To Be Mary MacLane

So then, yes. As I have said, I find that I am quite, quite odd. My various acquaintances say that I am funny. They say, “Oh, it’s that Mary MacLane, Dolly’s younger sister. She’s funny.” But I call it oddity. I bear the hall-mark of oddity.

There was a time, a year or two since, when I was an exceedingly sensitive little fool—sensitive in that it used to strike very deep when my young acquaintances would call me funny and find in me a vent for their distinctly unfriendly ridicule. My years in the high school were not years of joy. Two years ago I had not yet risen above these things. I was a sensitive little fool.

But that sensitiveness, I rejoice to say, has gone from me. The opinion of these young people, or of these old people, is now a thing that is quite unable to affect me.

The more I see of conventionality, it seems, the more I am odd.

Though I am young and feminine—very feminine—yet I am not that quaint conceit, a girl: the sort of person that Laura E. Richards writes about, and Nora Perry, and Louisa M. Alcott,—girls with bright eyes, and with charming faces (they always have charming faces), standing with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet,—and all that sort of thing.

I missed all that.

I have read some girl-books, a few years ago—“Hildegarde Grahame,” and “What Katy Did,” and all,—but I read them from afar. I looked at those creatures from behind a high board fence. I felt as if I had more tastes in common with the Jews wandering through the wilderness, or with a band of fighting Amazons. I am not a girl. I am a woman, of a kind. I began to be a woman at twelve, or more properly, a genius.

And then, usually, if one is not a girl one is a heroine—of the kind you read about. But I am not a heroine, either. A heroine is beautiful—eyes like the sea shoot opaque glances from under drooping lids—walks with undulating movements, her bright smile haunts one still, falls methodically in love with a man—always with a man, eats things (they are always called “viands”) with a delicate appetite, and on special occasions her voice is full of tears. I do none of these things. I am not beautiful. I do not walk with undulating movements—indeed, I have never seen any one walk so, except, perhaps, a cow that has been overfed. My bright smile haunts no one. I shoot no opaque glances from my eyes, which are not like the sea by any means. I have never eaten any viands, and my appetite for what I do eat is most excellent. And my voice has never yet, to my knowledge, been full of tears.

No, I am not a heroine.

There never seem to be any plain heroines, except Jane Eyre, and she was very unsatisfactory. She should have entered into marriage with her beloved Rochester in the first place. I should have, let there be a dozen mad wives upstairs. But I suppose the author thought she must give her heroine some desirable thing—high moral principles, since she was not beautiful. Some people say that beauty is a curse. It may be true, but I’m sure I should not have at all minded being cursed a little. And I know several persons who might well say the same. But, anyway, I wish some one would write a book about a plain, bad heroine so that I might feel in real sympathy with her.

So far from being a girl or a heroine, I am a thief—as I have before suggested. I mind me of how, not long since, I stole three dollars. A woman whom I know rather well, and lives near, called me into her house as I was passing and asked me to do an errand for her. She was having an ornate gown made, and she needed some more appliqué with which to festoon it. The appliqué cost nine dollars a yard. My trusting neighbor gave me a bit of the braid for a sample and two twenty-dollar bills. I was to get four yards. I did so, and came back and gave her the braid and a single dollar. The other three dollars I kept myself. I wanted three dollars very much, to put with a few that I already had in my purse. My trusting neighbor is of the kind that throws money about carelessly. I knew she would not pay any attention to a little detail like that,—she was deeply interested in her new frock; or perhaps she would think I had got thirty-nine dollars’ worth of appliqué. At any rate, she did not need the money, and I wanted three dollars, and so I stole it.

I am a thief.

It has been suggested to me that I am a kleptomaniac. But I am sure my mind is perfectly sane. I have no such excuse. I am a plain, downright thief.

This is only one of my many peculations. I steal money, or anything that I want, whenever I can, nearly always. It amuses me—and one must be amused.

I have only two stipulations: that the person to whom it belongs does not need it pressingly, and that there is not the smallest chance of being found out. (And of course I could not think of stealing from my one friend.)

It would be extremely inconvenient to be known as a thief, merely.

When the world knows you are a thief it blinds itself completely to your other attributes. It calls you a thief, and there’s an end. I am a genius as well as a thief—but the world would quite overlook that fact. “A thief’s a thief,” says the world. That is very true. But the mere fact of being a thief should not exclude the consideration of one’s other traits. When the world knows you are a Methodist minister, for instance, it will admit that you may also be a violinist, or a chemist, or a poet, and will credit you therefor. And so if it condemns you for being a thief, it should at the same time admire you for being a genius. If it does not admire you for being a genius, then it has no right to condemn you for being a thief.

—And why the world should condemn any one for being a thief—when there is not within its confines any one who is not a thief in some way—is a bit of irony upon which I have wasted much futile logic.—

I am not trying to justify myself for stealing. I do not consider it a thing that needs to be justified, any more than walking or eating or going to bed. But, as I say, if the world knew that I am a thief without being first made aware with emphasis that I am some other things also, then the world would be a shade cooler for me than it already is—which would be very cool indeed.

And so in writing my Portrayal I have dwelt upon other things at some length before touching on my thieving propensities.

None of my acquaintances would suspect that I am a thief. I look so respectable, so refined, so “nice,” so inoffensive, so sweet, even!

But, for that matter, I am a great many things that I do not appear to be.

The woman from whom I stole the three dollars, if she reads this, will recognize it. This will be inconvenient. I fervently hope she may not read it. It is true she is not of the kind that reads.

But, after all, it’s of no consequence. This Portrayal is Mary MacLane: her wooden heart, her young woman’s-body, her mind, her soul.

The world may run and read.

I will tell you what I did with the three dollars. In Dublin Gulch, which is a rough quarter of Butte inhabited by poor Irish people, there lives an old world-soured, wrinkled- faced woman. She lives alone in a small, untidy house. She swears frightfully like a parrot, and her reputation is bad—so bad, indeed, that even the old woman’s compatriots in Dublin Gulch do not visit her lest they damage their own. It is true that the profane old woman’s morals are not good—have never been good—judged by the world’s standards. She bears various marks of cold, rough handling on her mind and body. Her life has all but run its course. She is worn out.

Once in a while I go to visit this old woman—my reputation must be sadly damaged by now.

I sit with her for an hour or two and listen to her. She is extremely glad to have me there. Except me she has no one to talk to but the milkman, the groceryman, and the butcher. So always she is glad to see me. There is a certain bond of sympathy between her and me. We are fond of each other. When she sees me picking my way towards her house, her hard, sour face softens wonderfully and a light of distinct friendliness comes into her green eyes.

Don’t you know, there are few people enough in the world whose hard, sour faces will soften at sight of you and a distinctly friendly light come into their green eyes. For myself, I find such people few indeed.

So the profane old woman and I are fond of each other. No question of morals, or of immorals, comes between us. We are equals.

