I, Mary MacLane

by Mary MacLane

  This first meeting of Carmen with the dragoon was pictured in a brilliant hot-looking plaza as if before the cigarette factory in Seville. This woman in throwing the flower at the soldier expressed wonderfully in one fleet moment, by hand and lip and eye, the savage sordid poetry and passionate freedom— that unearthly fragrance—which is Carmen.

  The film version followed the scenes of the opera rather than the story, which took nothing from the headlong truth of the central figure.

  But no picturing can equal the star-clarity of Mérimée’s prose in Carmen’s death-scene—a thing of a piercing pathos comparable to nothing I know in writing.

  ‘After we had gone a little distance I said to her, “So, my Carmen, you are quite ready to follow me, isn’t it so?” She answered, “Yes, I’ll follow you to the death—but I won’t live with you any more.” We had reached a lonely gorge. I stopped my horse.

  “Is this the place?” she said.

  And with a spring she reached the ground.

  She took off her mantilla and threw it at her feet, and stood motionless with one hand on her hip, looking at me steadily.

  “You mean to kill me, I see that well,” she said. “It is fate. But you’ll never make me give in.”

  I said to her: “Be rational, I implore you; listen to me. All the past is forgotten. Yet you know it is you who have been my ruin— it is because of you that I am a robber and a murderer. Carmen, my Carmen, let me save you, and save myself with you.”

  “Jose,” she answered, “what you ask is impossible. I don’t love you any more. You love me still and that is why you want to kill me. If I liked I might tell you some other lie, but I don’t choose to give myself the trouble. Everything is over between us two. You are my rom and you have the right to kill your romi, but Carmen will always be free. A calli she was born and a calli she’ll die.”

  “Then you love Lucas?” I asked.

  “Yes, I have loved him—as I loved you— for an instant—less than I loved you, perhaps. And now I don’t love anything. And I hate myself for ever having loved you.”

  I cast myself at her feet, I seized her hands, I watered them with tears, I reminded her of all the happy moments we had spent together, I offered to continue my brigand’s life, if that would please her. Everything, sir, everything—I offered her everything if she would only love me again.

  She said: “Love you again? That’s not possible. Live with you? I will not do it.” I was wild with fury. I drew my knife. I would have had her look frightened and sue for mercy—but that woman was a demon.

  I cried: “For the last time I ask you, Will you stay with me?”

  “No! No! No!” she said and she stamped her foot. Then she pulled a ring I had given her off her finger and cast it into the brushwood. I struck her twice over—I had taken Garcia’s knife because I had broken my own. At the second thrust she fell without a sound. It seems to me that I can still see her great black eyes staring at me. Then they grew dim and the lids closed.—For a good hour I lay there prostrate beside the corpse.’—

  No play-acting could make the scene so pregnant and palpitant with human-stuff and alive in vision as that translucent jewel-prose of Mérimée. But so close as one art may counterfeit another, by drinking-up the fiery spirit essence which informs it, so close did this actor-woman compass and consummate the strong delicious unafraidness of Carmen’s death-hour.

  The scene was staged as in the opera—a court outside the bull-fighting arena, with Carmen richly bejeweled and dressed in the lacy smart-lady clothes of the Toreador’s mistress. But that was nothing. The gypsy wildness of the written scene was in every insolently splendid bodily movement and each fateful loveliness of eyes and lips of the fulfilling Theda Bara.

  I can still see the dark drooping-lidded dying eyes. I sensed Carmen in conscious chambers of my Mind. I felt her in my throat. It was Carmen herself living and breathing near me, the fearsomely adorable Carmen who has haunted the edge of my thoughts since I first read her.

  There are some odd crudenesses in Theda Bara’s acting which had the effect of making her un-stagey, unobvious. They made her humanly vibrant. And they added a devilish wistfulness to her Carmen and a surprising feel of genuineness to the whole masque.

  The actor’s art brings out the romance which is in human bone-and-flesh. And Theda Bara seems someway a master of its physical and spiritual subtleties. She expressed the swift emotion of Carmen by ringing slightest possible changes on her own virile and mobile body: insolence by kimboing an elbow: cruelty by the twitch of a wrist: sensual feeling by moving a knee and an ankle: murder in the twisting of her waistline: a fleet repressed animal tenderness by a posture of shoulder and breast: a heartbreak of mirth in her careless vivid lips: the desperate bravery of that death by the tilt of her potent chin: the hurricane-freedom of Carmen’s soul by lifting her face and her arms in the night wind. She worked with an exquisite muscular sincerity, as if she strongly gave her best of brain and blood and mettle to the part.

