I, Mary MacLane Read online

  I didn’t do this, of course. But I’m saying it now, and if Mary MacLane’s hungry ghost can hear me, I hope she will be a little bit satisfied.

  A CRUCIBLE OF MY OWN MAKING

  To-day

  It is the edge of a somber July night in this Butte-Montana. The sky is overcast. The nearer mountains are gray-melancholy.

  And at this point I meet Me face to face.

  I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and dearly and damnably important to Me.

  Face to face I look at Me with some hatred, with despair and with great intentness.

  I put Me in a crucible of my own making and set it in the flaming trivial Inferno of my mind. And I assay thus:

  I am rare—I am in some ways exquisite.

  I am pagan within and without.

  I am vain and shallow and false.

  I am a specialized being, deeply myself.

  I am of woman-sex and most things that go with that, with some other pointes.

  I am dynamic but devastated, laid waste in spirit.

  I’m like a leopard and I’m like a poet and I’m like a religieuse and I’m like an outlaw.

  I have a potent weird sense of humor—a saving and a demoralizing grace.

  I have brain, cerebration—not powerful but fine and of a remarkable quality. I am scornful-tempered and I am brave. I am slender in body and someway fragile and firm-fleshed and sweet.

  I am oddly a fool and a strange complex liar and a spiritual vagabond.

  I am strong, individual in my falseness: wavering, faint, fanciful in my truth.

  I am eternally self-conscious but sincere in it.

  I am ultra-modern, very old-fashioned: savagely incongruous.

  I am young, but not very young.

  I am wistful—I am infamous.

  In brief, I am a human being.

  I am presciently and analytically egotistic, with some arresting dead-feeling genius.

  And were I not so tensely tiredly sane I would say that I am mad.

  So assayed I begin to write this book of myself, to show to myself in detail the woman who is inside me. It may or it mayn’t show also a type, a universal Eve-old woman. If it is so it is not my purport. I sing only the Ego and the individual. So does in secret each man and woman and child who breathes, but is afraid to sing it aloud. And mostly none knows it is that he does sing. But it is the only strength of each. A bishop serving truly and tirelessly the poor of his diocese serves a strong vanity and ideal of the Ego in himself. A starving sculptor who lives in and for his own dreams is an Egotist equally with the bishop. And both are Egotists equally with me. Egotist, not egoist, is my word: it and not the idealized one is the ‘winged word.’ It is made of glow and gleam and splendor, that Ego. I would be its votary.

  So I write me this book of Me—my Soul, my Heart, my sentient Body, my magic Mind: their potentialities and contradictions.

  —there is a Self in each human one which lives and has its sweet vain someway-frightful being not in depths and not in surfaces but Just Beneath The Skin. It is the Self one keeps for oneself alone. It is the Essence of soul and bones. It is the slyest subtlest thing in human scope. It is the loneliest: tragically lonely. It is long, long isolation—beautiful, terrifying, barbarous, shameful, trivial to points of madness, ever-present, infinitely intriguing to oneself, passionately hidden: hidden forever and forever—

  It is my aim to write out that in the pages of this Me-book: no depths save as they come up and touch that, no surfaces save as they sink skin-deep. Only the flat unglowing bloody Self Just Beneath My Skin.

  I shall fail in it, partly because my writing skill is unequal to some nicenesses in the task, but mostly because I am not very honest even with myself. I’ll come someway near it.

  HALF INEVITABLY, HALF BY CHOICE

  To-morrow

  Half inevitably, half by choice, I write this book now.

  I am at a lowering impatient shoulder-shrugging life-point where I must express myself or lose myself or break. And I am quite alone as I live my life. And I am unhappy—a scornful unhappiness not of bitter positive grief which admits of engulfing luxuries of sorrow, but of muffled unrests and tortures of knowing I fit in nowhere, that I drift—drift—and it brings an unbearable dread, always more and more dread, into days and into wakeful nights.

  And writing it turns the brunt of it a little away from me.

  And to write is the thing I most love to do. And I myself am the most immediate potent topic I can find in my knowledge to write on: the biggest, the littlest, the broadest, the narrowest, the loveliest, the hatefulest, the most colorful, the most drab, the most mystic, the most obvious, and the one that takes me farthest as a writer and as a person. I write myself when I write the thoughts smouldering in me whether they be of Death, of Roses, of Christ’s Mother, of Ten-penny Nails.