I talk to her a little—but mostly she talks. She tells me of the time when she lived in County Galway, when she was young—and of her several husbands, and of some who were not husbands, and of her children scattered over the earth. And she shows me old tin-types of these people. She has told me the varied tale of her life a great many times. I like to hear her tell it. It is like nothing else I have heard. The story in its unblushing simplicity, the sour-faced old woman sitting telling it, and the tin-types,—contain a thing that is absurdly, grotesquely, tearlessly sad.

Once when I went to her house I brought with me six immense, heavy, fragrant chrysanthemums.

They had been bought with the three dollars I had stolen.

It pleased me to buy them for the profane old woman. They pleased her also—not because she cares much for flowers, but because I brought them to her. I knew they would please her, but that was not the reason I gave her them.

I did it purely and simply to please myself.

I knew the profane old woman would not be at all concerned as to whether they had been bought with stolen money or not, and my only regret was that I had not had an opportunity to steal a larger sum so that I might have bought more chrysanthemums without inconveniencing my purse.

But as it was they filled her dirty little dwelling with perfume and color.

Long ago, when I was six, I was a thief—only I was not then, as now, a graceful, light-fingered thief—I had not the philosophy of stealing.

When I would steal a copper cent out of my mother’s pocketbook I would feel a dreadful, suffocating sinking in my bad heart, and for days and nights afterwards—long after I had eaten the chocolate mousse—the copper cent would haunt me and haunt me, and oh, how I wished it back in that pocketbook with the clasp shut tight and the bureau drawer locked!

And so, is it not finer to be nineteen and a thief, with the philosophy of stealing— than to be six and haunted day and night by a copper cent?

For now always my only regret is, when I have stolen five dollars, that I did not steal ten while I was about it.

It is a long time ago since I was six.

Editors’ note: In 1902, Mary MacLane, a nineteen-year-old-girl from Butte, Montana, published a book detailing her fantasies, her outrageous philosophical ideas, and intimations of her own genius. The book was a sensation, selling a hundred thousand copies in its first month, and launching her into a short but fiery life of writing and misadventure. A template for the confessional memoirs that have become ubiquitous, “I Await the Devil’s Coming,” is being published in a new edition by Melville House this week. Here’s an excerpt.

Why I Am A Thief. By Mary MacLane. The New Yorker , March 18, 2013.

“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.” Thus begins one of the most unusual books in our literature, by one of the most scandalous American writers.

When The Story of Mary MacLane was published by the prestigious Chicago firm of Herbert S. Stone and Company in April 1902, its author was skyrocketed to nationwide notoriety. The book was an immediate sensation. Nothing like it had ever been seen before, and the fact that it was the work of a teenage girl—living in Butte, Montana, of all places—made the scandal complete. Every Associated Press affiliate in the country ran a front-page story on it. Here for the first time was a young woman’s “inner life shown in its nakedness”:

      I have discovered for myself the art that lies in obscure shadows. I have discovered the art of the day of small things … 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 … May I never become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity—a virtuous woman …

Respectable critics roared their disapproval. “Mary MacLane is mad,” wrote the New York Herald. “She should be put under medical treatment, and pens and paper kept out of her way until she is restored to reason.” The New York Times urged that she be spanked. Other critics raised the charge of “obscenity.” When the Butte Public Library announced that it would not allow the book on its shelves, the Helena Daily Independent applauded, arguing that if this book “should go in, all the self-respecting books in the library would jump out of the window.”

The Story of Mary MacLane was an instant best seller. Some eighty thousand copies were sold the first month alone, and the resulting $17,000 in royalties allowed MacLane to fulfill her greatest ambition: to escape Butte. The book went through several printings, and its author remained front-page news for years. Mary MacLane Societies were organized by young women all over the country. The popular vaudeville team of Weber and Fields—remembered today mostly as the introducers of pie-in-the-face gags—did a burlesque of the book. A full-length spoof was published, titled The Story of Willie Complain. “Montana’s lit’ry lady” found her way into the comics and popular songs. There was even a Mary MacLane Highball, “with or without ice-cream, cooling, refreshing, invigorating, devilish, the up-to-date drink.”

The rage for “MacLaneism,” against which leading critics from coast to coast declaimed so fervently, also had its more somber aspect. It was reported that a Chicago girl who had organized the local Mary MacLane Society was arrested for stealing a horse. She said she committed the theft because she needed the experience for a novel she was writing. And on May, 4 1902, the Great Falls Daily Tribune told of a Michigan fifteen-year-old who “imagined herself ill-used and misunderstood. The reading of the morbid ravings of the Butte girl convinced her that she was, and a dose of arsenic followed. She died with a copy of the book in her hands.” According to some reports, MacLane’s book prompted a whole rash of suicides.

Who was Mary MacLane—this Montana girl who drove literary critics to distraction and made moralists furious, and whose book was said to provoke insanity, crime, and suicide?

Descended from “a long line of Scotch and Canadian MacLanes,” Mary was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on May 2, 1881. Throughout her life she was fiercely proud of her father’s “Highland Scot” heritage, and she considered her own rebellious genius to be a direct result of it. At age four her family moved to western Minnesota. Her father died when she was eight. A few years later, after her mother had remarried—this time to “a mining man”—they pressed on to Montana, finally settling in Butte in the mid-1890s. Those who knew Mary MacLane in those years recalled her as a studious, withdrawn, and somewhat morbid child; her schoolmates called her “The Centerville Ghost” because she liked to prowl around the local cemetery at night. For two years she edited the Butte High School paper. She graduated in 1899, with proficiency in Latin, Greek, and other languages.

She seems to have read whatever came her way—everything from Nick Carter pulp mysteries to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Drawn to the great Romantic poets, Byron and Keats above all, she was also fond of “books for boys.” She did not, however, care for “girls’ books”: “I felt as if I had more in common with the Jews wandering through the wilderness, or with a band of fighting Amazons.”

Well versed in the history of the struggle for women’s rights, she read and liked the feminist authors—especially Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Victoria Woodhull—but took no part in the organized women’s movement. Similarly, she admired “the noise and color and morale of the crowds on a Miners’ Union Day” (Butte was a stronghold of the militant Western Federation of Miners, and later of the Industrial Workers of the World), but remained outside the ranks of organized labor. “I am always alone,” she wrote. “I might mingle with people intimately every hour of my life, still I should be alone.”

Outwardly her life remained in many ways as severely restricted as that of most women in the turn-of-the-century United States, crushed beneath the weight of custom and crippled by prejudice. But inwardly her spirit yearned for love, adventure, and the marvelous, and teemed with a defiance that found expression in her writing. It was what she did with these yearnings and this defiance that makes her work so unique and important. And what did she do? Simply, brilliantly, rigorously, she revealed the real working of her mind in the various circumscribed situations of daily life.

