Celia Paul : Self-Portrait

 

The painter​ Gwen John suffered from jealousy in her relationship with the sculptor Auguste Rodin. She was 27 when she started to model for him. He was 63. Rodin slept with a lot of women during his lifetime and the women he slept with also posed for him. John was jealous of Rodin’s other women. She was deeply in love with him. Throughout their tempestuous affair, she continued to paint, her paintings becoming ever more distilled and intense. She wrote in a letter: ‘I may never have anything to express, except this desire for a more interior life.’ In her work she showed no dependence on Rodin’s romantically charged, monumental style. Her paintings were usually very small, her focus narrow. She always knew what she wanted. Even as a student at the Slade School of Art, her talent for clear observation was completely formed.

 
Gwen John’s artistic style owes no debt to the two men with whom she was intimately involved: Rodin and her brother, Augustus John. Yet, when she is referred to publicly, her stature as an artist is qualified by the information that she was the lover of one and the sister of the other. She is often described as an artist ‘in her own right’. I hate that term: it implies that ‘her’ position as an artist is established only in relation to her circumstances. ‘She’ will never be seen as simply a great artist. The term ‘in her own right’ is used most often about women. I hate the word ‘muse’, too.
 
‘Longing’ is the emotion that drives Gwen John’s art. It is also the emotion that fuelled Charlotte Brontë’s writing. She fell passionately in love with her teacher, Monsieur Héger, when she studied at his language school in Brussels. When she returned home, his wife intervened to stop the exchange of letters between her husband and his infatuated English student. Charlotte pined for him. She channelled her yearning into her art. Jane Eyre is the result. These two women, Gwen John and Charlotte Brontë, are the artists to whom I feel most deeply connected. Longing powers my own art.
 
In the second volume of William Feaver’s biography of Lucian Freud (Bloomsbury, £35), David Dawson, Lucian’s long-serving assistant, describes Susanna Chancellor, the woman who remained Lucian’s partner longer than anyone else, as ‘a proper woman, not one of these neurotics’. She is the girlfriend who replaced me.
 
People don’t become artists if they are sane and well-adjusted. The world is indulgent towards the neurotic male artist. The more impossible his behaviour, the more he is valued. The world disapproves of neurosis in a female artist. This disapproval fills her with shame and undermines her confidence. Lucian was attracted to young women artists precisely because they were neurotic. He was drawn to their vulnerability. There is a sad pattern to this biography: the long list of sensitive young women, one after another, who fall for Lucian and, when they become too dependent and needy, are dumped by him. He always encouraged the infatuation, needing their dependence, until he felt too claustrophobic to stand them any longer.
 
Lucian didn’t like to be thought of in connection with other artists. He resented that his paintings were often compared to the pedantic realism of Stanley Spencer, and it irritated him that people presumed he’d been influenced by the Neue Sachlichkeit movement – the painters Otto Dix, George Grosz and Christian Schad who were active during Lucian’s childhood in Berlin. It came to an end, along with the Weimar Republic, in 1933, the year that Lucian and his family fled to England.
 
Lucian once told William Feaver: ‘I want to be beyond compare.’ But he was pleased if he was compared to Rodin. He was excited by the parallels in their lives. He liked to tell me how delighted he was that he had the same birthday, 8 December, as Rodin’s lover, the sculptor Camille Claudel, while Suzy Boyt, the mother of four of his children, had the same birthday as Rodin: 12 November. Lucian thought this showed that their relationship had a special significance. My birthday is 11 November.
 
Lucian owned several sculptures by Rodin, including the statue of Balzac that Lucian placed in his small hallway; it confronted every visitor to his flat in Holland Park. Another Rodin statue, entitled Iris, stood on a low round table in the sitting-room, in front of Francis Bacon’s painting of two men wrestling on a bed, known as ‘The Buggers’. Rodin’s Iris is a headless figure, her legs are splayed, her genitals the central vortex of the whole erotically charged form. Many of Lucian’s naked portraits remind me of this sculpture. Time and again the figures, with splayed legs, are lying down under his forensic scrutiny. In these paintings, Lucian always started with the genitals, and the composition grew out from this focal point.
 
