evenings drinking with Truman Capote and Carson McCullers and running wild through the moonlit rose garden.
She wrote in New York, from a cramped Greenwich Village apartment filled with dolls, carved angels, and an antique carousel horse. She wrote in Iowa City, where she taught creative writing and often unnerved her students by pausing to invite Henry James or Emily Dickinson into the classroom. She began the novel in 1945, in the shadow of Hiroshima, and proceeded for the next two decades to work on it each day, putting in a reliable eight hours. Marguerite Young spent eighteen years of her life writing Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, the amount of time it requires to raise a child.
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