“The clearest lights on persons,” she noted, “are small salient personal facts and items about them and their ways of life.” Out of these “small salient personal facts” Mary MacLane elaborated her own myth—a myth of herself. From the seemingly most trivial things that surrounded her, she distilled a pure magic. She wrote, with sensuous detail, on “the art of eating an olive,” on her long walks over Butte’s endless “sand and barrenness,” on the sexual longings stirred in her by seventeen engraved portraits of Napoleon. Narcissistically, obsessively, playfully, she explored the infinite irrational depths of her recalcitrant subjectivity. “Just to be Mary MacLane—who am first of all my own self, and get by with it!—how I do that I cannot quite make out.”

After The Story of Mary MacLane she published two more books: My Friend Annabel Lee (1903) and I, Mary MacLane (1917). She also contributed feature articles to a number of newspapers and magazines. None of her writings fit into the usual literary classifications. They are neither fiction nor nonfiction; they are not “stream of consciousness” narratives and should not be confused with “true confessions.” Although presented in diary form, they are really something quite different. They are certainly not autobiography, philosophy, or psychology, any more than they are stories, essays, or poems. Mary MacLane defied existing genres and created her own.

Poetic humor is her hallmark. Much of her work, such as “The Six Toothbrushes” and “The Back of a Magazine,” makes us think of Lautréamont and Jarry. There is an “anti-literary” quality about her writing—anti-literary in the sense intended by André Breton and Paul Éluard when they declared that “poetry is the opposite of literature.” Although an avid reader she disdained the society of litterateurs and contributed rarely, if at all, to literary reviews. Her eccentric, playful, yet radical divergence from the dominant literary tendencies of her time qualifies her as an authentic presurrealist.

“I do not write what my thoughts are saying to me,” she acknowledged, although “now and again I think I catch some truth by the sweat of its Rhythm.” But “something lives, lives muscularly in me that constantly betrays me, destroys me against all my own convictions, against all my own knowledge, against all my own desire.” With the same striking candor she recognized the limits of her own self-assigned project: “It is as if I have made a portrait not of Me, but of a Room I have just quitted.”

If most critics disparaged her with uncomprehending malice, there were at least a few exceptions. The novelist Gertrude Atherton, who visited MacLane and wrote about her at length, admired not only her writing but also her conversation, “a mixture of slang and prose of an almost classical purity”; she found, too, that MacLane’s “criticisms of current authors were acute, unbiased, and everything she said was worth listening to.” Hamlin Garland praised “her crisp, clear, unhesitating use of English.” H. L. Mencken admired her sense of “the infinite resilience, the drunken exuberance, the magnificent power and delicacy of the language,” and said he knew of no other woman writer who could play on words more magically. In a full-page review in the Chicago American, Clarence Darrow pronounced The Story of Mary MacLane “little short of a miracle,” and went on to say that “no more marvelous book was ever born of a sensitive, precocious brain.” The socialist Oscar Lovell Triggs saluted MacLane’s courage in portraying “the inner history of her life.” And Harriet Monroe, who went on to become the founding editor of Poetry magazine, likened MacLane to Emily Brontë and elsewhere stated that she had never met anyone with more analytical power.

After The Story of Mary MacLane was published, the young author visited Chicago and then went East for a time. Rumor had it that she might enroll in Radcliffe College or Vassar, but nothing came of it. She found life in Boston and Cambridge dull compared to Butte, “where the people are so much more virile and full of imagination.” She much preferred New York, especially Greenwich Village, where she kept an apartment for several years. Her New York writings include an affectionate sketch of Coney Island and a strong indictment of Wall Street.

Wherever she went she was sure to confound the philistines with her unconventional behavior. She went out of her way to insult Butte society matrons who staged a literary reception in her honor. A trip to Newport, Rhode Island, provoked an article sharply critical of that fashionable resort town’s class pretensions and arrogance. Mary MacLane simply could not be “domesticated.” Violating social conventions was the essence of her being. At a time when tolerance of dissident sexuality was virtually nonexistent, she openly avowed her lesbian inclinations. We find her refereeing a prizefight in Thermopolis, Wyoming, and frequenting low-class gambling dives on Forty-Second Street in New York. In later years she seems to have rejected literary society altogether and, with characteristic defiance of white middle-class propriety, chosen to live instead in Chicago’s African American community. Always, everywhere, she freely expounded her controversial views on marriage, the family, sex, religion, literature, morality, the greed and idiocy of the rich, and anything else that came to mind.

Unlike so many authors who enjoy initial success in Chicago and then move to New York to grow old and respectable, in 1917 Mary MacLane came back to the city of her youthful triumph for what turned out to be a second triumph, of sorts—or at least another scandal in the grand MacLane tradition: she made a movie!

An “ardent film fan” herself, when she received an invitation to make a film from the producer George K. Spoor of Chicago’s renowned Essanay Studios, where Charlie Chaplin made his greatest shorts, she readily accepted. Shortly after her arrival in town, production began on the full-length feature Men Who Have Made Love to Me. Not only did MacLane write the script—based on an article of the same title she had published in 1910—she also played the starring role: herself.

Directed by Arthur Berthelet, the seven- or eight-reel Men Who Have Made Love to Me was released in January 1918 and was widely reviewed throughout the country. Unfortunately, no print of this film appears to have survived. Most critics didn’t care for it, needless to say, although a few begrudged her some ability as an actress, and her director said that the comic vamp reminded him of the young Sarah Bernhardt. Not surprisingly, the film provoked the wrath of puritanical public opinion; it was banned by the Ohio Board of Censors as “harmful to public morality.”

And so Mary MacLane, who embodied much of the spirit of the “Jazz Age” two decades early, was still going strong in 1918. Not for nothing has she been called the earliest example of the “New Woman” in literature, and even “the first flapper.” But when the Roaring Twenties roared into full swing, she was no longer the constant headliner she had been in her youth. After the furor provoked by her movie died down, she settled in Chicago. Her contract with Essanay called for a series of films, but she made no others. In part this may have been because the first film was not a box-office hit, but MacLane’s failing health was surely another and perhaps greater factor. She had been considered frail even as a child, and in 1910 she suffered a severe case of scarlet fever. Sometime in the twenties, if not earlier, she was diagnosed as having tuberculosis.

She was cared for during her last years by her best friend, the African American photographer and longtime Chicagoan Harriet Williams, whom she had met through New York acquaintances not long after her first book came out in 1902. The two had stayed in touch and were especially close during MacLane’s last four years. On August 6, 1929, she died in her room at the Michigan Hotel on South Michigan Avenue, not far from Williams’s studio. She was forty-eight years old. Williams, together with Harriet Monroe, arranged her funeral.

For decades after her death Mary MacLane remained largely an unknown. Her books were long out of print and difficult to find, even in libraries. Standard literary histories and anthologies ignored her completely, and until recently even feminist writers rarely referred to her except in passing. Amazingly, she is not profiled in the three-volume reference work Notable American Women.

