While traveling this week, I am reposting another one from the archives: an essay on a late prose work by the late Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück. In particular, I explore how her new and earlier work share a fascination with libidinally charged hierarchical pairs.
This review originally appeared in the PN Review Volume 49 Number 5, May—June 2023, under the title “Sisterhood.” I encourage all my readers to subscribe to that excellent magazine.
Marigold and Rose is Louise Glück’s second book to appear since she won the Nobel Prize in October 2020 and her first to bear the designation ‘A Fiction’. Neither a novel nor a short story, it is identified in the publicity materials, plausibly enough, as a ‘fable’. That term has the advantage of having been favoured by Glück in the past: her Poems 1962–2012 contains five ‘Fables’ (not to mention an extensive set of ‘Parables’). Yet such poems are not ‘fables’ in the strict sense—that is, stories ‘in which animals substituted for people’, to adopt the description of the alphabet book that Marigold, one of the infant protagonists of Glück’s latest work, is spotted reading in its opening pages, and which her twin sister Rose, ‘a social being’, detests. Instead, Glück’s fables and parables are what we might call interpretive genres: short narratives, akin to dream, with an enigmatic significance. What then is the significance of Marigold and Rose?
Its subject is the infants’ first year. Its episodes include: sitting in the garden, learning to climb stairs, imagining their mother’s childhood, learning to use a cup and spoon, enduring the death of a grandmother and (by occasion) adults’ euphemism and lies, coming to apprehend Mother and Father as distinct people, celebrating a first birthday party. Beneath this changing surface, however, flows its genuine subject: the twins’ natures as individuals and how each is shaped or revealed by the other, and by the other’s relation to the world. That they cannot talk yet is no great obstacle. Marigold and Rose is, after all, also a pastoral—and not just because of its protagonists’ floral names. As much as any pastoral discussed by William Empson, its work is one of ‘putting the complex into the simple’. And, like many an eclogue, it centres on a contest—albeit a somewhat one-sided one. (Marigold, unlike Rose, is ‘writing a book’, despite the fact that she can’t yet read.)
‘When I was a small child’, Glück declared in her Nobel Lecture, ‘I staged a competition in my head, a contest to decide the greatest poem in the world. There were two finalists: Blake’s “The Little Black Boy” and Stephen Foster’s “Swanee River”.’ In the fall of 2020, this choice of objects—an antislavery poem of complex racial politics and a minstrel song of yearning for the Old South—was seen as a singularly poor one, though, of course, Glück did not present these first attachments as having been chosen, exactly. Blake’s poem was the winner, though Glück later ‘realized’ that the two poems had something in common, in that both featured ‘the solitary human voice, raised in lament and longing’.
Repulsion by ‘social’ life and its values is a constant in Glück’s writing. But her alternative to the ‘social’ is not the self in sublime isolation. Instead, she was drawn to ‘the poets in whose work I played, as the elected listener, a crucial role. Intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine.’ Her poetry is, as Helen Vendler once called it, ‘post-psychoanalytic’. Its arena is the family, scene of primordial attachments and conflicts. (Glück’s sister Tereze, herself a writer and a corporate executive, died in 2018; a third sister died in infancy.) If the Nobel prompted this least public of poets to articulate the value of the private in public terms, her latest work might seem like a strong reversion to the intimate. It would be truer, though, to see it as restaging, within the seemingly neutral sphere of infancy, an abiding conflict of values.
Coincidentally or not, Marigold and Rose is one of several recent works of prose fiction —think of books by Elena Ferrante, Yiyun Li and Sheila Heti, among others—to present a conflict between female protagonists who are typically close, often childhood, friends. Much as in the ‘agon’ Jonathan Baskin has identified in Heti’s work, one axis of conflict in Marigold and Rose is over how to interpret the agon itself. Do its alternatives represent a choice? Or are they, rather, irreducibly opposite natures? When Rose mentally exhorts Marigold to ‘swell the ranks’, she makes the typical assumption of the ‘social’ characters in these works, that non-participation is a choice. For the artists, however, it is an existential decision. Their only true choice is whether to espouse or betray their own calling.
When Heti’s novel Pure Colour (2022) asserts, fancifully, that different human types are born from different ‘eggs’, it signals its commitment to the artist’s view. The more ambiguous Marigold and Rose follows the principle of nomen est omen. ‘Rose was perennial’, we read (that is, singular, the cynosure of every eye), while ‘Marigold was annual’ (that is, multiple, nomadic, lacking in stable identity). Whether these names— presumably conferred by the sisters’ parents—are the makers or the revealers of their natures we are not told. What is certain is that the twins grow into them. Marigold’s multiplicity is tenacious.