In the catalogue to an exhibition of Lucian’s drawings at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, Leigh Bowery asks him: ‘In your work the pictures of naked women are always of straight women, while the pictures of naked men are always of gay men. Why is that?’ Lucian replies: ‘I’m drawn to women by nature and to queers because of their courage.’ His answer is brilliant, but typically evasive. He doesn’t reveal what Leigh really wants to know, i.e. are the naked portraits always about desire, and is that why there are no naked portraits of gay women or straight men? William Feaver (or ‘Villiam’ as Lucian called him) is a straight man and Lucian never painted him.
 
There is a strange tempo to his book. Lucian’s words, intermingled with Feaver’s, create the impression that nefarious goings-on are deliberately being concealed by the pace and the wit of the conversation, almost like a pair of conjurors using patter to distract the audience. Lucian’s ability to dodge a question is complemented by Feaver’s speedy prose; he is also very careful to allow Lucian to have his way by avoiding any kind of psychological interpretation of the paintings, even when the images are loaded with sexual symbolism. You don’t have to know Francis Beaumont’s 17th-century parody The Knight of the Burning Pestle to see what a pestle and mortar signify. Yet Feaver goes out of his way to explain that there is no intended meaning in the pestle and mortar placed so surreally at Lucian’s mother’s feet in Large Interior, W9, the double portrait of her with his lover Jacquetta Eliot.
 
Rodin’s life and Lucian’s life were different in one important aspect. Rodin had just one son, by his companion Rose Beuret. Lucian had numerous children by many different women. Neither Rodin nor Lucian involved themselves in their children’s upbringing. Rodin made sure that his son was looked after by Rose’s sister, Thérèse, so that Rose could continue to ‘be there’ for him.
 
When I first met William Feaver, I had recently had a baby: Lucian’s and my son, Frank Paul, whom I had left with my mother. My mother was Frank’s main carer during his babyhood and early childhood. I left him with her so that I could continue to paint, and so that I could continue to sit for Lucian. Before I got pregnant, I had started a big painting of my mother sitting on a bed with my four sisters. My father had died the previous year and the painting is full of grief. I continued working on it throughout my pregnancy and after the birth of my son. On the strength of this painting, which Charles Saatchi bought, my first dealer had started to represent me. I was due to have a solo exhibition at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery the year after I met William Feaver.
 
Here is his description of me on first sight:
 
 “”We went off to dinner. I drove. He, in his immaculate grey flannel suit, twitched beside me all the way, giving directions to Mark’s Club, off Berkeley Square. Celia joined us there. She seemed silenced. Sitting with her beneath the ornately framed Victorian hunting scenes that set the tone of the décor, he touched her leg and she reached for his arm, peeking sidelong at him as he talked.””
 
My first impressions of William Feaver were affected by the knowledge that he was sitting opposite me with his pregnant wife. I thought about how different their child’s upbringing would be from my own son’s. My silence was due, in part, to this. I was also remembering the last time I had come to this restaurant, three years previously, with Lucian and my father, then the bishop of Bradford.
 
I had felt proud of my father on that occasion, because he had recognised that the drawings on the walls were by Max Beerbohm and had impressed Lucian with his knowledge of art and culture. My father died from a brain tumour the year after this meeting. He left my mother no money. He never thought about saving from his small salary and the houses we lived in always belonged to the church. When he died, the church raised enough money for my mother to buy a little terraced house in Cambridge. This is the house where she was living with my son at the time of this dinner with Lucian, William Feaver and his wife, Andrea Rose.
 

 
Feaver asked me about my painting and I described Family Group, which I was still working on. He visited my studio a week or two later. He liked it but said he thought the figure of my sister Lucy needed ‘bulking out a bit at the bottom’. He didn’t sit for Lucian, but he did sit regularly for Frank Auerbach, Lucian’s closest friend. Frank supplies this book with many quotes about Lucian, his work, his friends and lovers. Feaver quotes his words about me:
 
   “”I remember him saying that because Celia gradually found out that she wasn’t his only girlfriend she very often wept while she was sitting [for him] and she had no esteem at all because he preferred other people on occasion to her. And Lucian was really distressed and asked me what could he do to make her feel better about herself.””
 
These words make me feel sad. Puzzled, too. Surely the way to make me feel better about myself was for Lucian to be faithful to me? Isn’t it natural to be upset if your boyfriend cheats on you?
 
When I met Lucian in the autumn of 1978, I was 18 and Lucian was 55. He was a visiting tutor at the Slade. I was keen to show him the first drawings and paintings I had made of my mother. I knew I had found my subject matter and I was excited to be making my first real works of art. And I had seen an exhibition of paintings by Lucian a few months before and had been especially struck by the paintings of his mother. I felt connected to him because of them.
 