Yet MacLane’s is an important voice, rebellious and original, and surely will be listened to again. At a time when most American “women’s literature” reeked of genteel sentimentality, moralistic uplift, and other literary sugar water, she offered readers stronger stuff by far. Scandalously, passionately, she rejected bourgeois Christian notions of “femininity” and scorned the patriotic platitudes about life in the U.S. Above all she affirmed her right to a free sexuality, and insisted that the quest for experience and self-realization is too important to allow it to be impeded by stupid, narrow-minded bigots and bureaucrats. After nearly a hundred years, her radical pessimism, her individualist feminism, her refusal to adjust to the misery and hypocrisy of an unjust and exploitative social order have retained and even multiplied their force, and more than ever win our respect and admiration.

“I can shake my life like a hollow gourd,” said Mary MacLane, “and hear the eerie rattling sound I make in it.” There is a bitter humor in these words, as in so much of her writing. Although she felt that her humor was “far too deep to admit of laughter,” she coolly and calmly insisted on keeping the last laugh for herself. “In my black dress and my still room, I say inwardly and willy-nilly, and with all my Heart and relishingly: Ha! ha! ha!”

From Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields, by Penelope Rosemont,  from City Lights Publishers.

To Be Mary MacLane. By envelope Rosemont. The Paris Review , December 5, 2019.

We live in a performative age. This is an era when restaurants have had to adopt formal camera policies, because so many diners persist in taking pictures of their meals on their iPhones to post online. On any given day, my Facebook and Twitter feeds are filled with self-portraits: This is my new haircut. This is my new shirt. This is the face I make when I wish to convey that I am wry and self-aware, and this is my confident, I-can-take-on-the-world grin. Or details of lives, broadcast to the world: This is my dinner. This is my cat. This is how I feel at this moment. Look, I made a pie! Etc. “All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare wrote, “and all the men and women merely players,” but it seems to me that only the first half of this statement remains true. The conventions of social media encourage us to see ourselves not as players in a larger drama, per se, but as the stars of our own individual reality shows.

There are moments when I love social media. There are other moments, actually a lot of moments, when I question how much of my finite life I want to spend on the Internet. In the plus column, I’ve met some wonderful people via social media, including a few who I’d count among my dearest friends. It’s an easy way to keep in touch with my siblings, who are as phone shy as I am and live 3,000 miles away. There are people who use social media in interesting ways. The conversations are occasionally good.

But I’ve been a sporadic and somewhat ambivalent participant of late. Long periods of time go by when I post almost nothing of my own and only respond to other people’s updates, because what it comes down to, I think, is that either you have an instinct for broadcasting your life on the Internet, or you don’t. It’s not that I find my life uninteresting, it’s just that I’m not at all sure why anyone else would be interested, aside from my mom. I keep a sporadic diary, because I want to remember my life, but I have a hard time imagining why I’d want to display that life for public consumption. I deeply value my privacy.

Mary MacLane, on the other hand, would have been a natural. Mary MacLane’s enthusiasm for broadcasting her life to the world was unparalleled in her time. Her staggeringly self-obsessed first book, I Await The Devil’s Coming, was published in 1902, and, as I read it, I found myself thinking that this was a woman who was temperamentally perfectly suited to the social media age. And then, a week later, I read Emily Gould’s excellent introduction to Melville House’s new e-book edition of I, Mary MacLane, the book that followed a few years later, and Gould said more or less the same thing. So much for my original insight.

But in any case, these are the facts: Mary MacLane’s main interest was herself, she found it necessary to exhaustively explore her own personality, and it wasn’t enough to write to herself in the pages of a diary. She required an audience. The audience, it turns out, was waiting for her. I Await The Devil’s Coming, originally published under the more sedate title The Story of Mary MacLane, sold 100,000 copies in its first month.

2.

I Await The Devil’s Coming is a peculiar and fascinating piece of work. At the time of writing, Mary MacLane was an intellectually frustrated, profoundly restless 19 year old living a middle-class life with her family in Butte, Montana. Little was expected of her. The days passed slowly. High school was finished, and college didn’t seem to be part of anyone’s plan. She did a little light sewing, she wrote in her notebook, she read, she went on long walks. She was unbearably lonely.

She seems to have been unable to relate to anyone in her family, or even in Butte, and felt like a foreigner among them. She alludes to a miserable, loveless childhood. She has one friend and one friend only, referred to throughout as the Anemone Lady. She is in love with the Anemone Lady, but the Anemone Lady has left town. “My life,” MacLane wrote, “is a desert — a desert, but the thin, clinging perfume of the blue anemone reaches to its utter confines. And nothing in the desert is the same because of that perfume. Years will not fade the blue of the anemone, nor a thousand bitter winds blow away the rare fragrance.”

The Anemone Lady, she wrote, offered her the first and only glimpse of love she’d experienced in her life. She fantasized about meeting and marrying the Devil, although it isn’t entirely clear to me whether she actually believed the Devil exists, or if this was more of a vague desire to be rescued combined with an instinct for shock value. Regardless, the overall impression is of a young woman driven half-mad by loneliness and boredom. “My life lies fallow,” she wrote. “I am tired of sitting here.” MacLane called this book “the record of three months of Nothingness.”

Those three months are very much 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.

In that nothingness, she wandered the plains outside Butte, and her descriptions of that spare landscape contain some of the most beautiful language in the book. When she could focus on subjects other than herself, she was capable of sublime prose.

It was rare, though, for her to focus on subjects other than herself. Mary MacLane’s primary interest was Mary MacLane. But she was extremely self-aware, and there are moments when she seems to recognize the corrosive potential of her self-absorption: “If I were not so unceasingly engrossed with my sense of misery and loneliness,” she wrote, “my mind would produce beautiful, wonderful logic. I am a genius — a genius — a genius.” It’s a startlingly candid admission: If I weren’t so engrossed with myself, I could accomplish greater things.

3.

It’s a slippery thing, genius. The above quote isn’t an anomaly. In I Await The Devil’s Coming, MacLane informs us that she’s a genius again and again, until the question becomes unavoidable: okay, sure, but a genius at what? MacLane was a good but not transcendently gifted writer. (There’s something underdeveloped about her writing. There are glimpses, here and there, of what she might have been capable of if she’d been more interested in writing about subjects other than herself; if perhaps she’d lived a little longer, if some editor had perhaps taken an interest and redirected her talents; if she hadn’t been quite so cripplingly self-obsessed.) Her genius didn’t lie in any other obviously identifiable fields: she wasn’t developing new mathematical theorums, composing symphonies, or elucidating groundbreaking philosophical ideas. She was prone to curious leaps of logic: “A genius who does not know that he is a genius is no genius,” she wrote.

Just after I read I Await The Devil’s Coming, I read Savage Beauty, Nancy Milford’s exquisite biography of the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. There are certain similarities between the two women. They were more or less contemporaries — MacLane was born in 1881, Millay in 1892 — and neither had much interest in living within the constraints of societal convention. At 18 and 19, Millay, too, was writing about an imaginary consort in the pages of her diary, and living a life shot through with desperation in Camden, Maine: “Sweep the floor,” Millay wrote at 19, “and sweep it again tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the day after that and every day of your life; — if not that floor, why then — some other floor.” This is MacLane’s territory, these endless interchangeable days, this narrow life.

