I, Mary MacLane

by Mary MacLane

  But for want of—other, other people—I am intensely lonely. When I was eighteen I thought I must be the most lonely creature in this world. I analyzed my life then as now and it by itself had set me apart. But I stood then as it’s given Youth to stand—on High Ground. I was strong to endure loneliness while viciously hating it. There was unaware a hope-colored bliss in my inexperience which companioned me. I felt it then without knowing I felt it. I can see that plainly now.

  Now also I see plainly and feel plainly that I stand on lower ground, at poorer vantage. As my bodily strength which was then robust is now slight. The metaphysic life-shadows reach me more easily. They have a feel of fatally shutting down, fatefully closing in. They are the mirages on the dun-colored worldly air near me of my own useless untoward selves. There is no more the hope-colored bliss. At eighteen I said to me: ‘I’m lonely but some day I may be happily friendshiped and apprehended and it will be like paradise.’

  Now I say to me: ‘I’m lonely by fate and by nature and temperament. I’ve known some friendships of vivid alluringness and informingness—they await me now in the offing. And others. There is paradise in it—an odd sweet dubious paradise. But what’s the use—?’

  It’s that what’s-the-use, born of the lower vantage-ground and the closing-in shadows, that chiefly makes me lonely—lonely to a desperateness and on through to a ruinous calm. It is this metaphysic loneliness which breeds in me one constant reasonless restless urgent motif: to Express me: not of-the-past except desultorily, not of-the-future save indifferently: but of my low-toned, low-echoing now. Until I’ve Expressed me there’s no setting open the gates of my spirit to a passer-by, though the passer-by should be a poet-in-the-flesh, a god, an angel with a torch.

  Four-and-twenty turbulent moods may break over me in a day, or four-and-twenty passive ones, or four-and-twenty someway joyous ones. But like the theme in a fugue this loud tranquil recurrent need to Express me transcends them all.

  It is a big voracious part-human bird of prey. Of it too I say what’s-the-use. But it is a need without a use, a need scornful of use. It springs unconceived, unsourced from inside me. It rises from the ashes of blightingest moods and beats its bruising strong wings against my face.

  It says: ‘Know me, defer to me, Slim-woman. Serve me, follow me, gather-in all your answers for me. Do this though I undo you, though I rend you, tear you with my sharp teeth so like a wolfs. When you’ve answered me I may let you go. Until then, turn to me. Tell me: tell me again and again. Utter yourself. Interpret. Unfold.’

  It makes my life-space someway sweet, someway heartbreaking, someway frightful—strewn with dust of broken stars.

  I live long hours of nervous profound passionate self-communion. I discover strange lovely age-worn facets of my Soul. I discover the subtle panting Ego—the wonderful thing that lives and waits in its garbled radiance just beneath my skin. To ask oneself and make answer out of oneself is the most delicious of this life’s mental delectations. I might have missed it but for those beating bruising wings against my face, now and years ago: for expressing breeds the last Expressions.

  I might have gone on through years and decades and lumps of months knowing at best a little of some rare person, a little less or more of another rare person, a little of a musician’s soul in a nocturne, a little of a dead poet’s splendors. But to Me and my own fine spirit-relationships to those things I could remain, but for my radiant flawed egotistic interpreting, eternally strange.

  But for it I’d not have the wit to perceive the one human being in the world I may know with vitalness: my own Self. I should drop into my grave at last without a good-by to the glowing one who was locked just inside, whose hand I’d never clasped, whose sad prescient eyes I’d never looked in, who was then flitting out and on and away.

  It is a being cruel and transfiguring and terrifying: terribly worth clasping close and breathing with.

  And some days it sleeps, sleeps like the dead: it is delicater than rose-vapors before the dawn: a sun-blown faëry thing.

  When it sleeps I’m left alone. Then comes a doubtful dreadful quiet, a hell of dumbness that only God could reach.

  It is as if neither God nor I attempts to cope with it.

  BASTARD LACY VALENTINES

  To-morrow

  The thing I admire most is strength. The thing I most hate is Weakness, of each and every kind.

