But how can you know?
You are beautiful.
I am a small vile creature.
Always I awake to this fact when I think of the anemone lady.
I am not good.
But you are kind to me - you are kind to me - you are kind to me.
You have written me two letters.
The anemone lady came down from her high places and wrote me two letters.
It is said that God is somewhere. It may be so.
But God has never come down from his high places to write me two letters.
Dear, - do you see, you are the only one in the world.
Mary MacLane
April 12
Oh, the dreariness, the Nothingness!
Day after day - week after week, - it is dull and gray and weary. It is dull, DULL, DULL!
No one loves me the least in the world.
“My life is dreary - he cometh not.”
I am unhappy - unhappy.
It rains. The blue sky is weeping. But it is not weeping because I am unhappy.
I hate the blue sky, and the rain, and the wet ground, and everything. This morning I walked far away over the sand and these things made me think they loved me - and that I loved them. But they fooled me. Everything fools me. I am a fool.
No one loves me. There are people here. But no one loves me - no one understands - no one cares.
It is I and the barrenness. It is I - young and all alone.
Pitiful Heaven! - but no, heaven is not pitiful.
Heaven also has fooled me, more than once.
There is something for every one that I have ever known - some tender thing. But what is there for me? What have I to remember out of the long years?
The blue sky is weeping, but not for me. The rain is persistent and heavy as damnation. It falls on my mind and maddens my mind. It falls on my soul and hurts my soul. - Everything hurts my soul. - It falls on my heart and it warps the wood in my heart.
Of womankind and nineteen years, a philosopher of the peripatetic school, a thief, a genius, a liar, and a fool - and unhappy, and filled with anguish and hopeless despair. What is my life? Oh, what is there for me!
There has always been Nothing. There will always be Nothing.
There was a miserable, damnable, wretched lonely childhood. Itself has passed, but the pain of it has not passed. The pain of it is with me and is added to the pain of now. It is pain that never lets itself be forgotten. The pain of the childhood was the pain of Nothing. The pain of now is the pain of Nothing. Oh, the pathetic burlesque-tragedy of Nothing!
It is burlesque but it is none the less tragedy. It is tragedy that eats its way inward.
It is only I and the sand and barrenness.
I have never a tender thing in my life. The sand and barrenness has never a grass-blade.
I want a human being to love me. I have need of it. I am starving to death for lack of it.
Bitterest salt tears surge upward - sobs are shaking themselves out from the depths. Oh, the salt is bitter. I might lay me down and weep all day and all night - and the salt would grow more bitter and more bitter.
But life in its Nothingness is more bitter still.
It is burlesque-tragedy that is the most tragic of all.
It is an inward dying that never ends. It is the bitterness of death added to the bitterness of life.
What hell is there like that of one weak little human being placed on the earth - and left alone ?
There are people who live and enjoy. But my soul and I - we find life too bitter, and too heavy to carry alone. Too bitter, and too heavy.
Oh, that I and my soul might perish at this moment, forever!
April 13
I am sitting writing out on my sand and barrenness. The sky is pale and faded now in the west, but a few minutes ago there was the same old-time always-new miracle of roses and gold, and glints and gleams of silver and green, and a river in vermilions and purples - and lastly the dear, the beautiful: the red, red line.
There also are heavy black shadows.
I have given my heart into the keeping of this.
And still as always I look at it - and feel it all with thrilling passion - and await the Devil’s coming.
*
L’Envoi
October 28, 1901
And so there you have my Portrayal. It is the record of three months of Nothingness. Those three months are very like the three months that preceded them, to be sure, and the three that followed them - and like all the months that have come and gone with me, since time was. There is never anything different; nothing ever happens.
Now I will send my Portrayal into the wise wide world. It may stop short at the publisher; or it may fall still-born from the press; or it may go farther indeed and be its own undoing.
That’s as may be.
I will send it.
What else is there for me, if not this book?