Both Millay and MacLane were sprung into new lives by works written at 19. Millay wrote a magnificent long poem, “Renascence,” that propelled her to Vassar and then a new life in New York, while the wild success of I Await The Devil’s Coming gained MacLane the fame she craved and enough money to escape Butte. Both women were bisexual, took many lovers, passed through Greenwich Village a few years apart, and lived bold and unconventional lives.

It’s important to note that MacLane made no claim to literary genius, but reading Savage Beauty and I Await The Devil’s Coming back to back throws one of the difficulties of MacLane’s work into sharp relief: one can’t help but notice that while MacLane was busy declaring herself a genius, certain other people were busy actually being geniuses without spending too much time announcing it.

But as the nature of MacLane’s “genius” is gradually revealed, there’s something deeply poignant about it. MacLane was excruciatingly sensitive. “I am not good,” she wrote. “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.”

That year, she stood watching the sunset in the landscape outside Butte and let her mind wander to a daydream of standing by the sea: “I stood on the shore and looked at the rocks. My heart contracted with the pain that beautiful things bring.” Against the beauty and pain and loneliness of her life, of the world, she had no armor. She barely had skin.

She was driven by a fervent longing. She wrote, “My wailing, waiting soul burns with but one desire: to be loved — oh, to be loved.”

4.

MacLane was condemned and widely mocked for her immodesty, her self-stated lack of morals, and her open self-absorption, but I Await The Devil’s Coming turned her into an overnight sensation. It turned out there was a vast audience waiting for confessional writing, before confessional writing existed.

MacLane specifically wanted fame. She longed to be seen. As Emily Gould notes, she would have been a Tumblr and YouTube star. I’ll take this a step further and suggest that MacLane was someone who might have benefited immensely from the existence of the Internet, a person who might have been shaped, for the better, by the exposure to a wider world that the Internet can provide to isolated people. MacLane was cursed with a certain narrowness of imagination: she could summon up an imaginary Devil in perfect detail — the look in his eye, his tone of voice, the cut of his suit — but at 19 she couldn’t conceive that in all of this vast world, very little of which she’d actually seen, there could possibly be anyone remotely like her.

In a 1986 article about confessional writing in The New York Times, Patricia Hampl made reference to MacLane’s “repellent self-absorption.” I find myself repelled too, but also I am fascinated. MacLane was an original. I Await The Devil’s Coming is frequently irritating, but it’s also audacious. This was an era when women were expected to be modest to the point of invisibility, to all but disappear into the wallpaper, and MacLane refused. The new Melville House edition of her first book has gained considerable traction, including a recent long excerpt on The New Yorker website. I find myself wondering if what seemed repellently self-involved when Hampl wrote that article in 1986 seems merely mildly eccentric in the social media age. We expect self-involvement in the social media age; we are, after all, publishing photographs of what we had for breakfast. The only eccentricity is in openly declaring one’s own genius.

“But I would give up this genius eagerly,” MacLane wrote, “gladly — at once and forever — for one dear, bright day free from loneliness.”

I Await The Devil’s Friend Request: On Social Media and Mary MacLane. By Emily St.John Mandel. The Millions , March 29, 2013.

Mary MacLane lived the dream, as we say nowadays. At least, in the beginning, she did. In Butte, Montana, where she grew up, she was just a bright girl in high school. She wanted to go to Stanford, but her stepfather spent the money that had been set aside for her education. She made the fields her world and wrote copiously in a notebook. What emerged was a long, piercing self-examination, about her frustrations with her family, as embodied by six toothbrushes (“Never does the pitiable, barren, contemptible, damnable, narrow Nothingness of my life in this house come upon me with so intense a force as when my eyes happen upon those six tooth-brushes.”). And the frustrations of feeling attracted to, you know, the Devil (“Think of living with the Devil in a bare little house, in the midst of green wetness and sweetness and yellow light — for days!”). She copied out the results and sent the manuscript to Chicago, where it landed in the slush pile of Stone & Company, on a Saturday in late April. The company’s reader, a woman named Lucy Monroe, adored it. By Thursday it was off to print; another couple of months and the book was selling quickly. Girls of the age MacLane had been, when she’d written the book — 19, just on the edge of the world — related to it particularly (there were reports it inspired some of them to suicide). And MacLane found herself a train to Chicago to meet the grand fate of a famous authoress, whatever it was.

It was 1902. She was 21. The figure of the New Woman, who so preoccupied James and Ibsen, was still only appearing by fits and starts in children’s literature. Alice had made it to Wonderland a few decades before MacLane was born, sure, and Jo March had long ago married her strange Professor Bhaer. But MacLane was more or less Dorothy Gale’s precise contemporary. Anne of Green Gables would not be around for another six years, Meg Murry of A Wrinkle in Time was more than a half-century away. I give you that bit of history because I don’t know who I would have been without reading those books a young girl. The world would be all sky, all sea, with the map I’ve followed well into my adult life only half-drawn (and I’m not being remotely hyperbolic). I can’t for one minute imagine what it would have been like to be my own cartographer.

All caveats about the reanimation of the dead aside, I think MacLane could hardly have known what she’d bargained for by publishing that first book. That it did not turn out as she’d hoped seems indisputable. In her last book, published in 1917, she declared: “I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and dearly and damnably important to me.” She lived only 12 years after that, most of them in hiding from the world. And she’d never publish another book.

***

The sun of the wide, bright world has come to shine on MacLane again. Melville House has recently reprinted of two of her three books, I Await The Devil’s Coming, her first, and I, Mary MacLane, written when she was 34. (Her second book, My Friend Annabel Lee, originally published in 1903, remains out of print — and out of the conversation. Possibly because it’s written as an extended dialogue between MacLane and a “very pretty” porcelain figurine of a Japanese woman.) Reprints are occasions to make arguments for relevance, and to pique the interest of contemporary readers MacLane often has been presented as a sort of advocate for women generally and a great artist of the “female experience” (whatever that is). Yet it’s hard to imagine, once you read her books, that MacLane would have much appreciated the broadness of this argument. From the beginning, after all, MacLane openly resisted the idea that she was like everyone else, of her time or any other:

I wonder as I write this Portrayal if there will be one person to read it and see a thing that is mingled with every word. It is something that you must feel, that must fascinate you, the like of which you have never before met with.

It is the unparalleled individuality of me.

About Sylvia Plath, Janet Malcolm once observed, in her dry but shattering way, that, “We all invent ourselves, but some of us are more persuaded than others by the fiction that we are interesting.” There are many who would say the same of MacLane. Passages like the one here elicit uncomfortable feelings. One begins to feel like a party guest trapped by someone who lives in a state of Platonic irony, always saying the exact opposite of what she means. Or alternately, of being back in a prison of adolescent worries, the ones that fade rather than disappear altogether. Reading MacLane I felt less convinced that MacLane found herself interesting than that she was anxious to convey her high degree of interestingness to her readers, at any cost.