I come from a family of sisters. I have no brothers. Lucian was my first lover. My father was head of an evangelical community in North Devon when I got into the Slade, aged 16. I had been brought up to regard sex outside marriage as a sin.
 
The first chapter of Feaver’s biography is devoted to Lucian’s involvement with Jacquetta Eliot, an heiress. He portrays her vividly: a sensationally beautiful diva who understood the rules of the sexual game that Lucian played – namely, making the other person jealous. She succeeded and beat Lucian at his own game. None of the other relationships that Lucian had in his later years receives as much attention. Years of my life are dealt with in a clumsy paragraph, in the context of a description of the painting Interior, W11 (After Watteau):
 
 “”Her father had said, after meeting Freud for the first time, that he was ‘the most selfish man he’d ever met’. He died in 1983, the year she moved into the flat Freud bought for her, high in a building opposite the British Museum. After his death and following After Watteau, she painted her mother and sisters adrift on a bed: the remaining family lovingly nestled. Her son Frank was born on 10 December 1984. She took three weeks off in Cambridge after the birth at the Portland Hospital (which Freud paid for) before leaving the baby with her mother and returning to London. In After Watteau she sat with Bella, because of having to rest her hand on her knee, but not with the others.””
 
I didn’t like sitting for Lucian. I felt trapped. I have never liked to be looked at, though I do like attention, of the right sort. I cried throughout the sittings for all of the paintings Lucian did of me: Naked Girl with Egg, After Watteau, Girl in a Striped Nightshirt, Painter and Model. (There is also a beautiful painting of my head and shoulders, with one hand lifted to my cheek and the curve of my naked breast just appearing from my white shirt – I don’t remember the title. It’s not often exhibited or reproduced.) I sat for him because I was in love with him. The last painting Lucian did of me was Painter and Model. Feaver quotes Auerbach:
 
“”Lucian was very aware of the fact that Celia wanted to paint and actually went out of his way to encourage her ... That elaborate and, to me, not entirely successful picture of her and Angus ... was partly done, I think, in order to make her feel better ... Certainly he was concerned to keep his two sitters to hand for as long as he needed. The painting was completed in 1987. And that proved to be the end of the intimacy.””
 
Again, I am more amused than upset by Auerbach’s interpretation of Lucian’s concern about my frustration at not being able to paint as much as I wanted. Surely the most effective way he could help me would be to spend some time with our son himself? My mother was Frank’s main carer, but I travelled regularly to Cambridge, usually every other day in the early years, and I was often exhausted. Doing a painting of me standing up was hardly a way to make me feel better about my own work. But Feaver is right in saying that this painting ‘proved to be the end of the intimacy’. I didn’t sit for Lucian again. He remained central to my life but gradually I fell out of love with him. I went on loving him, however.
 
Danny Moynihan, the son of Anne Dunn, one of Lucian’s lovers, was at the Slade with me. He arranged a show for some of us at Acquavella Galleries in New York in 1981. The work was at the Moynihans’ house, waiting to be shipped to the US, when, according to Dunn, ‘Lucian came round, walked straight in, took [Celia Paul’s] work away and that was that ... Danny was mortified at setting all this up, such a slap in the face. Lucian would get a better gallery for her and he wanted control.’ Feaver asked Lucian about the incident. This is how Lucian remembered it, apparently: ‘Danny Moynihan got Celia’s paintings from the Slade and she said she wanted them back. He said: “Sorry, they’ve gone to America.” So I walked round to Redcliffe Road’ – where the Moynihans lived – ‘and took them.’
 
This anecdote seems crucial to me in understanding the dilemma young women face about their own ambition for their art, and their need to be loved and desired. The two ambitions are usually incompatible. When I told him about the exhibition in New York, Lucian said: ‘Are you sure that’s what you want?’ He advised me that it was essential to focus on one’s art without distractions of this kind, especially when one was young (I was 21). I sensed that he would disapprove of me, and love me less, if I went ahead with it. If, instead, he had encouraged me, my life might have been very different. William Acquavella was Lucian’s dealer from 1992 till the end of his life, selling his paintings for record-breaking prices.
 