And, oh, that some one may understand it!
- I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel - everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire. -
My portrayal in its analysis and egotism and bitterness will surely be of interest to some. Whether to that one alone who may understand it; or to some who have themselves been left alone; or to those three whom I, on three dreary days, asked for bread, and who each gave me a stone - and whom I do not forgive (for that is the bitterest thing of all): it may be to all of these.
But none of them, nor any one, can know the feeling made of relief and pain and despair that comes over me at the thought of sending all this to the wise wide world. It is bits of my wooden heart broken off and given away. It is strings of amber beads taken from the fair neck of my soul. It is shining little gold coins from out of my mind’s red leather purse. It is my little old life-tragedy.
It means everything to me.
Do you see, it means everything to me.
It will amuse you. It will arouse your interest. It will stir your curiosity. Some sorts of persons will find it ridiculous. It will puzzle you.
But am I to suppose that it will also awaken compassion in cool indifferent hearts? And will the sand and barrenness look so unspeakably gray and dreary to coldly critical eyes as mine? And shall my bitter little story fall easily and comfortably upon undisturbed ears, and linger for an hour, and be forgotten?
Will the wise wide world itself give me in my outstretched hand a stone -
*
FURTHER READING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
*
Atherton, Gertrude. Perch of the Devil. Frederick Stokes, New York, 1914, pp 37, 173.
- - - - - - - . Adventures of a Novelist. Liveright, New York, 1932, pp 490-492.
Burlingame, Merrill K. and Toole, K.R. A History of Montana. Lewis Historical Publishing Co., New York, 1957, vol. II, p 286.
Brooks, Van Wyck. The Confident Years. Dutton, New York, 1952, pp 319-320, 469.
Brownlow, Kevin. Behind the Mask of Innocence: Sex, Violence and Crime - Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1990, pp 30-33, 514-515.
Canfield, Mary Cass. Grotesques and Other Reflections. Harper & Bros., New York, 1927, pp 48-60. (Essay on I, Mary MacLane. Originally appeared as “Mary MacLane and the Apparent Agonies of Introspective Pathology,” under the byline “Peter Savage,” in Vanity Fair, June 1917.)
Derleth, August. Still, Small Voice. Appleton-Century, New York, 1940, pp 58-59. (Biography of MacLane’s New York World interviewer, Zona Gale.)
Doran, George H. Chronicles of Barrabas (1884-1934), Harcourt-Brace, New York, 1934, pp 29-30.
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br /> Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women From the Renaissance to the Present. William Morrow, New York, 1981, pp 299-300.
- - - - - - - . Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in America. Columbia University Press, New York, 1991, p 113.
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence and Nancy Peters. Literary San Francisco. City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1980, p 92.
Foster, Jeannette Howard. Sex Variant Women in Literature. Vantage, New York, 1956. (Reprinted by Diana Press, Baltimore, 1975.)
Garland, Hamlin. Companions on the Trail. Macmillan, New York, 1931, p 147.
Hall, Dr. G. Stanley. Adolescence: Its Psychology, and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education. Appleton, New York, 1904, Vol. I, p 559-560; Vol. II, p 629.
Katz, Jonathan Ned. Gay American History. Meridian, New York, 1992. (Rev. ed.; orig. pub. Crowell, New York, 1976.)
Kittredge, William and Smith, Annick, eds. The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1991. (Reprints passages from I Await and I, Mary.)
Kramer, Sidney. A History of Stone & Kimball and Herbert S. Stone & Co. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1940.
Mencken, H.L. “The Butte Bashkirtseff,” in Prejudices - first series. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1919, pp 123-128.
Richards, Dell. Lesbian Lists. Alyson Publications, Boston, 1990.
Ross, Ishbell. Ladies of the Press. Harper, New York, 1936, p 419.
Rudnick, Lois Palken. Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1984, pp 139-140.