***

                                                                    Harriet Monroe

A bit more history: the first person to become enchanted with MacLane was that slushpile reader Lucy Monroe. In her mid 30s and unmarried, Monroe lived with her sister, Harriet. Harriet was still in the process of becoming that Harriet Monroe, a leading figure in modernist poetry, a woman who would in another decade found Poetry magazine and publish the early work of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. It was with this pair that MacLane had been invited to stay in Chicago, after the publication of the book in a big imposing mansion of a townhouse on Astor Street, the likes of which did not really exist in turn-of-the-century Butte.

For some reason unknown now, the Monroe sisters did not meet her at the station. Instead, a phalanx of reporters did. She immediately told them, “I hate reporters, and I hate newspapers.” In return one reporter felt moved to remark, in his article, that she “is not pretty, is commonplace in dress and appearance,” and this despite the fact that she has arrived in some kind of “sailor hat.” Still, “once she speaks, she is decidedly original and startling.”

Here MacLane was already honing the talent she’d display in the coming months for giving the perfect quote. In a pre-soundbite age she already knew how to draw blood in one direct sentence. She knew to call Chicago “boring,” telling the reporters who helped her right into a cab that the enterprise looked like a “kidnapping, but I am not afraid, if I am alone in a cab with three men.” She could be blithe and funny, telling those erstwhile kidnappers, “I don’t know, we are all out for the dough.” But her sharp style of conversation formed the spine of every article about her.

To these same reporters, Lucy Monroe was soon complaining that their focus on quotes was a distortion of the essence of MacLane. “She is not at all the belligerent spirit she appears to be in interviews under the fire of pointed questions, which she feels she has to answer or be criticised for not answering,” Monroe told the Tribune. “Nor is she the severe critic she appears to the public. The interviews do not carry the pleasing personality, and the infectious laugh that comes when one is not looking for it.”

She was, in other words, posing. In fact, one of the first articles the Tribune ran about MacLane was accompanied by sketches of her adopting five different set poses. Each has a name: Meditation, Animation, Expectation, Illustration, Exaltation. The caption observes, “Her every attitude gives evidence of being well studied.” And yet: the pose called “Illustration” involves turning her back to the audience, the illustrating evidently being about showing something other than herself. “Exaltation” — standing tall, haughty look in eye — is defined as the attitude MacLane adopted when she was “inclined to defy the world and its opinion.”

They are all theatrics, all performance. That they are chosen and rehearsed and mediated and projected by the person doing them does not, necessarily, make them accurate representations of MacLane’s inner states of mind, merely what she wanted to project. And yet at the time, whenever reporters asked MacLane if her book was factually correct, if it told the truth, her answer was always the same. It was an “honest book.” To one, she said: “I could have written a book and made myself out a sweet, nice girl but I chose to tell the truth.”

***

Do we take MacLane’s word for it? Oughtn’t we to? In memoir, it’s sometimes said, the primary goal is emotional honesty. And in a way it seems the only person who can honestly (whoa) testify to their emotional truth would be the person herself, yes?

It’s always been a curious thing to me that many people consider “emotional honesty” a fixed and knowable quantity, when there are so many testimonies to “not knowing how I feel” about things. It goes back to Hamlet’s self-identified prison, the place where “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” And even dramatizing the thought process, which is arguably what stream-of-consciousness memoirs like MacLane’s do, is a certain kind of lie. Inner monologues are not inherently readable things. The readable things are narratives.

Malcolm (yes, back to her) once drew on a metaphor from Borges’ “The Aleph,” of being able to see everything on the planet from any angle, to describe the way narrative frustrates the truth: “How can one see all the ants on the planet when one is wearing the blinders of narrative?” This applies to more than insects, and even the post-modernists, the ones trying to represent the failures of narrative in stories themselves, still find themselves falling into the trap. The best ones are honest about that. David Foster Wallace himself once put it this way, in “Good Old Neon”: “What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.”

My point is here is not that MacLane was dishonest, though. It is, instead, that we cannot possibly know what she was, and so predicating praise of her book on its “rawness” or “honesty” is to pretend that it is something other than a book, a pose, a performance, at best a half-truth about inner life. It gives her both too little and too much credit.

***

The critical reception to MacLane’s books was decidedly mixed. (It’s sometimes presented now as wholly negative, but it was more spiked than that, with some positive notices.) The most notable negative review came from a male critic in The New York Times who called it “ridiculous rot.” For her part, MacLane was always somewhat knowing about book reviews. As Kathryne Beth Tovo remarks in an unpublished dissertationon MacLane, MacLane actually wrote to her publisher that she wanted the book to get a negative review from a popular critical periodical like The Bookman, which would send it out “on a career of sorts.”

One part of the myth-making that surrounds MacLane’s career derailment is to remark that even H.L. Mencken mocked her. But his alleged denunciation, read now, is not so vehement. In the review, which appears in his collection Prejudices, he diagnosed her as “an absolutely typical American of the transition stage between Christian Endeavor and civilization,” caught between rigid religious laws and (his words) a “soaring soul.” Any self-dramatics, he pointed out, came from rigid Christian morals colliding with the ordinary acts of life, like kissing. While he was never much of a feminist himself, MacLane still somehow brought out a proto-women’s-libber in Mencken: “If it were not held universally in Butte that sex passion is the exclusive infirmity of the male, she would not blab out in meeting that — but here I get into forbidden waters and had better refer you to page 209.”

                                                                  

                                                             H.L. Mencken

Here Mencken was writing about MacLane’s third book, I, Mary MacLane, published in 1917, which included some fulsome accounting of her adult sexual escapades. Apparently audiences did not find MacLane as captivating in her 30s. The public seemed uninterested in reports from the itinerant life of someone once-famous. In the time since the publication of My Friend Annabel Lee had garnered little critical response and fewer sales, MacLane had been floating back and forth between Massachusetts (where she could not persuade Radcliffe to admit her) and New York. Then for a long stretch following an illness from scarlet fever, she moved back in with her mother in Butte. She wrote newspaper pieces, but only intermittently. For most of the intervening time she was broke, borrowing money from friends like Lucy Monroe, harassing the publisher for back royalties.

Yet while I, Mary MacLane’s sales were bad, it still landed her a commission for a series of articles to the San Francisco Chronicle, and attracted enough renewed support that she got to make a movie, now lost to time, called The Men Who Loved Me. She wrote the screenplay and got to star in it. It was produced by a company that had once done the Chaplin films and now was in decline. In the end it opened to tepid reviews, and it’s not clear that MacLane ever saw any money from it.

From there things went bad to worst. First MacLane skipped out on a hotel bill in Chicago, which her friends later seem to have settled for her. Then she was charged with stealing her wardrobe from the set of The Men Who Loved Me. She began to lead an itinerant life in Chicago boarding houses. The Monroe sisters tried to keep an eye on her but it was of no use; MacLane, stubborn, stopped giving them her address. When she turned up dead in 1929, in one of those rooming houses, the cause was said to be tuberculosis, though the medical examiner listed it as “natural causes.” She had only been in regular contact with one friend, an African-American photographer who the press routinely mistook for her “maid,” who confirmed the tuberculosis.