  All the reassuring things in the world are in and of the strong deeds done in it. All the mischief and despair come from human Weakness.

  I would better strongly murder my foe than forgive him Weakly for my seeming advantage. I would be happier in my mind as a careful charwoman than as a loose-jointed poet. I would rather have a farthing’s value as a faithful concubine than no value as a slattern housewife.

  Strength repays itself with strength—and with magnificence.

  Truth is strength nearly always: and not always. To cheat strongly in the life-game gets me more than does Weak easy honesty. By being a strong man Napoleon brought home the bacon. Being an honest one would have got him not one rasher of the bacon of his desire. The race is too ridden with ‘temperament’ to let truth be its prevailing force. But strength plows its scornful way through temperament like a steam-shovel. The bacon Napoleon brought home he took from other people, causing them misery. They were Weak and let him take it, or they were strong and got killed trying to keep it. To get killed trying to keep your bacon is to be even stronger than the Napoleon who lives and takes it from you. Those who sit still and let Napoleon get their bacon are fit only to be themselves made into bacon.

  Truth belongs with love, with friendship, with charity, with psychic loving-kindness: with all the altruistic graces and tendernesses.

  But in the mere grinding livingness of things it is to be strong. I say to Me, ‘Mary MacLane, be strong: whether you’re living joyous on a hill or mournful in a valley, make shift to be strong.’

  In which paragraphs I make an apologetic preamble to Me when about to dwell on my odd ironic element of Weakness. My Weakness is not an art nor a science nor a gift nor a trait but is a sort of ruinous trade touched with all of those, a trade at which I work and lose heavily from a viewpoint of personal economy.

  In Atlanta-Georgia lives a man with whom I exchange semi-occasional letters. He is thirty-nine and clever and what is called a business man. He is a business man not only by circumstance but by nature. At a glance one would picture him in the setting of an office in a steel-and-brick building with a roll-top desk, a swivel chair, a cabinet full of files, a stenographer with an unregenerate vocabulary, and stationery neatly engraved with his name, his business, his cable address and his telephone number. The look of the neat letterhead and the fibrous feel of the bond paper give one the idea that whoever went into a business venture with him would come out of it disadvantageously. After another glance at himself one would infer that his leisure hours might be fancifully spent. In hours of ease some business men follow baseball, others golf, ‘tired’ ones musical comedy. Others take up curio collecting or some personal phantasm. In the latter category is my acquaintance of Atlanta. He affects Mary MacLane and musings of her in his leisure hours. But what I am to him does not concern nor much interest me. What he is to me concerns me, for he—his letters— are a present source of my elaborated Weakness. I feel a wave of conscious Weakness washing over me as I write about it. His letters make a soft buffer, a foolish pretty window, a tinted veil between me and my too-harsh actualities.

  I met him when I lived in New York. He had read the book I wrote in the early nineteen-hundreds and at meeting me he conceived a thinly insistent admiration which someway went to his head. He has at intervals since then written me letters full of charmed and salubrious flattery and of appreciation and praise for traits and gifts and qualities which I do not possess. They appeal and cater remarkably to my vanity—and are pleasant and unreal and vain and fatuous and fond and piquant.

  He is a clever man and does not make love
to me. A butcher’s-boy may write love-letters—and I’d prefer those of a butcher’s-boy to those of a business man: they would be more sincere and less hopelessly discreet. But this business man is discerning and intuitive and writes me of love. His wife—a business man always has a wife—could not rationally object to what is in the letters, though she would irrationally and naturally object to the letters themselves. She is unloving and unloved—they always are—but whatever may be her caste (I know only that she is tall and blonde and named Bertha) she doubtless would find something superfluous in the idea of her husband’s letters to me.

  A letter comes from him in Georgia after I have written him a brief disquieting one with a latent human appeal in it to make him think the chief thing I need in life is his appreciation, his attitude toward me, to brace my spirit. Then his comes, written in his small slanting commercial hand. It is arresting from any angle and well thought, well couched. In it he tells me that my brain, scintillantly brilliant though it is, needs the dim twilights of other brains such as his to catch the sparks it throws off.

