I, Mary MacLane

by Mary MacLane

  It was this Mary MacLane.

  There was an eighteen-year-old girl in this Butte, as I well remember, with the outward savagery tamed out of her by studiousness. She was slim but no longer lanky and owned a white-hot aliveness and a grace. She had repelling gray eyes and the beautiful coppery hair, and about her an isolation, a complete aloofness. Her spirit fed itself on wonderful and exquisite dreams alternated by moods of young passionate woe, analyzed and torn to shreds: all of it hid beneath a very quiet surface. She had outwardly a tense markedly virginal quality but was inwardly insolently demi-vierge. She had no companions, no friendships. She absorbed herself in digging knowledge out of her high school textbooks, studying and imagining over it, and wandering in the fascinating highways which it opened to her. She was at her moment of brain-awakening, soul-awakening, sex-awakening, life-awakening, world-awakening: it uncurtained windows of magic old sorrow for her to look from. She had no characteristic weaknesses—she was strongly and scornfully courageous. It and the need of self-expression, born of her teeming spirit and life-long suppression of it, led her to write herself out in a book, which was published. It was a poetic book and had insight and vision and a riot of color with youth as its keynote. And it was human and figuratively and literally full of the devil. The far-and-wide public in England and America read it, and the newspapers made a loud noise about it and the lonely girl who wrote it found herself oddly notorious. It brought money which made her free of Butte and it brought human things into her life which changed her life forever. And it brought her no inner or outer excitement or elation.

  It was this Mary MacLane.

  There was a girl of six-and-twenty in Boston and in New York who had half-forgot her long-familiar Ego for several years. She lived and moved in folly and triviality and falseness. From having had too few companions she had too many who did her no good and no harm but helped her waste passing days and dissipate her moods and mental tissues. She had grown worldly in taste, weak in manner of thought, fragile in body from a mad irregularity of food and sleep, and in every attribute uncertain • of herself. Her Soul lay sleeping: her Heart because it felt too keenly worked overtime: nothing engaged her Mind. But her analytic trend stayed by and with it she pulled to bits the varied fragmentary things she encountered. She learned New York town in human sordid enlightening disciplining ways. She learned people of many kinds in many ways. She learned other young women, which depressed and exhilarated and perplexed her. She learned men —a race whose make and motive toward women bears no analysis. She had not the usual defensive armor of the normal woman, for she was not a normal woman but certain trends of varying individuals gathered into one sensitive woman-envelope. She was careless toward men in their crude sex-rapacity in ways no ‘regular’ woman would dare or care to be. No man could wring one tear from her, nor cause a quickening of her foolish Heart, nor any emotion in her save mirth. And there were women friends— There were some friendships whose ill effects she will never recover from, from having bestowed too much of herself on them in the headlong newness of knowing and owning friendship after her long young loneliness.

  —she could not cherish anything sanely. She couldn’t stand in her doorway and watch a pretty bird flying above a green hedge, and admire it for the gleam of its brilliant wings in the sun, and let it go. She must needs run out—leaving her door standing open and tea-and-cakes untasted within—and follow where the bird flew, through mire and brier, round the world—

  From the odd notoriety were many letters and experiences and adventures. She met some famous persons—writers, actors, artists—of agreeable philosophic plaisances. She saw her book of youth burlesqued with artistic piquance in the Weber-and-Fields show of its season (with one Collier, adroitest of comedians, cast as her long-lost Devil). There was a hasty voyage to the edge of Europe—a voyage of terrific seasickness lying in her stateroom: a halfglimpse of Paris all gray and green in the rain: a whole glimpse of London, mystic, Dickensesque and roundly British in its yellow-brown fog: and back again within ten days with more berth-ridden seasickness lasting from Cherbourg to New York harbor: the whole adventure grown from a Spring morning impulse. There were winters in Florida at sun-flooded resort towns full of gaudiness and gambling and surprising winter-resort people. Those were mongrel wastrel years empty of every realness, every purpose, every vantage: they filled her with a bastard wisdom.

  It was this Mary MacLane.