Her death was widely announced in the press. In the classic MacLane pattern, every story told of her being forgotten in the lead paragraph below a headline that spelled out her name in enormous type. Even Publisher’s Weekly ran an obit.

***

Dying alone and unwanted in a cheap hotel is a particular kind of feminine nightmare. When I was going through the clippings for this piece I began to think, of course, of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. I often do, when I’m writing or thinking about what I’ve come to call the Weird Girls, the young women who, like MacLane, and the nature-obsessed diarist Opal Whiteley and the child novelist Barbara Newhall Follett, were different, and somehow concluded that their only option was to disappear. They fall right off the map.

It’s what Lily Bart says to Selden on her last visit to him that haunts me:

I have tried hard, and life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.

When Selden finds Lily dead, he finds her papers too, ordered bills and accounts, every debt paid. Which is how people found MacLane, in a way: the papers reported that her press clippings were strewn about her, though we’ll never know if that was a press embellishment designed to give the story a little bit of color.

As it happens, The House of Mirth was published in 1905, coming into the world just as things, after the first great success of Mary McLane, were beginning to come apart.

 What Happens After You Meet The Devil? The Life Of Mary MacLane. By Michelle Dean.  

The Awl , March 26, 2013. 

"Had I been born a man," Mary MacLane writes in her 1902 debut The Story of Mary MacLane, "I would by now have made a deep impression on the world." These blunt words of a 19-year-old girl in Butte, Montana, are found in what the The New York Times called the "first of the confessional diaries" in America. Just months after finishing high school, MacLane, a self-proclaimed "genius," sent her manuscript to Chicago publisher George H. Doran, who "discovered the most astounding and revealing piece of realism I had read"—this, coming from the publisher of Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, and Theodore Roosevelt—but "clearly, we could not publish it." Doran forwarded the manuscript to Herbert S. Stone & Company, and they published it immediately.

The diaries ignited a national uproar, ushering in a new era for women's voices. In the first month alone, 100,000 copies were sold and it later landed on the New York Times' summer reading list. A baseball team, a cocktail, and "Mary MacLane Clubs" were named in her honor. MacLane's critical reception, unsurprisingly, was wide-ranging. Her book was banned at her hometown library. The New York Herald contended, "It is only charity to think that Mary MacLane is mad." Yet it was praised by Mark Twain, called "little short of a miracle" by Clarence Darrow, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, after a period of depression, wrote: "I now admire myself almost as much as Wm Seabrook, Mary MacLane, and Casanova."

Inspired by the diaries of Russian artist Marie Bashkirtseff, MacLane's prose is lyrical, sharp, bizarre, and anguished. The "barrenness" of existence is at the forefront: "It is not deaths and murders and plots and wars that make life tragedy. It is Nothing that makes life tragedy." Her life is a monotonous routine: "I rise in the morning; eat three meals; and walk; and work a little, read a little, write; see some uninteresting people; go to bed." Ad infinitum.

                                                             

                                                                         Marie Bashkirtseff

MacLane creates the "Devil," an imaginary creature who created her "without a conscience," a primary character in her diaries, representing experience, sensuality, and hedonism. She alternates between lust and admiration for the Devil, impatiently waiting to join his world of pleasure. He "constructed a place of infinite torture—the fair green earth, the world. But he has made that other infinite thing—Happiness." MacLane calls on the Devil to release her from mind-numbing, small-town life—and begs for marriage. The Devil asks, "If I were to marry you how long would you be happy?" "For three days." (She also wrote of marrying Napoleon for three days.). "You are wonderfully wise in some things," he replies, "though you are still very young."

But perhaps even more scandalous for the times than MacLane's longing for the Devil—a man—is MacLane's desire for a woman.

"I love Fannie Corbin," she writes, of her former schoolteacher, "with a peculiar and vivid intensity." MacLane doesn't declares herself a lesbian until her third and final "Me-book," I, Mary MacLane, (1917), written when she was "at a lowering impatient shoulder-shrugging life-point where I must express myself or lose myself or break." In I, Mary, she describes being "kissed by Lesbian lips in a way which filled my throat with a sudden subtle pagan blood-flavored wistfulness." Still, her early writing leaves little doubt about her ambivalence towards her sexuality. Towards Miss Corbin, MacLane senses "a strange attraction of sex. There is a masculine element in me that... arises and overshadows all the others." By asking, "Do you think a man is the only creature with whom one may fall in love?" MacLane challenged heterosexual norms.

MacLane's feelings about being a woman, the "plague-tainted name," and her role in society, were complicated. She loved her "excellent strong young woman's-body" and enjoyed the simple physical act of housework. When asked in a 1902 interview by Zona Gale: "What would you rather do with your life than anything in the world?" MacLane answered, "I would rather be a fairly happy wife and mother. There is nothing better in the world."

But, she said, "I never shall be."

Devoted to her work and eager to see its impact on the world, MacLane saw limitations in the roles women were expected to assume. Despite wanting the Devil's hand in holy matrimony, she questioned the institution of marriage. "How many of them love each other?" MacLane wrote of married couples. "Not two in a hundred, I warrant. The marriage ceremony is their one miserable petty paltry excuse for living together." And, sixty years before The Feminine Mystique was unveiled, MacLane warned of the suffocation of a domestic life. A woman is "born out of her mother's fair body, branded with a strange, plague-tainted name, and let go," MacLane writes, "But before she dies she awakes. There is a pain that goes with it."

MacLane did not fall neatly into any category. After harshly criticizing life and society in Butte, she later defended her hometown, telling reporters she found people in Cambridge, Mass., less interesting than those in Montana. In spite of her own rigorous study of literature, she found intellectuals "detestable." And, even with her convictions about women's rights and support of women's suffrage, she wasn't political—"she didn't campaign or march or join groups," MacLane scholar Michael R. Brown told me in an interview. She was, Brown asserts, "completely unapologetic" in standing alone.

MacLane's greatest wish was to be understood. She wanted to "give to the world a naked Portrayal of Mary MacLane: her wooden heart, her good young woman's-body, her mind, her soul." She sent her story to the "wise wide world" in the hopes that her voice would be heard.

In 1929, at age 48, MacLane was discovered dead of "unknown causes" in a Chicago rooming house. In her lifetime, she had produced three books, a handful of articles, and a silent movie. MacLane's elegant, ambitious embrace of full-disclosure had opened a door to what was possible for women; sadly, her work disappeared from national consciousness almost as quickly as it had entered.

Beyond the vivid language and eccentric imagination displayed in LacLane's diaries (republished today under MacLane's original title, I Await the Devil's Coming,), her writing reminds us of the power of personal narrative, honestly told. And, back in 1902, those were rare.