Spacks, Patricia Meyers. The Female Imagination. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1975, pp 6, 166, 171-180, 182, 184, 189, 192, 205, 218, 250, 316, 317.
Truitt, Evelyn M. Who Was Who on Screen. R.R. Bowker & Co., New York, 1977, p 293.
Workers of the Writers’ Program of the WPA in the State of Montana. Montana - A State Guide Book. Viking Press, New York, 1939, p 103.
- - - - - - - . Copper Camp: Stories of the World’s Greatest Mining Town - Butte, Montana. Hastings House, New York, 1943, pp 1, 257-258.
*
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Newberry Library for permission to quote material from the Stone & Kimball and Herbert S. Stone & Co. archives and to the University of Chicago for permission to quote from the Harriet Monroe Papers at the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
*
As a convenience to readers of the printed first edition, page numbers have been retained.
*
M often refers to the prices and costs of things; in place of a myriad of conversions, a retrospective list of 2010 values for one US dollar is offered: 1918 - $14.35; 1917 - $16.85; 1916 - $19.78; 1915 - $21.28; 1914 - $21.50; 1913 - $21.78; 1912 - $22.30; 1911 - $23.10; 1910 - $23.10; 1909 - $23.96; 1908 - $23.96; 1907 - $23.09; 1906 - $23.95; 1905 - $23.95; 1904 - $23.95; 1903 - $23.95; 1902 - $24.86; 1901 - $25.85; sources: Historical Statistics of the United States (USGPO, 1975) and http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ (accessed 11 September 2011).
*
15. To the Devil - This dedication was wholly cut by the publishers.
17. peripatetic - Ref. to Aristotle, whose thrust is akin to M’s emphasis upon sense-experience, logical analysis, friendship, and self-realization. M plays upon the (now questioned) tracing of his philosophy’s nickname to his known habit of strolling as he taught - peripatein means “to walk about.”
17. Marie Bashkirtseff - Russian painter and diarist (1860-1884), died of tuberculosis in Paris. Bashkirtseff’s posthumously-published diary was well-known in its day for the writer’s unabashed egotism.
17. Byron of - His incomplete epic in the tragicomic ottava rima scheme was famed for its irony and vastness of scope. Goethe called it “a work of boundless genius.”
20. germs of intense - Poss. from story in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (orig. in Phaedo’s Zopyrus): as rendered by Nietzsche, “A foreigner who knew about faces once passed through Athens and told Socrates to his face that he was a monstrum - that he harbored in himself all the bad vices and appetites. And Socrates merely answered: ‘You know me, sir!’” (Twilight of the Idols, translated by Walter A. Kaufmann).
22. killed off by the sulphur smoke - Smelters operated within Butte’s city limits.
26. ozone - In this usage, archaic term for wind-freshened country air; thus, Ozone Park, Queens, New York (c. 1882) and Ozone, Tennessee (1896).
26. Bacchantes - Female Dionysus-worshippers in Euripdes’ play The Bacchae.
27. of shade - From the poem “The Meeting of the Waters” by the Irish musician, poet, popular entertainer (and friend of Byron’s) Thomas Moore (1779-1852): “Sweet vale of Avoca! how calm could I rest / In thy bosom of shade, with the friends I love best, / Where the storms that we feel in this cold world should cease, / And our hearts, like thy waters, be mingled in peace.”
27. memory is possession - From the prelude to the poem “Regret” by the English novelist and poet Jean Ingelow (1820-1897): It is true / That we have wept. But O! this thread of gold, / We would not have it tarnish; let us turn / Oft and look back upon the wondrous web, / And when it shineth sometimes we shall know / That memory is possession.
29. blue - Prob. Pulsatilla patens (“Eastern pasqueflower,” “prairie smoke”), poss. Anemone blanda (“Grecian Windflower”), both of fam. Ranunculaceae (buttercup); P. patens (sometimes incl. in genus Anemone) is a Montana-area native (indeed, is Manitoba’s provincial flower - a sub-species is S. Dakota’s state flower) and prized for its blooming near Easter (whence “Pasqueflower”); A. blanda is native to Lebanon, Syria, SE Europe, and Turkey, but is also known as “Blue Anemone” (as was P. patens in Montana in the early 20th c.).