  There was a girl of seven-and-twenty worn to psychic fragments and returned on a winter’s day in a mood of indifference to this Butte. It was her first return since she and her book had gone forth eight years before. She celebrated it by being brought low with a baleful blood-sucking demon of illness, what is called scarlet fever. Borne upon by the mountain altitude after sea-levels and getting in the way of epidemic germs, she had no chance. A strong feverish serpent wound itself around her, consuming and destroying. There were tortured dying weeks. She had never been ill before in all her life. This was the most crucial bodily adventure she had known. It opened a new and dreadful world. There was no passing of time in those long, long weeks, no rational thinking, no day, no night, no dark, no morning, no memory. There was pain, and utter weariness, and a feeling of being hurried to her grave. There was an air of hurry in the stillness around, as if she and Death had made a date which she would be late in keeping unless she were urged on. There was a doctor, and a crisp white starched nurse, and there were interminable bitter drugs and tall narrow glasses of monotonous milk. She was endlessly disturbed by milk and medicine, and by cold spongings and changings of feverish bed-linens, and anointings with olive oil, and takings of her temperature, and sprayings of her throat: when she wanted only to sink down, down, forever and forever to the underworld. She almost sank. But God capriciously decided he had other plans for her—insomuch as decreeing she was not to be let go then. After seven weeks she tiredly rose from her bed and took stock of herself. Her role then was of a horrible yellow skeleton with negative gray eyes, a wreck of tissue and vitality such as only scarlet fever can achieve, and her beautiful thick coppery hair changed to a strange short mouse-colored tangle. She was a long time recovering. The scarlet demon changed her life and its meanings and energies and outlooks more effectually than if she had been trapped by a game-at-law and gaols and courts had had their toll of her. But after months, a year and a half of months, her health came back perfect if not vigorous, and her good looks—the few she ever had, and even the humanizing incongruous curls, though changed, grew long and covered her head again in a heathen frivol. A so magnificent mystery is this blood-and-flesh. It grows up again out of its ashes. Burn all of it but one cell in the scorchingest sickness and so that bones are still whole it will renew itself from that, perfect as the sweet-bay. But this mind, less magnificent and less mysterious and more delicate and dubious, rallies only by aid of the heart beneath it and the soul beyond it. Her mind came slowly out of darkened apathy. It lived in a high-walled cloister telling its languid beads by rote. But as if it sensed the sweet aura of her renewed body it at last woke strong and cold overnight and was aware again of itself and the mourning magic of being.

  It was this Mary MacLane.

  And after a year or two more it is this Mary MacLane.

  It is I myself.

  I walk my floor in leaden retrospect-days with a feel in my throat of damned and damning unfulfillment and at my eyebrows the twisted frown.

  In it is dread and anguish and worriment: in it is hideous altering breaking prepollence of death.

  —if my hair, just my hair, had not come back after that red fever I’d have decided—not capriciously like God but determinedly like myself—to have died by my own hand one night. It is no brave thought and it would have been no brave deed. Though it wants a lowering courage to leave life when, despite all, one loves its very textureless color, its bodiless air: not to speak of the yellow hot deathless sunshine that can not reach one in her dark grave—

  But the look and fee
l of my hair are the look and feel of positive life, opposed to death.

  To live up to my hair would keep me brave.

  But the retrospects, which I can’t escape, come and wrap me in the Winding Sheet.

  THE DOVER ROAD

  To-morrow

  I lay down at noonday on my green couch and I had a quaint dream. I have just awakened from it in a flush of languor and comfort. And the dream is vivid in my mind. I dreamed I was married and it was pink-and-pearl dawn in my married bed-room. And in the bed one inch away from mine was not my married husband but ‘another man.’ It was no man I can recall having seen. As I look back into the dream he seems of the nowhere, a stranger. But in the dream he was no stranger. I had crudely admitted him to my night. And I had just awakened in the pink-and-white dawn and was sitting silk-gowned and ruffle-haired in my bed, cross-legged like a tailor with my elbows on my knees and my chin on my palms, idly contemplating him. And he was lying in the other narrow bed contemplating me and smiling a little. He had nice teeth and yellowish hair. The crux of the dream was the sound ‘off-stage’ of the approaching footsteps of monsieur-the-husband. As it always is in the psychology of dreams the insistent thing in the situation was not the footsteps, nor even that they were approaching, but the sound: the elusive threat of their sound. He would presently discover us. Nobody appeared to care: not ‘another man’ smiling so tranquilly: not I sitting musingly overlooking him who had overnight ‘enjoyed me’: not the husband, because he never knew it—before he could open the guilty door I awoke.