One of Lucian’s last models was a former art student, Ria Kirby. He had met her when she was working as an assistant at the V&A, helping to hang an exhibition of his work. When Feaver asked David Dawson about the nature of Lucian’s involvement with her, David said: ‘Ria? She’d never dream of it. Never entered her head. To her he was an old man.’ Lucian was pleased with his new model: ‘She’s from a different social background. Something brand-newish about her but she’s so sensible, loves working at the V&A and was at Camberwell, painting where painting was discouraged. I’m very pleased. No hint of showing me her work, always a quarter of an hour early and since I’m always longing to start that’s good too.’ She posed right away to appreciable effect. ‘Lying on the bed she’s tragic.’
 
Ria was not one of ‘these neurotics’. She was not pushy about her own work. She was approved of by David and Lucian for these reasons. She decided when the time was right to stop sitting for Lucian. She told him that she didn’t want him to start another painting of her because she wanted to get married and have children sometime.
 
Reading about Ria reminds me of this ideal of straightforwardness, and how inhibiting and distressing it was for me to know that I couldn’t live up to it, even if I’d wanted to. Ria was never in love with Lucian. Love complicates things.
 
Gwen John sought out a life of solitude, a life lived in the shadows. Charlotte Brontë likened her writing process and that of her sisters to potatoes growing in a cellar. I know that women possess this particular power of interiority and silence. Perhaps the great women artists are nocturnal creatures who prefer to create freely in the darkness. In this way, too, they avoid being referred to as ‘one of these neurotics’. Perhaps they choose their overshadowing? If they go unnoticed they can be as madly inventive as they like, without making anyone jealous.
 
When Lucian died, I started to feel that I’d had enough of cellar life. Like Gwen John, I had continued to paint with complete dedication through very turbulent times. I had been represented by the same gallery, Marlborough Fine Art, for 25 years. In 2011, after Lucian’s death, I wrote to various galleries, hoping for a change. Simon Martin, the director of Pallant House in Chichester, suggested a joint exhibition of me and Gwen John. Victoria Miro saw the exhibition and liked my work. I am now represented by Victoria Miro and my life has been transformed. I am not often referred to as a ‘painter in her own right’. I still work and live alone, my aim is still silence and interiority, but I feel I am beginning to enjoy a certain freedom, in my work and in my life.
 
Feaver writes affectionately about Lucian’s sons: Ali Boyt, Freddy Eliot and my son, Frank. He describes him in a tender account:
 
  “”In March 1998 Frank Paul (‘Young Frank’, to distinguish him from Frank Auerbach) had sat the scholarship exams for King’s School Canterbury. He was successful and consequently on a Sunday in September Lucian went down to Canterbury to see him and the other newly enrolled scholars blessed in the cathedral ... Lucian said: ‘Frank looked awfully good and got into trouble, as he’s so dreamy and had mould on his gown.’ ‘He’s always reading,’ his housemaster said. ‘He’ll be fine.’ (He was to win prizes for academic excellence and German and proceed to Cambridge.)””
 
It meant a great deal to me, as of course it did to Frank, that he and his father formed a real relationship. Frank grew closer to his father when he started to sit for him. Unfortunately for Lucian, Frank was about to go away to university. He was studying languages and spent a lot of time abroad. The painting was never finished. Feaver quotes Lucian discussing Frank in 2004, when he was studying in Russia: ‘Poor little Frank’s been robbed: his glasses, his passport, credit cards, everything. He was held up in the street. Basically, he’s OK. It’s only just happened. Didn’t want to come back at all. He’s very affected by how people are to him.’
 
Frank and I spent some time with Lucian on the last day of his life. We were shown into his bedroom by Lucian’s daughter Rose Boyt, who told Frank that one of the nurses had said that the last sense to leave a dying person is their sense of hearing, so Frank should say a few words to his father, if he felt inclined. Rose and I left the room. I’ve often wondered what last words I would have spoken to Lucian, if I had been given this opportunity.
 
 
  

Painting in the Dark. By Celia Paul. London Review of Books,  December 2020. 

Celia Paul cried throughout her first sessions modeling for Lucian Freud. “The experience of being naked disarmed me,” Paul writes in her new memoir, Self-Portrait. She describes sitting for him as a tortuous experience and the sense of his scrutiny as overpowering. “I felt like I was at the doctor’s or in hospital, or in the morgue.” At one point, he tells her that her breasts reminded him of eggs; then he boils one, slices it in half, and places it in a dish in front of her. She has to lie still while he paints it.