  Which is a lie. My brain is not scintillantly brilliant and it ‘needs’ nothing. But the lie is agreeable to read. There is a gentle caressingness in its untruth which feels someway soovhinger than any flattering fact.

  And he tells me my chief attraction as an individual is my ability accurately to gauge another individual and to breathe myself graciously out to it and upon it while pretending to be immersed in my own ego. Which is another lie. Immersed in my own ego is never a pretense with me, and I have not gauged— in the sense of weighing and measuring—another individuality except to hate it. But it is piquantly restful to hear that I am thus benign.

  And he tells me that though several years have passed since he and I took leave of one another he has never forgotten that last parting because it was like the passing of a little weir-woman who brushed him lightly with her garments as she went. Which is another lie. My association with him was in brief meetings at hectic studio tea-fights and two noisy dinners at Churchill’s, at all of which I frowned impatiently at his tiresome conversation. And his leave-taking with me consisted in his sharpening a lead-pencil—beautifully he sharpened it—for me to write a telegram with. It was not until this correspondence that we established an unreliable intimacy. But to be told I seemed a weir-woman to a hard-headed business man who could doubtless cheat a client out of four thousand dollars easily in a half-day’s maneuvering is oddly inspiriting. And he tells me he is highly privileged to be permitted to gaze in at the mezzo-tinted windows of my soul, which are surely curtained against the passing proletariat.

  Which is another lie. He has never remotely glimpsed my tired Soul in the firmly false little letters I’ve written him. As to its being a privilege if he had: it is the proletariat, it so happens, who have first chance at those windows, which are not mezzo-tinted but made of the plainest of plain glass. But the conceit tastes mellow and naif and bromidic and appetizing to me, like cream and raspberries in July.

  And he tells me the most delightful thing in the world would be to live near me and have a season of daily meetings—meetings of astral selves upon a ‘higher plane’ whereon we should exchange those flowers and fruits of the spirit which grow not from the soils but from the esoteric essences of life:—that sort of thing.

  Which is another lie. No possible man (except a Poet whom I loved—or perhaps a scientist—) could find me delightful for more than two consecutive meetings—I develop something like temper —and I care for no higher planes except in airships. As for esoterics—I would fainer exchange musings anent over-shoes than over-souls. And my spirit bears in fertile earthy soil chiefly thistles from which men gather no figs. But it gives me a warmish feeling, similar to a hot-water bottle between my shoulders on a winter night, to read that picturesque palaver written to me in my slim scorn by him in his springy swivel chair.

  Thus it goes. His letters are made all of softest quaintest lies which I know to be lies the moment my gray gaze falls on them. All his premises in regard to me and his deductions from them are roundly lightly mistaken. But I like that fluent flattery the more because it is so false. I am too vain a creature to want to cope often with truths even though they might be uplifting self-lauding truths. My vain peculiar Weakness demands as well semi-occasional collations of creamed lies upon which it feeds like a sleek cat on creamed fish. My humor enters into it, in no obvious way but eerily like a gay ghost. My humor is a strong influence in me. It is stronger than my pride and anger and fear and caution and reverence and self-love— stronger than most things I own.

  And it’s for reasons of pastime and vanity and oblique humor I let letters from the business man come, though not often, into my solitudes. And I spend hours of inert time-waste conning his fanciful ideas. And the letters I write him in reply, though brief and impersonal and done in my best false manner, consume a surprising lot of time and mental and physical force to write. It is the Weakness in it which is so devouring: it eats me hungrily and lingers about like a buzzard, picking my bones. A spinelessly Weak game. I hate its Weakness more than I like its pleasant futility. I hate it and myself in it all the time I’m dwelling on it. I hate it as I’d hate a little drug habit fastened on my nerves. Its influence is the same but more insidious than a drug would be, more demoralizing. As feeling fear makes one afraid, feeling more fear makes one more afraid.