Yet if the conflict in Marigold and Rose resonates with contemporary prose fiction, it also takes up Glück’s abiding interest in unbalanced pairs. The title poem of The Triumph of Achilles (1985) tells of the friendship between the Greek hero, ‘who was nearly a god’, and Patroclus, who ‘resembled him; they wore / the same armor’— and was hence, in a manner of speaking, his twin. ‘Always in these friendships’, the poem declared, ‘one serves the other, one is lesser than the other: / the hierarchy is always apparent.’ While the infant world of Marigold and Rose appears remote from Homeric epic, the distance might not be so great as is supposed—and not just because of the notorious petulance of the epic heroes. Who is to be the centre of attention, whose life will be held worthy of esteem, whose account of the world and of the mind is to have authority: such are the stakes in a struggle that reveals itself, increasingly, as an asymmetric one.1
To the world, the gregarious Rose appears triumphant, and Marigold herself at times feels her difference from her sister as a deficiency. And yet, a change is brewing. In the long run, the battle favours Marigold—and Rose knows it. Indeed, there is in Rose’s heart of hearts ‘a deep vein of humility, born, she later felt, of her love for her sister, a reverence slightly tinged with awe, as though to Rose Marigold was a kind of prophet or holy figure’. The qualification here—‘she later felt’—is typical of the book’s reluctance to offer authoritative pronouncements unmediated by the twins’ own perceptions. At the same time, it introduces a skeptical note, and one that is hardly more favourable to Rose than, one senses, her ‘reverence’ for her sister is, in the narrator’s eyes, creditable.
If this unrequited adoration, so unexpected in its reversal of the apparent pecking order of the sisters, recalls the ‘hierarchy’ of Achilles and Patroclus, it also—in its dramatic irony, its invitation to look behind Rose’s account of her own feelings—marks one of several moments in which Marigold and Rose recalls the problematic dyad in ‘The Little Black Boy’ of Blake. For many modern readers, Blake’s poem dramatizes a psychic injury stemming from (in this case racial) subordination; it shows how the self-consciousness of the member of the subjugated group can be warped by its reflection through the categories of the dominant. This is certainly how Glück reads the poem in her Nobel speech, and part of what makes it ‘heartbreaking and also deeply political’.
Yet Marigold and Rose, by forgoing social determinants, also forgoes the political charge. (When Rose asserts her own superior age and wisdom—she was born first—her facetious appeal to primogeniture falls on deaf ears.) The book vigorously affirms Marigold over her sister—which isn’t to say it does so without qualification or remainder. (Rose may be right, for instance, that she understands Marigold ‘much better than she understands me’, even if Rose barely understands Marigold at all.) Yet whom the book favours is never in doubt—least of all towards the end, when we find a startling intrusion of the narrator’s voice. In the last chapter, Rose, having greatly enjoyed the twins’ first birthday party, reflects that Marigold should end her book with it: ‘It would even, she thought to herself, make a nice ending. End on a bright note, she thought.’ The narrator then twists the knife: ‘as though that were a good or even a possible thing’.
But rejecting happy endings does not mean simply affirming the power of time. Within Marigold and Rose’s sprightly narrative of growth, of challenges encountered and surmounted, there runs a deeper strain that rejects the dominance of what merely occurs—and, perhaps, what merely happens to dominate. ‘Marigold was absorbed in her book’, the opening sentence tells us, ‘she had gotten as far as the V.’ The alphabet is not a narrative, of course; its arbitrary sequence is there to be mastered and recombined in meaningful order. Life, though lived forward, is likewise susceptible of being transformed—even if only by the minimal gesture by which Marigold, racing ahead of her own experience, proposes to write what she knows (that is, her parents’ lives), then change the names.
For all its lightness and charm, Marigold and Rose retains its hard core—as a vindication of writing that shears it of its idealisms. The writer-as-infant is radically dependent and radically free, imprisoned by a resemblance to her worldly sibling that will, as her inner life takes shape, fall away like a snake’s skin. ‘Everything will disappear’, Marigold reflects. ‘Still, she thought, I know more words now. She made a list in her head of all the words she knew: Mama, Dada, bear, bee, hat. And both these things would continue happening: everything will disappear but I will know more words.’ The bitter wisdom of ‘The Triumph of Achilles’, that ‘the legends / cannot be trusted – / their source is the survivor, / the one who has been abandoned’, has not been contradicted. The book ends with Marigold abandoned to her task: ‘All night she wrote. She wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.’
The asymmetric nature of the conflict also, of course, marks the most significant difference from the conflicts of the Homeric world, which, as contests of military prowess between opposing nations who apparently share the same gods, do not tend to involve conflicts over fundamental values. In this sense, for all their apparent atavism, the conflicts of Marigold and Rose retain a “modern” character.