  One’s thoughts are one’s most crucial adventures. Seriously and strongly and intently to contemplate doing murder is everyway more exciting, more romantic, more profoundly tragic than the murder done.

  I unfold myself in accursed and precious written thoughts. I cast the reflections of my inner selves on the paper from the insolent mirror of my Mind. —my Mind—it is so free—My Soul is not free: God hung a string of curses, like a little manacling chain, round its neck long and long ago. Always I feel it. My Heart is not free for it is dead: in a listless way and a trivial way, dead. And my Body—it is free but has a seeming of something wasted and useless like a dinner spread out on a table uneaten and growing cold.

  —but my free Mind—

  Though I were shut fast in a prison: though I were strapped in an electric chair: though I were gnawed and decayed by leprosy: I still could think, with thoughts free as gold-drenched outer air, thoughts delicate-luminous as young dawn, thoughts facile, seductive, speculative, artful, evil, sly, sublime. You might cut off my two hands: but you could not keep me from remembering the Sad Gray Loveliness of the Sea when the Rain beats, beats, beats upon it. You might admonish me by driving a red-hot spike between my two white shoulders: but you could not by that influence my Thoughts—you could not so much as change their current.

  I am intently aware of my Mind from moment to moment—all the passing life-moments. The awareness is a troubled power, a heavy burden and a wild enchantment.—

  Also what I feel I write.

  I am my own law, my own oracle, my own one intimate friend, my own guide though I guide me to deadwalls, my own mentor, my own foe, my own lover. I am in age one-and-thirty, a smouldering-flamed period which feels the wings of the Youth-bird beating strong and violent for flight—half-ready to fly away.

  I am not a charming person. Quite seventy singly used adjectives would better fit me. But I have some charm of youth, and a charm of sex, and a charm of intellect and intuition, and some charms of personality.

  I have a perfervid appreciation of those things in other persons. And my steel has sometime struck fire from their flint.

  But always my steel has turned back drearily yet strongly to itself.

  A TWISTED MORAL

  To-morrow

  If I should meet God to know and speak to the first thing but one I should ask him would be, ‘What was your idea, God, in making me?’

  I can believe he had some Purpose in it.

  I’m in most ways a devilish person. There’s sevenfold more evil than good in me. It is evil of a mixed and menacing kind, the kind that goes dressed in brave and beauty-tinted clothes and is sane and sound. While the good in me is ill and forlorn and nervously afraid—a something of tear-blurred eyes and trembling fingers.

  Yet God has made many things less plausible than me. He has made sharks in the ocean, and people who hire children to work in their mills and mines, and poison ivy and zebras—

  —and he has made besides a Wonder of things: Thin Pink Mountain Dawns, Young English Poets, Hydrangeas in the sudden Blue of their first Bloom, human Singing Voices,—more things, always more—Whe
n I think of them all a joyous thrill breaks over me like a little frenzied wave. It is delirium-of-bliss to feel oneself living though shadows be pitch-black. God has a Purpose in making everything, I think.

  I am half-curious about the Purpose that goes with me. He might have made me for his own amusement. He might have made me to discipline my Soul with some blights and goads or to punish it for bacchanalian ease and pleasure in the long-distant centuries-old past. He might have made me to season or scourge other lives, as I may touch them, with Mary-Mac-Lane-ness. He might have made me to point a twisted moral.

  I muse about it with doubts.

  But if I knew my Purpose I belike would not swerve a hair’s-breadth from my own course which is an unhallowedly selfish one.

  If I could myself see a way of truth I would walk in it. I have it in me to worship. I long to worship. And I am game, wearily and coldly game: when I start I go on through to the end.

  But I see no way of truth—none for me. And God is eternally absent and reticent. So I go on in the way where I find myself. And muse about it. And damn it faintly as I make nothing of it.

  EVERYDAY AND TO-MORROW

  To-morrow

  Aloofly I live in this Butte in the outward role of a family daughter with no responsibilities.