  I looked at photographs of her which decorated the lobby of the theater. She looks a beautiful and earnest-seeming girl of a mental rather than a physical caste, with melancholy dark eyes, a childlike mouth-profile and the slim patrician hands of a Bourbon duchess. She will live in my warmed memory as the star of all the Carmens.

  A flood of life and color goes into the staging of a Carmen film: a throng of attractive faces and bodies of people, women and men and lovely children, move through it in a pulsating gay pageant: flowers and Spanish prettinesses of costume and country-side and street and cafe are all over it, bright as life: and sweet winds blow in it and leaves and grasses wave and flutter, and the sunshine melts and mellows the air—all as if one saw it thrice-enlarged through windows. It is not poetry—it is not in itself any art, but a dear delectable counterfeit of it, a miracle-taste of the outer-looking madly-peopled world. For me it meant my long-adored Mérimée given sudden brief life, the haunting Carmen turned into flesh: a spell of silent human-music which glowed and burned upon me like gentle fire.

  Often is God thus capriciously kind to me.

  A FASCINATING CREATURE

  To-morrow

  I am a fascinating creature.

  I move in no stultifying ruts. There’s no real yoke of custom on my shoulders. My round white breasts beneath their black serge are concurrent with nothing settled or subservient or discreet.

  My Mind goes in no grooves made by other minds. It lives like a witch in a forest, weaving its spells, revelling in smooth vivid adventure. When I look at a round gray stone by a roadside I look at it not as a young woman, not as a person, not as an artist, nor a geologist, nor an economist, but as Me—as Mary MacLane—and as if there had not before been a round gray stone by a roadside since the world began. When I look at a chair with my somber eyes I say to the chair, ‘What other persons may see when they look at you, chair, I don’t know—how could I know? But I well know what I see and that what I see is uninfluenced by other eyes that may have looked at you, were they Aristotle’s or Galileo’s or an archangel’s.’ There may be equally egotistic viewpoints—in Waco-Texas, or Japan, or Glasgow-Scotland or the Orkney Islands, where not? I don’t know—I don’t care. What is it to me? I know my own virile vision and that it thrills and informs and translates me as if crackling bright-jagged lightnings broke along my sky.—

  It is a night of whispering breezes and little restless clouds, an endearing night. It makes solitude a delectation. I walked out in it, in the glimmering moonlight past buildings and houses and mines and mounds. My thoughts as I walked were all of Me: how fascinating is Me.

  I came in at midnight and met Me in my mirror. I pushed my three-cornered hat backward off my head, slipped out of my loose coat and dropped my squeezed gloves. I sank fatiguedly into a little chair before the mirror, tipped the chair forward on its front legs, rested my elbows on the bureau and my chin in my hands and looked absorbedly at myself. Lovingly, tenderly, discerningly, marveling and absorbed and d
eeply fascinated I looked at Me in the mirror. ‘You enchanted one I’ said I, ‘You Witch-o’-the-world! you Mary MacLane!—who you are I don’t know—what you are I but partly know. You’re my Companion, my Familiar, my Lover, my wilding Sweetheart—I love you! I know that—that’s enough. I love your garbled temper, your aching thoughts, your troubled Heart, your wasted spirit. I know much, much, much of you and love you! I love your beauty-sense and your proud scornful secret super-sensitiveness. I love your Eyes and your Lips and your bodily Fire and lce’——to know oneself: apart from all the world!

  One looking at me sees a cold-poised young woman, reserved and aloof, slightly diffusing insolence and inspiring misgivings.