  A short-cut gently headlong dream. I was at once married, mixed adulterantly with an imperfect stranger and awaiting in pleasant mild anticipation, to match the pink-and-pearl of the summer dawn, the climax in the approaching sound of my husband’s footsteps. It was humorous and artistic. Unseemly preliminaries were done away with in that dream. I was given at once the one exciting worthwhile moment in it.

  Having no data as to what were my husband’s, temper and tenor, what he looked like or who he was, I could not in the dream or out of it surmise what he would say or how he would act when he opened the door.

  —a theme for idling speculation in a summer’s day—

  Also I wonder whence came that dream: so Unexpected: so Irrelevant to any thought in me: so Artistically Right: so Disgusting: so Dramatic: so quaintly Vulgar.

  A question: to which the one answer is that unanswerable answer to all questions, propounded by Mr. F.’s Aunt—‘There’s milestones on the Dover road.’

  THE HARP OF WORN STRINGS

  To-morrow

  May I own no unleavened egotism.

  May I own no egotism that is not sensitive and poignant and vibrant: a harp of Worn Strings.

  The surprising world is full of non-analytic persons of ox-eyed vision and hen-headed mental caliber whose egotism is a stupendous impregnable armor: those who burned the Maid of Orleans: those who crucified the prophet of Nazareth: those who killed John Keats.

  They inherit the earth, which is a Golden-Green earth, but never look at it.

  They accept this life, which is Intoxicating life, but never feel its texture with their fingers.

  They gather a Blue iris by a marsh-edge and let it die in their sweating hands, or let it fall to the ground as they walk, or throw it away when the Blue petals droop: without looking at it and breathing it and knowing it: without sensing the tremulous Blue to be lovelier in its wilting.

  Theirs is the thick fat solidly-fierce egotism of an emperor or an infant whose main metaphysic concept is that he is alive, and will remain alive, and must be alive, though all around him bleed drop by drop to their death.

  I have analyzed mine, and it is not so with me.

  If I say I am enchanting or false or despicable it is because I know it’s true. Not because I say it but because I have tested and proved it. I feel the textures of my life with the tips of my fingers. I turn my senses outward and let the old winds blow over them—icy, balmy, harsh, gentle, scorching, cooling. I suffer for it but I know those winds: songs of seas and stars and of little pebbles are in their thunderous-dim wailing: life is in the soft stinging perfume of their wings. No breath of poetry and beauty comes to me that I do not pay for with the beating ache of my Heart, the nervous tensions of my Body, the fraying and shredding of my Soul. If any beauty or poet-thing comes easily and gives me pleasure and not pain, I know I have not yet got it and that it will come again.

  It will come again: with the pain.

  I can’t eat cake and have it.

  I can’t make silk purses out of sows’ ears.

  Those things I learn nearly perfectly from playing on my harp with the Worn Strings.

  A STRONGLY-WINDY SATURDAY

  To-morrow

  It is a strongly-windy Saturday.

  A thought achieves itself in my roiled-and-placid brain: that one half of me is Mad, but the other half is doubly Sane and someway over-Sane, so that in it all I break a little better than even.

  A SOMEWAY SEPARATE INDIVIDUAL

  To-morrow

  This body I live in is familiar and mysterious.

  It is like a book of poetry to read and read again.

  It has the owned sentientness of bone-and-flesh, and with it tremors fine as spirit-emotions.