The Forgotten Story of Mary MacLane, 1902's Racy, Angsty Teenage Diarist. By Hope Reese. The Atlantic , March 19, 2013.

Mary MacLane lived to shock her public. In her 1902 autobiography, The Story of Mary MacLane, she wrote:

  Periodically I fall completely, madly in love with the Devil. He is so fascinating, so strong—exactly the sort of man my wooden heart awaits. I would like to throw myself at his head. I would make him a dear little wife…. .

Considering her stated desire to marry the devil, her open bisexuality, and her revelation of the most intimate personal details in print, writing and starring in a motion picture was perhaps one of MacLane’s least shocking acts.

Born in Canada, but settling near Butte, Montana, in her early teens, MacLane gained notoriety in 1902 at the age of nineteen with her best-selling, scandalous, confessional, diary-style novel, The Story of Mary MacLane. Selling over one hundred thousand copies in its first month of publication, her book was reviewed across the country, banned in Boston, and savaged by conservative critics, according to Penelope Rosemont in a recent edition of MacLane’s writings  MacLane was a self-admitted egotist, and her writing was frank and filled with outrageous thoughts. In the book she chafed at having to live in the desolation of Butte, and wrote at length about her distaste for conformity.

 MacLane’s name was rarely out of the newspapers between 1902 and 1917, the publication dates of her first and last books. Particularly after the first book, newspapers tracked her movements as she traveled to Chicago, then eastward. She arrived in Boston, hoping to attend Radcliffe College, but was turned away for lack of scholarship, and finally moved on to New York, where she settled in Greenwich Village and, according to Western historian Cathryn Halverson, was finally able to live the bohemian life she had so craved . When public attention began to wane, MacLane would give interviews and write articles capturing the ennui of being a public figure, or, as in a 1910 Chicago Daily Tribune article, she might claim to be looking for a husband in order to create good copy . After contracting scarlet fever in 1911, Mary returned to Butte to write her final novel, I, Mary MacLane, which was published in 1917 . While this book did not approach the success of her first, it did catch the attention of George Spoor, who ran Essanay Studios in Chicago.

Essanay, by 1918, was on its last legs. The majority of the company had moved from Chicago to Niles, California. Charlie Chaplin, Essanay’s biggest star, had left the company in 1916 to seek more creative control, and Spoor’s business partner, G. W. “Broncho Billy” Anderson, the A of “S&A,” had quit in anger over Chaplin’s departure. Both men went to California, but Spoor bought out his partner Anderson and continued on in Chicago. The company went through a series of mergers, and historian Jack Spears claims that Spoor imported Max Linder from France to improve the financial situation of Essanay, but when Linder’s comedy didn’t transfer well to American audiences, Spoor, in dire need of a hit, began looking for other alternatives.

An admitted fan of the movies, Mary MacLane was delighted when Spoor approached her in 1918 with a multi-picture contract that gave her the opportunity to write as well as to act. The first film would be an adaptation of her 1910 article, “Men Who Have Made Love to Me,” in which she was to play herself. Though the film itself is believed to be lost, the plot can be pieced together from contemporaneous reviews by James McQuade in Motion Picture World and Peter Milne, who wrote for the Motion Picture News in 1918. The original article followed MacLane’s relationships with eight men who embody the flaws of the average male and represent popular types: “The Callow Youth,” “The Literary Man,” “The Bank Clerk,” “The Prize Fighter,” “The Absinthe Drinker,” “The Middle Aged Gambler,” “The Baronet’s Son,” and finally, the adulterer, here “The Husband of Another.”

To streamline the script in the adaptation, MacLane removed the gambler and drinker roles, which would have invited trouble from censors as at the time absinthe and gambling were illegal in the US. In the original article, MacLane does not describe how the relationships end, which meant that the original didn’t provide enough dramatic structure for either a short or a feature-length film. She solved this problem, for instance, by enlarging the role of the Baronet’s Son so that when the Mary character tires of him, and he tries to force his attentions on her, she can be saved by the Prize Fighter. Although in the article Mary falls for the Prize Fighter, for greater dramatic flair the film gives the Prize Fighter a girlfriend who begs Mary to leave him, which she does. Like his character in the article, the Literary Man is too domineering, but in the film he also fails to respect her writing talent. The idealistic Boston Bank Clerk, whom Mary finds too boring in the article, leaves her in the film when he discovers that she smokes and drinks. Finally the Husband of Another, who in the article is a weepy sap desperate for Mary, becomes in the film a brute who tries to force himself on her. All of the men in the article are obsessively in love with the Mary character, but none are abusive rakes; in the film, however, Mary is attacked by two of her five suitors in harrowing scenes. To connect each story, Mary appears, languidly smoking while addressing the audience (via title cards) about the trouble with all men. In the final scene, Mary, again addressing the audience, questions whether true love really exists, and though her French maid says “Oui,” Mary still has her doubts.

Mae Tinee of the Chicago Daily Tribune noted in a late 1917 article that the film was highly anticipated . When finally released, however, most of the reviews were not positive. Tinee was fairly scathing: “[MacLane] on the screen is eloquently expressed by the minus sign. She looks and acts like a headache.” Not stopping there, she claims that MacLane’s only talent is the ability to look good while smoking. Reviews for the film were not uniformly negative, however. In his review for Motion Picture World, James McQuade credits both her performance and her writing, although one wonders about the scarcity of the actress-writer phenomenon: “It is the first time in my remembrance that I have seen on the screen author and actress concentrated in the same person” .

Ironically, in many ways, the film was MacLane’s downfall. Essanay merged with Vitagraph, Lubin, and Selig in late 1918, and Spoor decided to cancel the multiple picture contract with MacLane after the failure of Men Who Have Made Love to Me. MacLane publicly declared that she hated her acting in the film, but in late 1919, she was arrested for stealing the dresses that had been used in filming. The studio dressmaker had made numerous gowns for the actress, valued at $1,025, and MacLane claimed she had absentmindedly forgotten to pay for them, but she also refused to return them. In a 1919 Los Angeles Times article, she claimed jail might do her good, stating, “I am writing another book to pay for these stupid dresses.” Continuing her thought—and ever the egotist—when asked what the topic of her new book would be, she replied, “Why myself, of course! What else could I write about? What else is more interesting?”  MacLane’s obituary, however, states that she was financially ruined when she was locked out of her apartment for nonpayment for the dresses, and her once-popular books fell out of favor in the flapper culture of the 1920s. . She moved to a black neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, where her companion, a black artist named Harriet Williams, cared for her. At forty-eight, Mary MacLane died in utter obscurity, surrounded by hundreds of newspaper clippings.

Mary MacLane. By Julie Buck.  Women Film Pioneers

A scholarly resource exploring women’s global involvement at all levels of film production during the silent film era. Published in partnership with Columbia University Libraries.

The Mary MacLane Project.

The definitive website on the life and work of the pioneering feminist writer, film-maker, and media personality Mary MacLane (1881-1929)