  Still once in a month, once in a two-month, I feel the hankering itch to be applauded for second-rate qualities I do not own, and I give way to it: in a particularly Weak way, after my sanest self has reduced it analytically to shreds, and after saying bosh! with all my selves.

  After telling Me too that it is a common-tasting game. Life is a strange music-clangor of gold bells, some silent, some far-echoing. And the common-tasting thing cracks a bell-edge.

  Then briskly I answer the last letter from Atlanta-Georgia and soon there comes a fresh sheaf of smooth velvetish lies to pad my way.

  There may come no more if this I write now should find its way to Atlanta-Georgia. Or if fate or Bertha should intervene.

  But always I know Weakness of me will find ways to work at its losing trade.

  It is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature—like gold teeth and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines

  SWEET FINE SWEATINGS OF BLOOD

  To-morrow

  Merely from the view-point of outward intellect this book of myself is oddly difficult to write.

  My most-loved thing to do and my hardest thing to do is to write.

  It is hard to catch and hold with mental fingers one’s own emotions and then doubly hard to write them. A feeling is something without the words and without even the thought. To put it into the thought and then into the words is a minuter task than would be the translating of a Francois-Villon poem into Choctaw.

  It’s a knowing person who realizes her own emotions and a knowinger who recognizes what is what, who is who, which is which among them. I look inward at Me and I see an emotion of World-Weariness and want to write it. I write it as nearly as I can. But when I have done—it’s not World-Weariness that I wrote but its twin-sister, Boredom-of-the-Moment, which happened to be next the other when I looked. I am glad to have transcribed Boredom-of-the-Moment. It is the finer and thinner and more elusive of the two. But how and why did I fail of World-Weariness?

  But sometime when I aim at Fear or Resentment or Surprise it may be World-Weariness I’d bring down unexpectedly with a clean wing-shot.

  When I set out to write the Look-in-my-Eyes it may be the Feel-of-my-Fingers that comes out in my round writing.

  Another time I think I’m writing my Bad-Tooth: until I get it written when it turns out to be my little Eye-Wrinkles.

  Having failed of the thought often I fail of the words. When I have a particularly M.-Mac-Lane thought to express I review the top tier of my vocabulary of words to find proper ones for it. They are all very nice words in that top-tier—neatly washed and dressed
and hair-brushed and tidied-up, like the children in a small private school: words like Necessary and Irresolute and Crockery and Inconvenience and Broth and Apprise: good words and useful if one’s thought is radical or risky and wants conserving. I call some of them to me and question them and consider them and ponder a bit, and decide they will none of them suit. Then I go to the bottom tier, the unkemptest of words in the untidiest attire: words like Traipse and Nab and Glim and Hennery and Chape and Plash. And I at once reject those as too carelessly bred for my terse thoughts to associate with. (But for my uncombed ungroomed grimy-faced thoughts I turn to them.) Then I glance over a tier of mysterious words, spruce but with indefinable vagabond faces: such as Whelk and Mauger and Frush and Gnurl and Yare and Hyaline. They are expressive but of a kind it’s well to use with caution, the kind that may trip up thoughts that would make them their medium and lead to slips ’twixt cups and lips. So I dismiss them with a mental reservation of one or two to use if I fail to find right ones among the less mysterious. Then I turn to a tier that represents the virile middle-class in words, the lower-case words, the mob and riot words, the words for poets and anarchists and prophets: such as Adroit and Nightingale and Gallows and Gutter and Woman and Madrigal and Death. And I say, ‘Without doubt here are my words.’ But I use discretion. I know that tier of words to be of the nature of bombs, of strychnine, of a dynamic force resistible against all human and worldly substance. They also must be used cautiously and with a sparing hand. With caution one can handle a bomb, and sparingly one can eat strychnine, and one can control any dynamic force by studying its tendencies and keeping out of its direct road. It behooves one to heed those conditions in broaching the countermining counter-irritant words if one would avoid blowing oneself analytically broadcast.