 This became Freud’s Naked Girl With Egg (1980-81), a strange and slightly surreal work that one critic noted was emblematic of Freud’s interest in female genitalia, a painting that “turns the body inside out and drags the mystery into the daylight.” The mystery dragged into the daylight was Paul’s body, naked and splayed on a black bedspread, as she cups her breast with her hand. Her eyes are turned upward toward something in the distance so that we see mostly their whites. In front of her, on a small table, is the egg, lookng like a pair of disembodied breasts or yellow eyes.

 The naked girl and the famous artist: It’s an old story and perhaps  predictable arrangement of roles for Freud, the much older and more famous painter, and Paul, his beautiful younger lover; he paints and she sits for him. And yet. The concept of sitting occurs over and over again in Paul’s book, and these roles are not as static as Naked Girl With Egg might lead us to believe. Nor is sitting as simple as it might seem. “The act of sitting is not passive,” Paul writes, describing it, at times, as almost a form of intense meditation, one that requires its own kind of focus.

 Self-Portrait might be read as a series of sittings over the course of a lifetime. Paul sits for Freud many times throughout their relationship, but he also sits for her. So do all of her sisters. When Paul is just starting out as a painter, her mother sits for her and cries because she feels like her daughter is treating her as an object. But as Paul’s career continues, sitting becomes something of a vocation for her mother; she takes the train twice a week to London to sit for her daughter in her studio. Time passes, the roles and the balance of power alter, and so the acts of sitting and painting change, too. There are traditional narratives about the painter and his subject, the genius and his muse. Paul tells us that, in her life, this story was at least partly true: She was the naked girl on the bedspread, weeping and overexposed. But it is part of a longer story that she is telling about herself and Freud and others in her life, about the painter and those she paints. In Self-Portrait, Paul is her own subject, but so are the shifting conditions of subjecthood and objecthood, the changing relationships between the painter and the painted.

 Celia Paul was born in 1959 in Trivandrum, India. Her father was a missionary and later a minister in rural England. Paul learned to paint while at boarding school. When she was 16, after a teacher noticed her talent,  she went away to the Slade School of Art in London. There, two years later, she met Freud, then 55 and a visiting tutor at the school. She showed him some drawings and a painting she had done, and he invited her back to his flat to show her one of his. When he kissed her, she writes, she was a little frightened. Slowly, they became romantically involved, as she moved from rented room to rented room in London, waiting for him to call. Their love was rooted in painting—both the act of putting paint to canvas and a shared devotion to art as the primary purpose of their lives. Their relationship was also turbulent. He often had other lovers, and she occasionally did, too. He had a daughter roughly her age. In the prologue, Paul states that one reason she wrote this book was to tell the story of their relationship on her terms: “By writing about myself in my own words, I have made my life my own story. Lucian, particularly, is part of my story rather than, as is usually the case, me being portrayed as part of his.” 

 Her telling of this story is characterized by a certain matter-of-factness. She incorporates old journal entries and letters, which float to the surface of the narrative with a particular intensity, and images of her and his paintings. Paul’s prose is at once unflinching and direct as well as reticent, full of gaps. She tells us the details of a delicious meal she and Freud shared at a bistro but not quite how she was feeling or why she acted a certain way. She also reflects on a period when she was living in London, drinking heavily and sleeping around, trashing her quiet landlord’s beautiful house, but she doesn’t really tell us where these seemingly out-of-character impulses sprang from. She doesn’t explain herself; there is a kind of dialectic between directness and reticence in her work, as she reports the facts but obscures the motivations. It made me think about portrait painting: After all, what is a portrait if not a painting of a surface, an outer layer that hints at something deeper? In her written portrait of herself, Paul exercises a kind of control in the acts of revelation and withholding.

 In many ways, this is not a book about Freud but rather one about painting. Paul writes about the particular intensities and tediums of her work, its relationship to life, and its peculiar power dynamics. She describes, too, the sacrifices and tensions that she sees as inherent in being a woman artist. Paul is nearly ascetic about her work, even to this day at age 60. She chooses not to live with her current husband in order to preserve her privacy and time for painting. For the same reason, when she and Freud had a son, Frank, she did not live with the child; his primary caretaker was her mother. She does not apologize for this, nor does she valorize it. She simply relays the circumstances of her life, what felt necessary and what did not, what allowed her to paint and what she gave up to do so.