  But I looking at Me see a woman standing high on flame-washed battlements of her life in whom burn and beat the spirits and lights and star-discords of uncounted tired lustrous ages. I see me forlorn and radiant, drab and brilliant. I see me wrapped in a fiery potentiality of pain and beauty and love and sorrow. I hear wild voices in Me like horrid-sweet wailing of ghost-violins, muted but crying loudly in frightful reasonless vital joy and in unspeakable terror and sadness. I see Me ragged-clothed, bleeding, with disordered tangled hair and bloodshot eyes, with coarse soiled hands, broken-nailed, like a criminal’s: a woman of woes. And I see Me wistful in quiet pure garments like one seeking light. I see Me old as old sin and young as new Spring days. I see Me un-sanely sensitive and hardened over—closed in worldly cases: guarded antagonism round my thoughts, protecting indifference round my Heart, dead silence round my Soul. I see Me with brains to know, with prescient mind to grasp, with mobile sense to feel. I see Me all futile, all hopeless, all miserable. I see Me all poetry. I see Me all wonder, mystery and beauty. I see Me!—

  —much more than that, this Me sitting here! my deep gray wanton dark eyes: my lips—like pink flowers—with the inscrutable expression: my white fingers—slim, strong, glossy-nailed, silken at the tips. My glass gives Me back to Me, sitting by it, languid of Body, tense of spirit and Mind, bathed in witcheries of Self—

  I love my Mary MacLane! Ah—I love her!

  It is good—since I can’t find God, since I can’t find way-of-truth however I grope about.

  Every human friendship I form throws me back more completely on myself.

  Whom then shall I love but myself?

  I know my own human enchantments and that they never fail me.

  I’ll know them more! I’ll love them more!—I’ll love them in sane madness lest mad madness overtake and destroy Me, Soul and bones.

  NO RESONANCE

  To-morrow

  My life, myself, I know are nothing noble, nothing constructive.

  There is no resonance in this analysis, but all Dissonance.

  Something lives, lives muscularly in me that constantly betrays me, destroys me against all my own convictions, against all my own knowledge, against all my own desire. It may be true of Everybody.

  I don’t know. I think about it but get nowhere. It seems someway unlike God to make each person a something all of cross-purpose.

  But I doubt that I am different from Everybody. I doubt if I am anyway abnormal.

  I am very sane.

  A match-flame burns me the same as it burns Everybody: pins prick me and hurt.

  Yet I look in myself and see, through harmonic details, the massed Dissonance.

  I am dying in a pit.

  BLACK-BROWED WEDNESDAYS

  To-morrow

  All my life I’ve liked the Back of a magazine. Some black-browed Wednesday I purchase a magazine, a fifteen-cent one, and read it through. I read the stories and they deeply engage or lightly interest me. I read the ‘special articles’ and if they tell about flying machines or wild birds or hospitals or woman-prisoners in penitentiaries they charm or absorb my thoughts. I look at the illustrations and try to decide whether they are art or science or mechanism. I read the verse and if it’s poetry it exhilarates me as if closed shutters were opened to let Day into a gloomy Room. Then I read the advertisements in the Back and they do all of those things to me in comforting lifegiving oxygen-furnishing ways. Each advertisement is a short story with an eerie little ‘plot’ in it: each is a special article full of purpose: each is fruitful poetry: and in my two hands I all-but have and hold those wonderful Things they exploit.

  They make me feel it’s my birthday and I’m presented a wealth of lavish gifts. They make me feel it’s all a world of playthings.

  They make me feel like a baby with a rattle, a ball and a hoop of bells.

  I like everything in the Back of a magazine.

