I Await the Devil's Coming - Unexpurgated and Annotated
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I Await the Devil's Coming
- Unexpurgated and Annotated -
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(Publisher's altered title: The Story of Mary MacLane)
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by Mary MacLane - written 1901, pub. 1902
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Michael R. Brown, ed.
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From Human Days: A Mary MacLane Reader
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Petrarca Press * Rocklin, California * April 2013
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All original material including introduction and annotations copyright © 2013 Petrarca Press
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Introduction to the Kindle Edition
by Michael R. Brown
One of the unconfessed fascinations within some consumers of art is the artist's high-wire act. A great American newsman once said he watched a prominent colleague of his with fascination: not for his news-delivery, but rather expecting that one day the colleague would suddenly blow into "the amazing exploding newsman" - so tightly wound was he.
Similarly, the unconfessed major premise of some classical musical critics was sharply revealed a few years ago when a vastly-praised pianist - Joyce Hatto, just deceased in 2006 - was revealed to have had a whole latter career as a manufactured scam: her entire enormous recorded corpus for the last few decades of her life was a pastiche of manipulated recordings from other pianists, passed off as her own recorded under the most poignant circumstances: while she fought terminal cancer. In some cases, critics who had denigrated the original performances found the resurrected versions, set within the frame of a heart-rent tale, luminous and revelatory.
This would have come as no surprise to the Romantic era, which honestly exalted the individual performer and would have found perplexing our recent vogue-idea that art - high or otherwise - should be as impersonal and abstract as possible, as if it had come from nowhere and no one and should be thus apprehended, to carry the perceiver into a like depersonalized state. They'd never have gotten themselves into such a fix. We seem to find it impossible that an individual state or a consciousness could be of high art. Yet we exalt our artist-superstars - the cooler they are, the more heated the response.
Preceding art-eras, particularly the Romantic, cannot be understood through the lens of modern depersonalizing. Such a lens will inevitably invert, reverse, and fun-house-undulate the object it attempts to render. Which defeats the very precision and sharpness, the unveiledness, the refusal to fall for illusion, on which we pride ourselves as moderns, even more as post-moderns. The Romantic era brooked no hard split between art, artist, personality, passion, and perceiver. If one actually enters into the Romantic mood, the spidery structures of modernism - seen from without, with a more passionate mood through oneself - are suddenly known as unfulfilling to the whole person.
Yet modernism did not come from nowhere. Like other eras before it, the Romantic era painted itself into a corner: through its dwelling in its own intensity. The editor has listened to Wagner and thought, "Where could it have gone from here, if not into reaction? Ninety-hour operas, twice as loud? And what after that? Where is the exit point?" Wagner made Strauss a necessity, if an ugly one.
It is in this setting of a conflict of era-tongues that the recent rediscovery of Mary MacLane rises up from the stage-floor like a magician's chef d'oeuvre. MacLane - more Romantic than the Romantics, more post-modern than we've yet been able to complicate ourselves into - defeats, fulfills, transcends, and thumbs her nose at these genres simultaneously. They fall off her sides, unable to apply, because there's no hook: MacLane was a deeply original consciousness, in circumstances of mixed inspiration, exasperation, and desperation who had mastered a body of classic literary matter, extracted from it a vast range of expressive devices and moods, and set to the great artistic work: making something new at the interface of internal and external life. For, borrowing from Hume, there's no internal tale that doesn't have some reference to the outside - even in a single metaphor - and no external tale that bears no mark of the consciousness that made it. And so comes MacLane as one of the great reorienters. "Oh!” she would exclaim to a newspaper reporter amid the great success her first book occasioned, “don’t think that I approve of what I say in my book. I don’t - of much of it. I don’t approve of myself." But, she said, it was true, and that was her aim: to be true.
Long excavation of not only her written legacy but of the traces of her unwritten life leads the editor to say that MacLane is first and foremost a structure of moods, a world (like a good musical composition) unto its own, communicated - at times by stylistic means that seem nearly magical - directly to other consciousnesses. That is all. She has no fixed doctrine - in her 1917 article on marriage she comes the closest to describing her own path, with the words "absolute freedom" - but with full knowledge that it will bring with it things undesired and unwished. She is no utopian: beginning with herself. She finds an irreducible pairing of complementary sides at every point in life, and in her last book attempts to give direct voice to it with adjective-strings, surfacely akin to Whitman but without his open-road optimism.
