Marguerite Young

Matthew Paris writes:

Iowa born, a habitue of the Village bistro Pennyfeathers, Marguerite Young was a singularity much more complicated than one might guess from her best-selling Miss MacIntosh My Darling.

She lived in a fantastical apartment with a carousel. She was beyond her fiction about opium users, a midwestern Socialist who loved Eugene Victor Debs.

As Virgil Thomson used to say, fame makes prole simple. Marguerite Young was a very complex woman with a natural propensity to live a cultured Bohemian life. She ate lunch every day at Pennyfeathers, a bistro on Sheridan Square. She was usually in the company of such stellar poets as Barbara Holland. Pennyfeathers was an island province from the Left bank of Paris, yet had the conviviality of an American bar. Many of its patrons would sit at the long counter in it, forsaking the relative comfort of its tables.

Marguerite made her living teaching at Fordham University. She was there for decades, Although her domestic taste in furniture was eccentric enough, she didn't seem all that flamboyant in person. She had an earnestness about her that was very attractive. She was also an excellent poet.

I never asked her why she had a carousel in her home. I felt it was impolite.

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