On Anniversaries and Miss Macintosh, My Darling

"Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one illusion."

Jacobus Vrel. Woman at the Window. 1654.

From August 2023 to August 2024 I lived in Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries, a two volume, 1,700 page epic chronicling a year in the life of Gesine Cresspahl from August 1967 to August 1968. It is a year of recounting in which the story of her childhood in Germany during World War II and under Soviet occupation is related to her daughter Marie.

What makes up a year? Aside from the day to day trivialities of commuting, work, cooking, parenting, meeting with friends, there exists the foundation of history underlying it all. For Gesine, this history is present and inescapable. It presents itself through the questions of her daughter Marie, through The New York Times (lovingly referred to as Auntie Times) and, most disconcertingly, through the voices of the dead that speak to Gesine, voices that challenge, clarify, question, accuse, forgive, and explain.

In Anniversaries the present is already history. My local book club read a chapter a day, each corresponding to the calendar date. This pace makes of the book a space and time parallel to our own, where our own weekend trips are reflected in Marie’s beloved Saturday South Ferry days, where daily news reports of protests against the Vietnam war echo protests against the ongoing Palestinian genocide. Johnson, in writing a novel where history is tangibly present, invites for a complementary reading experience. To live each day of the year with Gesine and Marie is to acknowledge a relationship between life and art that reflects the relationship between past and present. New anniversaries are created in the process of observing old ones.

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Anniversaries, though at times arduous, promotes discussion. It calls for conversation about families, history, war, and legacy.

This past summer I read Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling alongside a group of online readers. I organized a group read because a 1,400+ page novel about a woman reckoning with her past, in search of her titular childhood nanny, all taking place on a bus ride and in the obscure depths of memory, calls for company. However, unlike Anniversaries, Miss Mac challenges discussion. Before one even begins to speak about it one can already hear Young’s duplicitous prose in their mind, questioning: is that what happened? Are you sure?

It is a book that exists between illusion and reality, toying with both until either one on its own ceases to have meaning. They must belong together. The force of Young’s prose is all-consuming. If there was a god of the Midwest its voice would likely sound like the one in which Miss Macintosh, My Darling is written.

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My partner has low blood sugar. It’s made her syncope worse lately. On elevator rides she shuts her eyes tight and blocks out the world. I always watch her in these moments. I imagine a caterpillar crawling into its cocoon. She either emerges with bright eyes and a smile of relief or she sways back into her body. My own is attuned to hers in these moments, prepared to grab her if she faints. It’s rare for a full on faint to occur, but memories of past faints live in me, come to the surface of my skin when she braces on an elevator, and when she sways the memory puts me on like a glove.

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What much of the recent discussion surrounding Miss Macintosh, My Darling fails to mention is that it is a book about trauma. A third of the way through the book Vera begins to prepare the reader for the events of the night of her fourteenth birthday. It takes a while to get there: the bedroom at night, Miss Macintosh bald and illuminated by moonlight, her haughty factuality gone, bathed in illusion. She rapes Vera that night. I put it bluntly because the prose does not—in this scene the confused nature of Vera’s voice becomes clear, why everything is questioned, why nothing is as it seems, why everything is suspect. The next morning, as the two sit at table for breakfast, Macintosh unleashes an endless deluge of facts, maddening in their monomania and irrelevancy. She gaslights Vera, and in doing so reveals her own façade of down to earth practicality to be a front, a gaslighting of the self by someone who cannot face the inexplicable within herself.

Miss Macintosh, My Darling seemingly speaks to everything there is to be spoken about, but the emotion and flavor of it all is grounded in this experience. It changes Vera, precipitates Macintosh’s departure and Vera’s future search for her. Like Ahab hunting the whale that stole his leg, Vera hunts her own white whale, one who took from her a stable mooring to reality.

Johnson and Young are both preoccupied by the illusion of a present. For Johnson, the present is a historical construction. Anniversaries is a sociological novel, only interested in individuality to the extent that it is constructed by outside factors. Miss Macintosh, My Darling explores the present through the tenuous relationship between consciousness and reality, through the limits of our perceptions to depict an accurate image of the world. It challenges the idea that there can be an accurate image of the world. It is a psychological novel so inward searching that it passes through the self into something else entirely.

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Sometime during the summer of 2020 I explored a tunnel running under the city of Indianapolis with two friends. I miss those friends, one of which fell out of touch, the other who betrayed us both. Despite the tunnel only being a few miles long, it felt as if we’d been walking for hours. It was pitch black, our phone flashlights revealing graffiti and a rusty substance that covered portions of the floor and walls around us. At one point we heard water rushing from somewhere, the sound of flooding. My friend looked into my eyes with a vision of animal terror. We ran as water trickled past our feet, until we realized the flood was not a flood but a trickle. Where did that water go that we heard rush by us?

We turned around halfway, before we could reach the other side.

It’s a simple memory. I don’t have much attached to it. But it exists in my mind as a slice of the present cut off from the timeline of my life. When I step into that memory and feel myself embodied again in the tunnel I am not myself. I exist in a vacuum separate from reality. I am a gaze in the dark.

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I am not going to talk about the ending of these novels, nor the experience of having read them, for this essay is concerned with living with them. These are novels of legacy that chart relationships between mothers and daughters, Anniversaries being written by a mother and Miss Macintosh, My Darling by a daughter. To live in novels concerned with legacy is to live a present embodied by the past. To read them over a year, or over a summer, is to create a space and time parallel to your own. Two parallel lines that meet in infinity—as distant and as near as memory.