Yet it is not with her career's final years with which we are concerned, but its earliest: the book that began the phenomenon. Au courant publishers Melville House has played an important role in the MacLane rediscovery by reprinting her first and last books in March of this year, with associated PR campaign. (Her quieter middle book, My Friend Annabel Lee, is as ever left to fend for itself.) In particular, their restoration of MacLane's original title - I Await the Devil's Coming - for her first book is a signal service to MacLane's original intentions, crossed by her 1902 publisher's mild drop-in: The Story of Mary MacLane. One of the unfortunate tonal changes occasioned by the drop-in was the removing of the gestural significance of MacLane's regular, steady references through the text to waiting for the Devil: a continual upward glance at the actual title that gives what might seem a rambling work a steadying influence, and her onomatopoeic repetition of waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... for the one for whom one is never supposed to have to long wait once one is willing: the Devil himself.
But many other beauties in the original text remain inaccessible to the reader, particularly to one new to MacLane's highly specialized style. For all the controversial elements permitted to remain, I Await the Devil's Coming was edited - and many changes made in 1902 did MacLane's original conception and execution no service, and in some cases compromised the radicality of her vision. A reader of the text reproduced so many times day may find striking MacLane's affirmation of her body, system by system, her "calm, beautiful stomach" and her liver, heart, lungs, her "two good legs" - but would never know that that she had praised even her intestine, "vibrating with conscious life." Neither would that reader have seen the punctuation system she had developed which permitted many quasi-musical hesitations and extensions. Perhaps most unfortunately, a reader possibly concluding that MacLane was incapable of meta-criticism (or humor), would never have read her entry of February 19. (In its entirety: "Am I not intolerably conceited?")
And no reader would see the arc described by the original version, from the beginning dedication to the absent Devil, through the waiting, to an ending direct address to - as the author might have said - the sure readers of earth: a trajectory that precapitulates that of MacLane's career to its completion seventeen years later in 1918.
It was for these hidden joys the editor thought it imperative, when publishing the first MacLane anthology in 1993, to remove the 1902 publisher's egregious alterations and show the almost-invariable superiority of the original version.
This need persists today wit
h Melville House's welcome reprint of the 1902 edit, so the original text of I Await the Devil's Coming is herewith presented, with expurgations and editings removed, that what Mary MacLane was able to bring up out of herself into the world may be seen for what - and all that - it is. Her text is an enduring testament to the power of the individual consciousness turned with complete absorption to a task that arises out of its own depths, with intensity turned all the way up, and Devil take the hindmost.
The discussions are already ongoing, as they rightly ought, on how to classify MacLane, on the extent of her influence, on how much of her self-involvement was real, how much was theatrical or performative, and all the takings-apart we of these times enjoy in our cooler-temperature way. But let us not lose sight of the original creators, who are clearly more than mere mannequins to hang our word-nets over. MacLane, and the rest, are great fun to dissect, but we forget at times that dissection implies a living body - which implies a life.
Here, in the form intended for it, is Mary MacLane's most alive book.
Michael R. Brown
Rocklin, California
31 March 2013
To The Devil
Of the Steel-Gray Eyes, Who One
Day may Come - Who knows?
I Dedicate, with the Mad Love of
A Young Weary Wooden Heart,
This, My Book.
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Butte, Montana
November, 1901.
Butte, Montana
January 13, 1901
I, of womankind and of nineteen years, will now begin to set down as full and frank a Portrayal as I am able of myself, Mary MacLane, for whom the world contains not a parallel.
I am convinced of this, for I am odd.
I am distinctly original innately and in development.
I have in me a quite unusual intensity of life.
I can feel.
I have a marvelous capacity for misery and for happiness.
I am broad-minded.
I am a genius.
I am a philosopher of my own good peripatetic school.
I care neither for right nor for wrong - my conscience is nil.
My brain is a conglomeration of aggressive versatility.
I have reached a truly wonderful state of miserable morbid unhappiness.
I know myself, oh, very well.
I have attained an egotism that is rare indeed.
I have gone into the deep shadows.
All this constitutes oddity. I find therefore that I am quite, quite odd.
I have hunted for even the suggestion of a parallel among the several hundred persons that I call acquaintances. But in vain. There are people and people of varying depths and intricacies of character, but there is none to compare with me. The young ones of my own age - if I chance to give them but a glimpse of the real workings of my mind - can only stare at me in dazed stupidity, uncomprehending; and the old ones of forty and fifty - for forty and fifty are always old to nineteen - can but either stare also in stupidity, or else, their own narrowness asserting itself, smile their little devilish smile of superiority which they reserve indiscriminately for all foolish young things. - The utter idiocy of forty and fifty at times! -
These to be sure are extreme instances. There are among my young acquaintances some who do not stare in stupidity, and yes, even at forty and fifty there are some who understand some phases of my complicated character, though none to comprehend it in its entirety.
But, as I said, even the suggestion of a parallel is not to be found among them.
I think at this moment, however, of two minds famous in the world of letters between which and mine there are certain fine points of similarity. These are the minds of Lord Byron and of Marie Bashkirtseff. It is the Byron of Don Juan in whom I find suggestions of myself. In this sublime outpouring there are few to admire the character of Don Juan, but all must admire Byron. He is truly admirable. He uncovered and exposed his soul of mingled good and bad - as the terms are - for the world to gaze upon. He knew the human race. And he knew himself.
