I, Mary MacLane

by Mary MacLane

  A countess, a courtesan and a convict-woman summarily pass over the front and middle of the magazine as containing nothing to their purpose. But like jungle denizens at their drinking pool the three of them meet hostilely on the common ground of a popular Cigarette featured in the Back—a blend to suit every taste—wherewith they unwittingly smoke away half their generic differentiations. The Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady anoint themselves nightly into a state of shining invisible kinship from separated twin jars of the same bewitching Cold Cream.

  I’m not sure myself and Miss Lily Walker of the Broadway chorus regard similarly a beauteous box of Rice Powder: she perchance would at once dash madly into it and powder herself o’er with it, whereas I would fain ponder about it awhile as a tiny be violeted adventure. But pondering or powdering, equally exciting to each of us is its delicate pale lilac blazonment in the Back of a magazine.

  The front of the magazine may mean little to you and the middle of the magazine may mean nothing to me: the Back of it none of us escapes.

  It is for Everybody, Everybody.

  Even Senegambians: they can look at the pictures and marvel over them.

  I can there meet a Senegambian on the common ground of it might be a delicate transparent oval of Pears’ Soap, pretty as a jewel of price: perchance we would each unconsciously feel we wouldn’t be happy till we got it.

  It’s only as playthings I want the Things in the Back of a magazine.

  To me they are toys, lyrics of matter, food of the senses.

  The octroi would have no sympathy with my loiterings among their wares. It is a fête of my own, indolent and fanciful, unrecognized in commerce. Any article I may put to its forthright use in actuality becomes an idyllic toy when I find it in the Back of a magazine. The desirable Revolvers are not firearms with which to shoot myself and burglars, but only bijous to have and handle and caress. The luxuriant vervain and violet-scented Soaps are not for my toilet, but something to eat, for my astral body to feed on—nourishing food they make. The lush Cold Creams have no massaging possibilities in them—they are for my thoughts to gambol among, for my meddlesome spirit-fingers to touch and fuss with deliciously, blissfully, transcending all vulgar use. The men’s thin Watches mean nothing to me as Watches: and their Garters—what’s it to me whether no-metal-can-touch-you or no-metal-at-all? My thoughts merely revel and juggle with them, picture and legend—they are pastimes of my child-self. The cream-woven Note Papers are not to write on but wherewithal to imagine how cool and smooth they would feel drawn slowly across my flushed cheek. A sack of Flour—I feel only how I’d like to have it spilled out—eventually-why-not-now—in a thick warm-tinted heap on the blue-velvety floor of my room that I might roll and bathe in it and feel it feathery-fluffy on my skin.

  So I play with my toys on black-browed Wednesdays. Some Wednesdays even fail to be black-browed because there are Backs to magazines.

  THE CONSCIOUS ANALYST

  To-morrow

  I don’t know whether I write this because I wear two plain dresses or whether I wear two plain dresses because I write it.

  My life fell into a lowering mood which calls for but two dresses: which mood compels me to write out these things that are in me as inevitably as heavy gathered clouds come raining to the ground. The mood having overtaken me I can not keep from writing this day after day, more than I can keep from brushing my hair every day, and eating lumps of food every day, and picking up tiny white specks from my blue rug.

  I love this book and I fear and hate it. I love the writing of it though it is a finical unobvious task— more so than it looks. And often I fear to read it over lest I hurt my own feelings. And I hate it in ways. I am a particularly sane woman when all’s said. And many things I come to in me are grating and inexplicable and incongruous.

  But also I love it. It is my companion ‘when the world is gone.’ I am as solitary as if I had no human place in this earth. My days are as silent as if I lived in it alone. The few voices that bespeak me in a day or a week stop at my ear-drums and are immensely alien. At times, for weeks on end, I am quite alone in this house and the silence then has a depth and a hollowness. From it I feel not alone in a house but alone in a world: and more when the family is in the house.