  This Butte is an incongruous living-place for me. And I have not one human friend in it—no kindliness. And Nature in her perplexingest mood would not of herself have cast me as a family daughter. Three things have kept me thus for four years past: that nothing has called me out of it: a slight family pressure like a tiny needle-point which pierces only if one moves: and to stay thus is presently the line of least resistance.

  Unless impelled to violent action by a violent reason—like love or hatred or jealousy or a baby or humiliated pride or rowelling ambition—a woman follows the physical line of least resistance. I have followed it these years with outward acquiescence and inward rages—languid rages which lay me waste. The years and acquiescences and rages have built up a mood which compasses me, drives me, damns me and lifts me up.

  It is a forceful mood, though I am not myself forceful. This mood is this book.—

  I live an immoral life. It is immoral because it is deadly futile. All my Tissues of body, soul, mind and heart are wasting, decaying, wearing down, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day: with no return to me or to my life, nor to anything human or divine.

  It makes me dread my life and myself.

  I do not quite know why.

  But to be an ardent pickpocket or an eager harlot would feel honester.

  My Everyday goes like this: I waken in the morning and lie listless some minutes with drooping eyelids. I look at a gilt-and-blue bar of morning light which slants palely in at one window and at a melting-gold triangle of sun which shows at the other window on the red brick wall of the house next to this. Then I say ‘another day,’ and I kick off bed-covers with one foot and slide out of my narrow bed, and into blue slippers, and out of a thin nightgown, and into peignoir or bathrobe. I twist and flatten and gather up my tangled hair and push some amber pins through it. And I go into a respectable green-and-gray bathroom and draw a bath and get into it. I splash in brief swift soapsuds, and go under a sudden heroic icy cold shower, and dry me with a scourging towel. Then I go back into the blue-white bed-room and get into clothes, feminine thin under-garments and a nunlike frock.

  I look in my mirror. Some days I’m a delicately beautiful girl. Other days I’m a very plain woman. One’s physical attractiveness is a matter of one’s mental chemistry.

  I say to Me in the mirror, ‘It’s you-and-me, Mary MacLane, and another wasting damning To-morrow.

  “To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow

  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.” ’

  A haunting decadence is in that To-morrow thought. And always the To-morrow thought comes out of my morning mirror. I dwell on it awhile, till my gray eyes and my lips and my teeth and my forehead are tired of it, and make nothing new of it.

  I jerk the flat scollop of hair at one side of my forehead and turn away. I open door and windows wider for the blowing-through of breezes. And I wander down-stairs. It is half-after nine or halfafter ten. I go into the clean empty clock-ticking kitchen and cook my breakfast. It is a task full of hungry plaisance and pleasantness. I make a British-feeling breakfast of tea and marmalade and little squares of toast and pink-and-tan rashers of bacon and two delightful eggs. Up to the moment of broaching the eggs the morning has an ancient sameness with other mornings. But eggs, though I’ve eaten them every day for quite five-and-twenty years, are always a fascinating novelty.

  They are delicious in my breakfast. So are the squares of toast and the bacon-rashers and the tea and marmalade. When I’ve done with them I lay down my napkin by my cup, light a cigarette, breathe a puft or two from it and feel contentedly aware that my brain has gone to rest in sweet tranquility with my breakfast. When my brain is in my head it analyzes the soul out of my body, the gleam out of my gray eyes, the savor out of my life, the human taste off my tongue. That post-breakfast moment is the only peace-moment I know in my day and in my life.

  Having puffed away the cigarette and read bits of a morning paper I then prove me arrantly middleclass by contemplating washing my breakfast dishes. I am middle-class, quite, from the Soul outward. But it is not specially apparent—one’s tastes and aspirations flit garbledly far and wide. But a tendency to wash one’s dishes after eating one’s breakfast feels conclusively and pleasantly middleclass. Not that I do always wash them, but always I think of it with the inclination to do it.

  I sit on the shaded front veranda in the summer noon day and look away south at the blue Highlands, ever snow-peaked: or east at the near towering splendid grim wall of the arid Rockies which separates this Butte from New York, from London,—the Spain-castles—the Pyramids—the Isle of Lesbos: or south-west beyond housetops at some foothills above which hangs a fairy veil made by melting together a Lump of Gold and an Apricot and spreading it thin.