 The interplay between solitude and proximity, between separation and closeness, factors into all of her close relationships. In a piece by her son for an exhibition catalog, which Paul excerpts, he writes:

   "' Isolation is deeply important to my mum’s peace of mind…. Her studio, which no-one else may enter without permission, is a mass of splintered floorboards, paint spatters and canvases, but, like [her] bedroom, it’s devoid of any adornments which others might find necessary for a sense of self-assurance. One might conclude from this that my mum is an entirely self-subsistent person, yet she feels separation keenly, as well as a deep guilt that her need for solitude precludes her from being as hospitable as she would like to be. "

 Frank seems to have made a kind of peace with the unusual domestic arrangements of his childhood and with his mother’s need for solitude. He has come to understand that her choices were not easy for her. And yet Paul implies—again, somewhat reticently—that he did not always feel so settled in her choices, and neither did she. She describes the experience of painting a portrait of her young son perched on his grandmother’s lap, as well as the sense that something about the arrangement of their roles was strange. “I felt that it might be wrong and suspect for me to be standing looking at him, where I had placed him, lower than me on my mother’s knee,” she writes. “I should have been the one who was sitting. I sensed that he felt this, too, and that there’s a trace of indignation in his regard, and a hint of hurt pride.” When he was a teenager, Frank started to refuse to sit for her, even becoming angry when he discovered in her sketchbook that she was making sketches of him sleeping. It was a rejection, perhaps, of the feeling of being somehow used. Later in life, though, he began to sit for her once again, listening to audiobooks while she painted him.

 So it goes: the flux of sitting and painting. Paul looks back to a time in her early years with Freud when she tried to paint a portrait of him, which simply wouldn’t come together. “I think I felt, at the time, that although I was Lucian’s subject, he wasn’t mine,” she writes. She only finished the painting many years later, after his death.

 The last portrait Freud did of Paul before their relationship finally came to a painful end was called Painter and Model. In it, she is painting a nude male model; she is dressed in a paint-covered smock, stepping on a tube of paint and brandishing her brush. It is a clear reversal of the traditional gender roles in art, a radical image of a woman artist in control of the male body. “I felt honoured that Lucian should represent me in the powerful position of the artist: his recognition was deeply significant to me,” she writes. “But underlying my pride, I felt wistful that I was no longer represented as the object of desire.” It is not so straightforward after all, the shedding of the objectification that bothered her so much in the beginning. Paul distills these tensions masterfully, and her book does something that painting alone cannot, linking all of these sittings and portraits in a way that allows us to see the relationships from different angles and at different times. She fluctuates between subject and object, not just in her relationship with Freud but even in her own conception of herself and how she would like to be seen.

 After Freud died in 2011, Paul writes, she wanted to paint something about what he meant to her. She called this work Painter and Model, and it is something of an updated version of the one he did of her. But this one is a self-portrait, giving the title a new frisson of meaning. Paul sits and looks straight ahead, wearing a similar spattered smock, the paint tubes scattered around her feet. She is older and looks a bit stoic, somewhere between happy and sad, but peaceful.

 This version is more visually muted than Freud’s—it’s darker in color and has a single figure, and there is no action frozen on the canvas. It does not have quite the same obvious thrill of upturned power dynamics, the woman artist wielding her brush over a lounging male nude. In this portrait, she is simply sitting. But of course, as she has told us, this is not so simple at all. Of all the paintings in the book, this one perhaps crystallizes most essentially the act of sitting, which animates so much of Paul’s work. It also manages to capture most clearly that strange liminal space she occupies, that perhaps we all occupy, moving between subject and object, caught in a flux of power and attention, in a single canvas.

 

The Painter and the Painted : Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait. By Sophie Haigney. The Nation, November 9, 2020.

  

  
 
“Pictures unpainted make the heart sick.” With this indelible line, the principal of the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in London persuaded Bishop Geoffrey Paul to allow his talented teenage daughter to study there. Two years later, in 1978, Celia Paul met Lucian Freud, who was at Slade as a visiting tutor. She was 18; he was 55.
 
In her captivating memoir, “Self-Portrait,” Paul describes how her growing love for Freud seemed at first to denude her of ambition. She stopped washing her clothes and brushing her hair. Her work became “slack and halfhearted”; she kept wiping away images, and felt “suffocated by the increasing debris of unfinished paintings.” Her heart was sick.
 