  And it is what-should-l-do if I had not a writing talent to expend me upon from day to day, and so rest me. I feel God around some corner but that feeling is no rest, but only an odd terror which wants the dignity of terror.

  Times I wonder if I shall have this published afterward for all to read and if so what colors it will paint on my world—and what else may befall.

  But it’s an aspect dim and remote now. I wearing but two nun-like dresses and face to face with me, have nothing to do with publishing books and with the beautiful noisy world and its befallings. It is easy to believe I shall never again have to do with any of that. This may be my death-mood. I am very tired. The weight of being a person is heavy on me as weights of lead. And still I know if I suddenly bloomed with beautiful frocks and went out to-morrow to lose myself among people, people, people I should at once achieve a veneer of the utmost frivol. I have an odd frivolous quality full of an ardor and strength, with all of my mental mettle in it. Also I know if I did that now it would be but postponing this analytic reckoning. Which would confront me again with the more rancor, the more futileness gathered into it from having been put off.

  This book and the two dresses are my present portion. If I could escape them (I am not quite sure I want to—but—hell!)—it would be of no use. They would come back again in an unexpected ripeness of time and demand a hearing: an exquisite nervous tragic hearing.

  They are such stuff as the conscious analyst is made of.

  But though I’m the conscious analyst I can’t quite tell whether I write the book because I wear two plain black dresses or I wear those because I write it.

  EYE WHEN I MEAN TOOTH

  To-morrow

  I write it, and it’s a surprising book.

  It is not what on the surface it looks to be.

  I do not write what my clear Mind may want to say to the white blank paper.

  I do not write what my thoughts are saying to me.

  Those things are facile, uninformed—flat mental pictures, the writer’s craft.

  I write what still voices of life: voices trivially frightful in their secret pettiness: voices of all my life—merest living—say to my ancient Soul and my young present Body and what they two may answer. I am in some sort a wonderful person—and in places I do that, nearly perfectly.

  I am also tired and someway whelmed by self-conscious despair, and possessed of a talent imperfect and inadequate to reveal the radiances and shades my being perceives: and in places I fail.

  I fail remarkably. I write Eye when I mean Tooth. I write Fornicate when I mean Caress. I write Wine when I mean Blood. For no better reason than that my writing hand is not sufficiently dexterous: the little flashing shutters open and shut so quick that the second ones are shut and the third starting to open before I have got written the things I saw through the first ones.

  Only not always.

  A WILD MARE

  To-morrow

  Also I am dissatisfying to myself.

  My thoughts smother me: they keep me from life.

  I am a hundred times more introspective than most people, most women. Most women, even conventional ones, are lawless—the more conventional, the more lawless usually. And so most women beat me to life. Where they yield to an impulse the moment they feel it—I, because an impulse itself is adventure-fabric:—I feel of its quality, test it for defects, wash a little corner of it to see if the color will run—and conclude not to use it.

  That I gaze inward at the garbled biograph of Me keeps me from several sorts of violent action.

  I have violent action in me, chained in analysis.

  Most women are secretly lawless on the old plan inaugurated by Eve—of inclining to do anything forbidden, of hugging everyt
hing they are unsupposed to hug, of determinedly kicking over the traces when coerced too much. The ban is the chief attraction.

  It’s but little like that with me. There would be point and purpose in my Action. But it is kept in stupor by analysis. I am malcontent about that, though I live upon analysis. I hate the inaction and inertia that follow on its heels.

  I could be an anarchist. I condemn anarchists but not as I condemn Me. I would respect me more were I this moment prisoned in a real bastile for having stuck a good knife into a bad king. I could feel, no matter how foolish and mistaken in itself the act, that I had done the strong and brave thing at sacrifice of my personal selves. The dry living death of the prison would be compensated for each day when I said to Me, ‘It was a needful honorable act and I did it: for once in my life I was a Regular Person.’