  Then restlessly I go into the house and up to my room. I put it in order—in prim, prim immaculate order. One marked phase of mine is of some wanton creature—a maenad, a mental Amazon, a she-imp. But playing opposite to that is another—that of a New-England spinster steel-riveted to certain neat ferociously-orderly habits. A stray thread on my blue rug hurts, hurts me until I pick it up. Dust around my room gives me a nervous pain, a piteous gnawing grief-of-the-senses, until I’ve removed it. And my chastened-looking bed—after I’ve turned over its tufted mattress and ‘made’ it, smooth and white and crisp and soft—how the fibers of me would writhe should anyone sit on it. But no one sits on it. And I myself sooner than press one finger-tip down into its perfectness would sell my body to a Balkan soldier for four dimes: it is that way I feel about it. My bed must be kept perfect till the moment I slip into it at night to float under the dream-worlds.

  Then maybe I pull a soft black hat down over my hair and draw on gloves and go out into the gray-paved streets for a longish walk. Or maybe the day is humidly hot. Then I don’t go but stay in the blue-white room and mend a bit of torn lingerie or a handkerchief or a silk stocking or a petticoat. Or I take books and dig out some Greek—Homer or a Sapphic fragment—very laboriously but marvelling that I can do it at all: the first things one forgets being the last things one learned at school. Or I read an English or a French philosopher, or a translated Tolstoi, or a bit of Balzac novel, or some bits of Dickens-books with which latter I am long familiar and long enamored for the restful falseness of their sentiment and the pungent appetizing charm of their villains.

  And betweenwhiles I think and think.

  Then it’s dinnertime and I perhaps change into the other nun-like dress, and nibble some dinner with no appetite, and talk with the assembled small family in a vein and tone of life-long insincerity. When in family-circle-ness I’ve had to hide my true self as if behind a hundred black veils since the age of two years. It would be
a poignant effort now to show any of it at the family dinners, which is the only meeting-time. The one easy way is to be comprehensively insincere at the dinners where with no appetite I nibble. None there wants my sincerity, and so in my Soul’s accounting now it is eternally and determinedly No Matter. It is a little bell which stopped ringing long and long ago. If it rang now it would ring only No-Matter, No-Matter. Then it’s night and I go to take the walk I didn’t take in the afternoon. I walk down long lonely streets. Long lonely thoughts pile into me and through me and wrap me in a nebula that I can feel around me like a mantle. I walk two or three miles of paved streets till I’m very tired. I am lithe but fragile from constant involuntary self-analysis. One may analyze one’s life-experience and life-emotion till physical tissues at times grow frail, gossamer-thin. It is then as if—at a word, a whispered thought, a beat of the heart—one’s Soul might flutter through the Veil, join light hands with the death-angel and flee away.

  —but I love my life even while I analyze it bit by bit and so hate it. I love it in its grating monotones and its moments of glow and its days of shadow and storm and bitterish lowering passion—

  I walk back beneath a night sky of dusky velvet-blue decked with jewels of moon and star and flying bright-edged cloud. The night has a subdued preciousness, like an illicitly pregnant woman’s. It is big with the bastard-exquisite To-morrow. The night air kisses my lips and throat. I pull off my gloves to feel it on my hands. It gives me a charmed and unexciting feeling of being caressed without being loved.

  I come back to my blue-white room, take off my hat, ruffle my fingers through my hair, look at Me in the mirror and smile the melancholy wicked smile which I keep for Me-alone. It’s an intimate moment of greeting—a recognition of my Familiar on coming back to her. Often when I walk I go without Me, and wander far from Me, and forget Me. Then I sit at my flat black desk and write desultorily for two or three or four hours. Sometimes a letter, sometimes some verses or a hectic fancy in staid prose. But now mostly this. Then I go downstairs to a refrigerator or a cellar-way to find food—a slice off an affable cold joint, some chaste-looking slices of bread, a slim innocent onion. And I eat them, not relishingly but voraciously, reminding myself of a lean foraging furtive coyote. It is two or three or four in the morning. I smoke a quiet cigarette in a cool night doorway and count the nervous gray-velvet moths outside the screen. And all the while I think and think.