Marguerite Young’s Angel in the Forest, the only work of nonfiction she would publish in her lifetime, was first published in 1945 by Scribners, re-released by Dalkey Archive in 1994, and was recently re-re-released as a Dalkey Archive Essential. Recently, Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling, has become a critical darling, a sort of lost classic. One can only hope readers want more, as Angel in the Forest is a genre-defying literary work of art just as deserving of praise, attention, and readers.
In essence, Angel in the Forest is the story of New Harmony, Indiana, between the years 1814 and 1827, where two utopias, one after the other, were attempted and failed. But in the hands of Marguerite Young, a proto-maximalist, poet, and knitter who once told her friend Anaïs Nin that, if she had things her way, she’d knit a scarf that encircled her entire block, a history will be far more thorough and gorgeously written than any traditional history readers are expecting.
Much of the book’s first half is dedicated to George “Father” Rapp and his Rappites, German millennialists who believed, amongst other things, that Rapp was a prophet of God, that they should live as celibates, and that they should go and live communally, away from persecution, in the land of “Jerusalem”—the United States—as they prepared for the coming millennium. Even an inattentive reader will quickly realize Young has been thorough in her research. She is able to depict the work of getting from Germany to Pennsylvania, the continuous financial successes of the Rappites on their way to New Harmony, Indiana. She can describe Father Rapp’s home, his daughter’s daily life, the town’s landscaping, and, with a wink, Father Rapp’s tunnels, used to keep a spying eye on the flock.
Such ironies are not lost on Young. She is thorough, poetic, but she is also, quite often, slyly sardonic. For instance, when the Rappites’ experiment disintegrates, Young explains it thus: “Although selling Harmony at a sacrifice, Father Rapp profited, in spite of or perhaps because of his pursuit of happiness, which he recognized to be unhappiness.” In other words, the sale is a “sacrifice,” but it is one that brings financial profit to the saint. She does the same when pointing out how the celibate utopianists build a distillery to profit off their neighbors’ thirst for alcohol in the American frontier. In this, just as in the ways the Rappites shipped commercial goods down the Mississippi, Young displays a profit-driven gumption characterizing Rapp and his heavenly-minded brethren.
The Rappite community, not surprisingly, ran into a variety of issues due to celibacy, an issue the sly Young will not simply ignore. As she writes:
The Rappite community was … an organization of married people who had abjured relations merely for the duration and might easily tire of counting the years. Not all were old when they took the vow. There were a number of hardy young people coming up. A community of hopeful bachelors and aesthetic spinsters might better have approximated the lost Atlantis, an island where gods copulated with the daughters of men until the daystar arose in their hearts.
In other words, millenialism works until the Millenium doesn’t show up. Then, as many New Testament letters demonstrate, people start to get impatient, lose interest, particularly in a chaste life.
Soon enough, the Owenites take over New Harmony, the millenialist Rappites selling it to the materialist socialists for a tidy profit: “it was to become almost immediately another paradise, on a plan not envisioned by the celibate builder—the Owenite community of rationalism, free love, and easy living. The German prototype of American Puritanism was thus to be followed by the French Revolution in miniature.”
Young dedicates more pages of Angel in the Forest to the Owenites, followers of Robert Owen and a footnote in the birth of the British Labor Movement. Owen, a socialist materialist, was against the injustices of the time—the exploitation of workers, child labor, and women’s lack of rights, to name but a few. Young depicts Owen’s long slog of trying to change minds across Europe, continually running up against the power and steadfast obstinacy of those who control the means of production, before setting up his failed utopia in Indiana. Here, though, she has more access to the letters and opinions of various Owenites, describing the problems in Utopia 2.0 before it even began, which only accumulated with time: a lack of skilled labor, a lack of buy-in, of leadership, of responsibility, all leading to a not-so-slow disintegration of the new New Harmony.
The thoroughness and maximalist tendencies in Angel in the Forest, combined with Young’s poetic impulses are reminiscent of Agee and Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Young provides great detail of Owen’s travels around Europe, minutiae of individual items found in a home, not to mention what happened to various individuals once they left New Harmony, the generations that followed Owen (there being scant few, for obvious reasons, following Rapp), to say nothing of the ways she interviews current residents of the town while depicting its day-to-day existence in 1940. She tells us about the hobbies of a duke—horseshoeing, sheepshearing, etc.—despite his playing an incredibly small role in the narrative. Such thoroughness, if done poorly, would be tedious, but here, in Young’s hands, it feels as if you’re in a Borgesian library, discovering all of existence within.
But Young’s maximalist tendencies are not solely demonstrated in the research. Remember, she wants to knit around the entire block, and that means covering everything. So it’s not just her subjects, but even her sentences that can work to contain eternity, such as Father Rapp’s adopted son, Frederick, here shown like an Aaron to Rapp’s Moses, believing yet harboring seeds of doubt in the ways he sinfully loves the things of this Earth:
Frederick was, to tell the truth, in love with the Wabash valley, right from the start. Wheat was already tall that year, shining above water as clear as a sea of glass … the wilderness seemed almost a promise, not a threat—its wild, high acres of gum trees, sycamore, persimmon, like music unheard but felt. Earth turned on its axis, impersonally, as if there were no evil. There were peaches of an enormous diameter and size, this side millennium—a fuzz upon them like a baby’s cheek.
This is the language of the book, emerging from deep research, yes, but an equally deep love of language. One might come for the history lesson but will stay for the words, sentences, and paragraphs, lush with detail, playfully articulating truths, showing empathy one moment and winking the next.
Angel in the Forest is a sort of New Journalism before New Journalism existed. Before the term postmodern began being bandied about—and well before it became a too-easy designation for genre-defying work—Marguerite Young was already showing more than a little “incredulity toward metanarratives,” no matter if religious or secular, political or social. And it is with this incredulous lens that she looks at these failed utopias, along with their origins and aftermaths, to present the mirage of utopia. Ultimately, Angel in the Forest is a book about the United States itself, where believers’ new utopic dreams are continually being built atop others’ failed—or crushed—utopias. Religious or secular, Young convincingly, brilliantly, and beautifully shows that the only winners in utopia-building are those selling the goods.
When the Rappites went back to Pennsylvania, Young notes, they named their town Economy.
Angel in the Forest, by Marguerite Young. Dallas, Texas: Dalkey Archive Press, November 2024. 438 pages. $17.95, paper.
Matt Martinson teaches honors courses at Central Washington University, and occasionally reviews books for Heavy Feather. Recent fiction and nonfiction appear in Lake Effect, 1 Hand Clapping, and Coffin Bell; his piece, “Trout and Trout Remain,” received a Notable mention in Best American Essays 2024.
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 