  My Body is more chaste than my Mind, my Heart and my Soul My Body if fragile is healthful, and is one with the woman-race: it moves with the sunlit cosmos. My Mind wanders in sex-chaos and muses on piquant impure things, enchanting villainies, odd inversions, whatnot. My Soul—a sweet and an exquisite Thing—its tired wings have borne it languidly down the dim stairways of many centuries, some leading in wilful perverted ways. And my Heart is a pagan Heart. Its essence is flavored with the day and lyric trail of the Sapphic students.

  Bodily I am also pagan in the freedom of my owned sex feelings—as are all women. Most of them do not know it and those who do hide it in a tomb-like silence, except the brazen, the headlongly honest and the artlessly frank. I come under none of those heads. I am myself. I live and ponder alone.

  And my Body feels consciously aloof and as a someway separate individual: with inner organs as eternal hopes, smooth skin as emotion and drops of blood as thoughts—little drops of sparkling red virile sweet blood for its thoughts.

  I so love my Body as it lives and breathes and moves about, with me and close to me. It is my so constant companion. It is an attractive girl, a human being of some charm. I love it for the priceless air it breathes and the long jewel-days of sunshine it has known: for the tiny wears and tears of its daily life—the rending of its magic tissues with each going-up-or-down-stairs, each crossing of a door-sill. I love it for that it must lie at last pale, pale and still—still—still—in its grave.

  I love my Body for its woman-complexities of sex. I love it for the lonely lyric poetry of its cell-adventures.

  I love my Body for this long journey of woe and loveliness which it goes, from Birthday to Deathday, in wilding passions of subtle nervousness: each day a day of bodily beauty and intolerableness and fear and utter mystery: because life is, and because I own a white smooth-skinned Body, and because the strange, strange Air of Everyday breathes on it—touches it—always!

  SINCERITY AND DESPAIR

  To-morrow

  I am a true Artist, not as a writer but as a writing person.

  I try to feel myself literarily a poet—finer-made than a god.

  But I fail as a poet-litterateur as I fail as a poet-person. A poet flies always on wings of fiery gold though it might be waywardly. But often I walk with my feet in odd gutters, and have some plaisance in them, and analyze their gutteriness absorbedly and own them as part of my portion.

  —poet or no poet, it is best to be myself. In heights and murks and widths and trivial horrors, myself—But as an Artist I am in the true. As a painter of words and maker of paragraphs which picture my phases and emotions, and in my conscious feeling anent it, I realize the artist flair, the artist temper. It is not a literar
y but a personal art.

  I have what goes with all artist-matter—long periods of dry-rot when having nothing ripe to write I write nothing. My Artist-spirit proves itself, justifies itself in my times of stagnation and reaction. Out of it something human and sad and lustrous grows in me, something which is half worldly but awaits its ripe time of expression with someway-divine scorn.

  I once thought me destined to be a ‘writer’ in the ordinary sense. And many good people visioned a writing career for me. It has a vapid taste, just to recall it. My flawed life has that to felicitate upon— that I have not spent it in fat lumps of writing, magazine tales and sex-novels. In the days, and later, when my demi-vierge book made its success I was besought by publishers to write others—to go on, to reap and garner. I pushed all that away with a preoccupied hand, not as part and parcel of my wastrel living but in my assured Artist-temper. I should feel more true-to-form to earn my living by making linen roses in a shop, along with rows of pale women, than by my writing.

  My writing is to me a precious thing—and a rare bird—and a Babylonish jade. It demands gold in exchange for itself. But though it is my talent it is not my living. It is too myself, like my earlobes and my throat, to commercialize by the day.

  But I cannot think of me as an Artist without thinking of me as a Liar. The two are someway related; I am an appalling, an encompassing Liar. I am a Liar by the clock. My life ticks out silent lies as my little clock ticks out seconds. It is a phase hard to put my finger on. I feel it on me the way I feel a headache. I write this book with seriousness and earnestness. It is all a mood of sincerity and despair. But except I give it some backgrounding of lies, though each thing in it is fair fact, I fail as an Artist.

  It is strange about lies—any lies, all lies. They are muscularly stronger than truths. They come more readily to human tongues. They fit more easily into the games of this life. And in me they seem needful to my Artist mind.