As for that strange notable, Marie Bashkirtseff, yes, I am rather like her in many points, as I’ve been told. But in most things I go beyond her.
Where she is deep, I am deeper.
Where she is wonderful in her intensity, I am still more wonderful in my intensity.
Where she had philosophy, I am a philosopher.
Where she had astonishing vanity and conceit, I have yet more astonishing vanity and conceit.
But she, forsooth, could paint good pictures, - and I - what can I do?
She had a beautiful face, and I am a plain-featured insignificant little animal.
She was surrounded by admiring, sympathetic friends, and I am alone - alone, though there are people and people.
She was a genius, and still more am I a genius.
She suffered with the pain of a woman, young, and I suffer with the pain of a woman, young and all alone.
And so it is.
Along some lines I have gotten to the edge of the world. A step more and I fall off. I do not take the step. I stand on the edge, and I suffer.
Nothing, oh, nothing on the earth can suffer like a woman young and all alone!
- Before proceeding farther with the portraying of Mary MacLane, I will write out some of her uninteresting history.
I was born in 1881 at Winnipeg, in Canada. - Whether Winnipeg will yet live to be proud of this fact is a matter for some conjecture and anxiety on my part. - When I was four years old I was taken with my family to a little town in western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and lonely life until I was ten. We came then to Montana.
Whereat the aforesaid life was continued.
My father died when I was eight.
Apart from feeding and clothing me comfortably and sending me to school - which is no more than was due me - and transmitting to me the MacLane blood and character, I can not see that he ever gave me a single thought.
Certainly he did not love me, for he was quite incapable of loving any one but himself. And since nothing is of any moment in this world without the love of human beings for each other, it is a matter of supreme indifference to me whether my father, Jim MacLane of selfish memory, lived or died.
He is nothing to me.
There are with me still a mother, a sister, and two brothers.
They also are nothing to me.
They do not understand me any more than if I were some strange live curiosity, as which I dare say they regard me.
I am peculiarly of the MacLane blood which is Highland Scotch. My sister and brothers inherit the traits of their mother’s family which is of Scotch Lowland descent. This alone makes no small degree of difference. Apart from this the MacLanes - these particular MacLanes - are just a little bit different from every family in Canada, and from every other that I’ve known. It contains and has contained fanatics of many minds - religious, social, whatnot. And I am a true MacLane.
There is absolutely no sympathy between my immediate family and me. There can never be.
My mother, having been with me during the whole of my nineteen years, has an utterly distorted idea of my nature and its desires, if indeed she has any idea of it.
When I think of the exquisite love and sympathy which might be between a mother and daughter, I feel myself defrauded of a beautiful thing rightfully mine, in a world where for me such things are pitiably few.
It will always be so.
My sister and brothers are not interested in me and my analyses and philosophy, and my wants. Their own are strictly practical and material. The love and sympathy between human beings is to them, it seems, a thing only for people in books.
In short, they are Lowland Scotch and I am a MacLane.
And so, as I’ve said, I carried my u
ninteresting existence into Montana. The existence became less uninteresting, however, as my versatile mind began to develop and grow and know the glittering things that are. But I realized as the years were passing that my own life was at best a vapid, negative thing.
A thousand treasures that I wanted were lacking.
I graduated from the High School with these things: very good Latin; good French and Greek; indifferent Geometry and other mathematics; a broad conception of History and Literature; peripatetic philosophy that I acquired without any aid from the High School; genius of a kind, that has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent strong young woman’s-body; a pitiably starved soul.
With this equipment I have gone my way through the last two years. But my life, though unsatisfying and warped, is no longer insipid. It is fraught with a poignant misery - the misery of Nothingness.
I have no particular thing to occupy me. I write every day. Writing is a necessity - like eating. I do a little housework, and on the whole am rather fond of it - some parts of it. I dislike dusting chairs, but I have no aversion to scrubbing floors. Indeed, I have gained much of my strength and gracefulness of body from scrubbing the kitchen floor - to say nothing of some fine points of philosophy. It brings a certain energy to one’s body and to one’s brain.
But mostly I take walks far away in the open country. Butte and its immediate vicinity present as ugly an outlook as one could wish to see. It is so ugly indeed that it is near the perfection of ugliness. And anything perfect, or nearly so, is not to be despised. I have reached some astonishing subtleties of conception as I have walked for miles over the sand and barrenness among the little hills and gulches. Their utter desolateness is an inspiration to the long, long thoughts and to the nameless wanting. Every day I walk over the sand and barrenness.
And so then my daily life seems an ordinary life enough, and possibly, to an ordinary person, a comfortable life.
That’s as may be.
To me it is an empty damned weariness.