30. to rejoice - From the 1864 free-love novel Victoire by Mary Clemmer (1839-1884, also known as Mary Clemmer Ames): Be faithful to thyself and to all that ever was thine. Thy friend is always thy friend. Not to have or to hold to love, or to rejoice in, but to remember.
32. when Omar - From the third stanza of the introductory poem by the Irish politician and author Justin Huntly McCarthy (1859-1936) to his translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1889): Alas for me, alas for all who weep / And wonder at the Silence dark and deep / That girdles round this little Lamp in space / No wiser than when Omar fell asleep.
33. James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916) - American Midwestern writer, best-seller in his time, known as “The Hoosier Poet” and “The Children’s Poet”; tended to the humorous or sentimental; contributed to the creation of regional literature in the US.
33. tragedy to - From aphorism attrib. to English antiquarian, litterateur, and politician Horace Walpole (1717-1797): “Life is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy to those who think.” (Attrib. at times to Molière.)
34. vile dust - Prob. from Sir Walter Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel” (pub. 1805): High though his titles, proud his name, / Boundless his wealth as wish can claim; / Despite those titles, power, and pelf, / The wretch, concentred all in self, / Living, shall forfeit fair renown, / And, doubly dying, shall go down / To the vile dust, from whence he sprung, / Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.
34. melancholy Jacques - From Shakespeare’s As You like It II:1 (spoken by the First Lord at the Forest of Arden): The melancholy Jaques grieves at that, / And, in that kind, swears you do more usurp / Than doth your brother that hath banish’d you.
34. dropsical - From “dropsy,” an archaic term for edema.
35. of green - From the poem “Afoot” by the Canadian author Sir Charles G.D. Roberts (1860-1943), known as “the Father of Canadian Poetry”: Comes the lure of green things growing, / Comes the call of waters flowing - / And the wayfarer desire / Moves and wakes and would be going.
35. law of compensation - From Emerson’s Essays: First Series (1841).
36. Anne “Ninon” de l’Enclos (1620-1705) - French courtesan and wit.
36. Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) - South African novelist and feminist; wrote The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Woman and Labour (1911).
37. pathetic - The modern contemptuous/ridiculing sense (which dates from the 1930s) must nowhere be applied to M’s use of the term.
43. Give thyself - From Charles E. Norton’s rendering (c. 1896) into English of J.B. Nicolas’ French translation of The Rubaiyat (1867): Give thyself to joy, for grief will be infinite. The stars shall again meet together at the same point of the firmament; but of thy body shall bricks be made for a palace-wall. Paragraphing appears to be M’s.
43. this be - From a song ref. to in, or a direct quote from, the novel Sir Jaffray’s Wife by English author Arthur Williams Marchmont (1852-1923): For answer, he kissed her again. / “Have I made you happy, Jaffray?” she asked, after a long pause. / By way of answer this time, he hummed the snatch of a song, “If this be vanity, vanity let it be,” an old teasing trick of his, when she had seemed to look for a compliment from him.
44. conceiving but - Poss. ref. to Descartes, specifically his argument that mind and body are two substances since they may be clearly and separately conceived. (If so intended, M ironically inverts and extends the argument in a passage of sensualism.)
44. heart with - From the final stanza of Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (pub. 1807): For oft, when on my couch I lie / In vacant or in pensive mood, / They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude; / And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils.
44. meeting of - Where the rivers Avonmore and Avonbeg meet to form the Avoca is called the Meeting of the Waters.
44. never to - From Shakespeare’s Henry VIII III:2: There is, betwixt that smile we would aspire to, / That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin, / More pangs and fears than wars or women have: / And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer, / Never to hope again.
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