  I like the Revolvers, handsome plausible short-barreled Revolvers with pictures of ordinary people in dim-lit midnight bedrooms, and ordinary expected-looking burglars climbing in windows—Revolvers of ten shots and of six, and of different calibers, and all of them gleamingly mystically desirable: I like the Soaps, smooth amorous appetizing Soaps, some in luxurious Paris packets, and “others spread out in blue water and rosy foam, splashed in by athletic Archimedesque young men and fat creamy babies and slim beautiful ladies—Mary Garden Soap of pungent delicious scent, tar Soap for the long lovely hair of girls, austere Ivory Soap—it floats: I like the Rubber Heels of resilient charm so tellingly pictured and described that at once I desire them beneath my spirit-heels—springy and solid and thick and firm: I like the Tooth-pastes and Tooth-powders and Tooth-lotions in tubes and tins and bottles, each bearing beneficent messages to the human white teeth of this world—one unfailing kind coming lyrically out like a ribbon and lying flat on the brush: I like the foods—of miraculous spotless purity and enticement—Biscuits and Chocolate and Figs, and Foie-gras in thick glossy little pots, so richly pictured and sung that merely to let my thoughts graze in their pasturage fattens my Heart: I like the men’s very thin Watches, and men’s Garters—no metal can touch you—, and men’s fluffy-lathered shaving sticks, and men’s trim smart flawless tailored Suits, in none of which I have use or interest until I find them in the Back of a magazine—where at once they grow charming and romantic: I like the jars and boxes and tubes and glasses of Cold Cream, Cold Cream fit for skins of goddesses, fit for elves to feed on—a soft satiny scented snow-white elysium of wax and vase-line and almond paste, pictured in forty alluring shapes till it feels pleasantly ecstatic just to be living in the same world with bewitching vases of Cold Cream, Cold Cream, Cold Cream—always bewitching and lovely but never so notably and festively as in the Back of a magazine: and I like the Pencils: and Book-cases: and Silver: and Jewels: and Glass: and Gloves: and Shoes—beautiful Shoes: and Fountain-pens: and Leather things: and Paint—silkish salubrious Paints, house-Paints, and the panegyrics with them—they make me long to own a spirit-house and paint it liberally: and Rugs: and Varnish: and Clothes—wonderful Clothes: and Bungalows: and Phonographs—his master’s voice: and Paper—fine-wrought Paper to write on—bond and linen and hand-pressed, pale-tinted—a vast virgin treasure: and Oranges: and Cigarettes—a shilling in London a quarter here: and Water-Bottles of powdery rubber: and Stockings—patrician Stockings which take me into realms of silk-looms and delicate dyes and slim ankles: and Candle-Shades: and Candle-Sticks: and countless Cosmetics —Cosmetics of tender colors for the outer woman: and Sealingwax indescribably useless and attractive: and Tennis-Racquets: and Ivory—smooth Vantine Ivory toys and trinkets polished softly bright as moonlight—and their lily-worded descriptions like restrained sonnets: and Washing Powders—let the Gold Dust twins do your work: and Shower-baths: and Evans’ Ale: and Flying Boats: and Umbrellas: and Cameras—if it isn’t an Eastman it isn’t a kodak: and boxes of Candy—sweet wilderness of chocolates—their very makers’ names have a melting gust—Allegretti, Huyler, Clarence Crane, Maillard—cloying courtiers all: and Diamond Dyes—a child can use them: and Veranda Screens—she can look out but he can’t look in: and Cedar Chests: and Chartreuse from Carthusian monasteries: and Perfumes—Perfumes in their maddening-sweet pride, Perfumes from Paris, Perfumes bottled in thick crysta
l, enchantingly costly—each American dollar added to their price-by-the-ounce making them fragranter to my thoughts: and boxes of benevolent Matches, and captivating Brooms, and fascinating Scouring-powders—a Dutch girl on the can chasing dirt—all three luscious tempting things in the Back of a magazine: and Automobiles—ask the man who owns one: and Rifles—simple and formidable and fine: and restful Rat-poison—they die in the open air seeking water: and sacks of Flour—eventually why not now—flour unusual and piquant in the Back of a magazine, flour novel and endearing: and Type-writers: and Mushrooms: and Monkey-Wrenches: and Rosaries: and Rock-salt—

  the Back, the Back, the Back of a magazine—

  There’s no sadness and no terror in the Back of a magazine.

  And it is for Everybody, Everybody.

  A million people read a story in the middle of the magazine and half the million readily miss its point. But a single tin of Talcum Powder in the Back— the whole million note that and miss nothing in it: it gets to them both on and under their skin.

  Some of the million read a ten-line poem in vers libre in the front of the magazine—and nine-tenths of their number are hard-put to it: the mentalities of this human race being mostly shops shut down. It is something pregnant and prophetic to a poet, merely musical to a plain prose writer, arrant folly to a telephone girl, amusing nonsense to a butcher, a comic fantasy to a milliner, a form of insanity to a plumber, an unknown tongue to a milk-man, a kind of sin to a Baptist minister. But to each of those a Can of Soup in the Back of the same magazine has easily, exactly the same ox-tail-ish meanings: it reaches them where they live. A thousand persons agree with an article about atavism in orang-outangs and ten thousand more quite refute it. But they all harmoniously commit suicide with the same make of Revolver—hammer the hammer—or get rousing drunk to the same degree with the same brand of high-powered whiskey—Wilson, that’s all.