  There would be a nourishment in being able to tell that to myself. There would be warming food in owning one so brave remembrance of myself

  But, my Soul-and-bones!—at the very moment of lifting the good knife a thought would come: ‘How is this king worse than another? What rotten rascal mightn’t rise in his place?’ And on with a lightning-trail of analysis till my pale hand dropped inert and the knife in it grew harmless as a lily-petal. It isn’t that I haven’t the guts. I have.

  I am a wild mare in foal: and unfoaling.

  THE MIST

  To-morrow

  Because I am to myself someways dissatisfying and exasperating often this thing I write is dissatisfying and exasperating.

  It is a true account of what is inside me. ‘The wine must taste of its own grapes.’

  It would be easier to make it an untrue account, for fiction is the most effortless of writing. So I have found it. And I am very clever.

  I could write myself as a pretty dainty harmlessly purring one—the leopard with claws clipped and fangs drawn.

  When my dynamos rest I am like that, doubtless.

  But the wears and tears of breathing and the influences of varied life-details and of clothes worn and food eaten start me moving devilishly.

  Phases of a score of persons, men and women, come to light in me.

  To be one human being means to be monstrously mixed.

  I write me out not as I might be, nor as I should be— whatever that may be—: but merely as I am. As, Just Beneath The Skin, I am.

  So my written account must come out someways dissatisfying and exasperating. Logically dissatisfying and divinely and ethically exasperating.

  —a passage in Vergil tells of a Mist that is all over and about this world from the human ‘tears that are falling, falling, falling always.’ Something, and it may be that Mist, makes one’s view of everything—everything in life—a little blurred. It may even blur one’s view of oneself. So it may be I do not see myself with entire clearness—

  I only know I write me as clearly as I see me, considering the Mist.

  A WHITE LINER

  To-morrow

  To-day came the Finn woman and cleaned.

  She comes now and again and cleans excellently.

  I would like to clean my room myself but lack the strength and skill to do it well.

  But I stay with the Finn woman and show her how and I watch her work and muse upon her. She would be called in England a charwoman, but in this America of the vast mongrel heterogenesis she is an unclassified laborer.

  I like to watch her and talk with her a bit and dwell on her mixed potentialities. She contrasts fascinatingly with me.

  She is a human being and so am I, and beyond and with that there are odd parallels and similarities and distinctions between her and me.

  Her name is Josephina and she looks as if it might be. Mine is Mary MacLane but I don’t look entirely like it.

  She lives a lonely life and so do I, differing in sort and circumstance.

  I am middle-class and American of Canadian reminiscence, and early-thirty.

  Josephina is Finn and lower-class with a ‘foreign’ my blue-and-white bedroom.

  look, and she is forty-five and looks sixty and is twelve years out of Finland.

  I am tallish and slim and weigh nine wavering stone.

  The Finn woman is short and solid and weighs all of a hundred and seventy pounds.

  I am slender of flank and ankle, narrow through the loins and bony at the shoulders.

  The Finn woman is thick everywhere, broad of girth and deep of chest like a Percheron stallion.

  I am darkish with dusky gray eyes.

  Josephina is dirty-blond with pale narrow blue eyes like a china doll’s.

  My sex feels to me like a mysterious sweetness. Josephina’s sex looks porcinely obvious and uninteresting like her large dubious breasts.

  I am inwardly full of strong-flavored emotions.

  The one positive outward feeling Josephina manifests is a dull but comprehensive hatred, peculiar to her nationality and station, for everything Swedish.

  The Finn woman has a husband now and had a different one formerly.

  I have none and never had.

  Josephina is elemental primeval woman.

  So am I but terrifically qualified by complexity, incongruity.

  I have white smooth firm beautiful hands.

  Josephina’s hands are particularly ugly and have a menacing look.

  I have quick intelligence.

  Josephina is markedly stupid.

  I live in a quiet clean bungalow.

  Josephina lives in an unusually filthy unrestful little house. I own two dresses whose personnel alters at intervals. Josephina owns one unchanging dress, septic, maculate and repellent.

  I have a sense of humor vivid and intriguing to myself.

  Josephina has no more sense of humor than a flatiron.

  I bathe foamily icily each morning.

  Josephina would seem never to have had a bath. She cleans windows and floors and rugs for thirty-ive cents an hour. She would regard it as a fantastic waste of time and soap to clean herself for nothing. I own in a still flawed life one phase which is an endless treasure of beauty and power and charm and light: my love for John Keats.

  The Finn woman owns about the same thing in a life which may be more still and flawed than mine: her love for strong drink.

  There begins a curious line of similitude between us. I feel oddly joyous and light of heart on a solitary veranda corner with the John-Keats poetry book open in my lap.

  And Josephina has been found many a time by Butte policemen sitting alone joyous and very drunk, in dark alleys with empty pint bottles strewn all about her.

  In my un-Keats hours I am mostly mournful. And Josephina sober has all the melancholy of her race with an added gloom, as if the acetylene had run out of all her lamps. That my melancholy is more lustrous than hers I lay to her native dullness as against my native braininess, and to alcohol’s having rotting effects on human mental tissues: whilst John Keats to those who drink his poetry is a starry savior. I like to think there’s the same ambrosial food in the Demon Rum for Josephina as in the Grecian Urn for me.

  There seems no other pleasure in life for her.

  The limit of her literary pursuit is the reading of a four-page Finnish newspaper full of obituaries.

  The opalescent enchantments of her inner being mean nothing to her: she wouldn’t know her entity from her duodenum.

  Her body can bring her no delight: there’s no lightness to it, no tang, no feminine charm, no consciousness to make her love it as the Dianas love theirs.

  A sunset above the western peaks is less than a setting sun to her.

  Her food is merely her fodder.

  Love and Romance pass her by. She and the husband vie with each other for solitary possession of their little nasty house. And her personality is not conducive to lovers.

  She has nor chick nor child to mother.

  Her idea of a life beyond this vale is crude and uncomfortable. She went two Sundays to the Finnish church and had a surprising lusty doctrine of eternal fire
rammed down her throat: she took the Finn minister’s word for it and quitted the fold, preferring to live this life unhampered by flaming anticipation. All her material treasure she works for with mops and scrubbing-brushes at thirty-five cents an hour.

  Other roads being thus blocked it is sing-ho for King Alcohol in pint bottles.

  Josephina is what is called a white liner. Which means that she has drunk so long, so much, so regularly that whiskey, rum, gin and brandy have no or negligible effects upon her. To achieve her intoxicating aim she must drink pure alcohol.

  By the same token I eschew many a tame poet: l must have John Keats.

  What the poetry of John Keats does to me I know. What the distilled waters of her choice do to Josephina it pleases me to imagine while I watch her clean my walls and floor and windows.

  She works strongly, steadily, quietly till I pronounce the room clean. Then she stops, carries the pails and other things downstairs to the kitchen, removes a big brass pin from the rear of her dingy skirt which had held it back and doubled over her darkling petticoat, re-dons an antique rain-coat and bad hat, ties her clinking silver into the corner of a decadent handkerchief, bids me good-evening with a grave blond Finn bow and goes out into the dusk. She takes her way through alleys and short-cuts to the side door of a ‘Finlander’ gin-palace in the Finn quarter of the town. And there she lays out her day’s wage in the pint bottles of her delight. As many pint bottles as her few dollars will buy, so many she buys. She ventures her all in the name of passionate thirst taking no thought of the morrow. She then seeks out some alley with a dark door-step and there she does her drinking. It would not do to go home with her alcoholic wealth because the husband might be there who, like the alphabetic vintner, would ‘drink all himself.’ So she drinks away in pint-bottle-ish peace, sitting alone in the gloom of the alleyway door-step, in her limp raincoat and bad hat and her stolid Finn self-sufficience. Because I like Josephina it charms me to think of the happiness that must be hers as she sits emptying pint bottles into herself and the white strong firewater begins to work.