Paul and Freud were lovers for 10 years, and in 1984 she gave birth to their son, Frank. By the time the philandering Freud died in 2011, he had at least 14 offspring that he acknowledged as his own; The Times’s obituary played it safe by specifying only that there were “many.”
 
Freud was by turns domineering and caring, encouraging about Paul’s paintings while doing what he could to stop her from making them. He was fanatical about his own time, famously punishing portrait sitters who deigned to arrive late, but he would keep Paul waiting for his arrival or even — because he refused to give her his number — just a phone call. Freud would speak enviously of how Rodin had convinced his lover Camille Claudel to give herself over to becoming a muse, and how hurt Rodin was when he no longer had complete control over her.
 

 “Self-Portrait” is Paul’s account of her life and her work — or, more precisely, of her attempts to realize the possibilities of each despite the constraints thrown up by the other. She left Frank with her mother in Cambridge when he was an infant. When Paul spends time with him, she says, “I don’t have any thoughts for myself.” She lives separately from her current husband, who doesn’t have a key to her flat.
 
Paul writes about her struggle to love someone while dedicating herself to her painting, explaining in her prologue that she hopes her book will “speak to young women artists — and perhaps to all women — who will no doubt face this challenge in their lives at some time and will have to resolve this conflict in their own ways.” But this makes her mesmerizing book sound more helpful than it is, or than it needs to be; “Self-Portrait” is less tidy and more surprising than such a potted purpose would allow.
 
When Paul first met Freud she noticed how pale and waxy his skin was, with an “eerie glow” that looked “like a candle inside a turnip.” (Her metaphors are often startling in their cool specificity.) His initial attempts to seduce her made her feel “hemmed in.” His apartment smelled of rotting fruit and food scraps. “I watched him kissing me and my mouth was unresponsive,” she writes. “I was frightened.”
 
It was only later in their relationship that Paul describes anything resembling pleasure. Still, aside from some ghostly charcoal sketches she made while he slept, she wasn’t able to paint him. “Although I was Lucian’s subject, he wasn’t mine,” she writes. The first time she sat for him, she cried. She lay naked, and self-consciously pushed her hand to her breast; he told her to hold the pose, even though it was excruciating for her: “I felt like I was at the doctor’s, or in hospital, or in the morgue.”
She recalls all of this precisely, without anger. When Paul learned about Freud’s other affairs, she swallowed a handful of painkillers and chased them with a bottle of whiskey. “This landed me in the hospital,” she writes. “I went home to recover.” Paul’s powers of observation are keen and often ruthless, but she never resorts to the language of self-pity — even when a reader might expect her to. “Self-Portrait” reveals an abjection that declines to announce itself as such.
 
Pages of this book are given over to notebook entries she kept decades ago, describing her painting practice with a moving, almost painful, immediacy. She would envy Freud in his soundproof studio while she suffered a noisy apartment and had to wear earplugs, “trying to block out the din so that one poor struggling thought might swim through.” If only she could get the solitude and quiet she needed, her next painting promised to be great. “There is a creativity working in me like worms in sand.”
 
Unlike the hard, clinical gaze of Freud’s work, Paul’s portraits are radiant with intimacy. The child of missionaries, she has always been attracted, she says, to the “juxtaposition of the mystical with direct observation.” “Self-Portrait” includes lush, full-color reproductions of numerous paintings — Freud’s as well as hers. Paul’s main subjects have been her four sisters and their mother, when she was alive. “The act of sitting is not a passive one,” Paul writes. Her mother would use the time for prayer. In one painting, “My Mother with a Ring,” her mother looks off into the distance as if she’s waiting for something, her eyes gleaming as they catch the light.
 
 The arc of Paul’s story is not one of triumph, but endurance. “I felt that time itself was like water, a powerful current that had dragged my mother away and that was also pulling me in the same direction,” she writes. “There was some comfort for me in this thought.” A self-portrait she painted after Freud’s death was done as both homage and severance. Like a painting he did of her, it’s titled “Painter and Model” because now, she writes, “I am my own subject.”
 
  
‘I Am My Own Subject’: Celia Paul on Lucian Freud, Motherhood and a Life in Art
By Jennifer Szalai. The New York Times,   November 11, 2020

A woman sprawls on a bed, the suggestion of a wall behind her. With her left hand, she cups her left breast, while the right falls free. Her eyes are turned toward the pillow. Her strong thighs don’t quite meet, and her knee points toward a table in the foreground, where a boiled egg, sliced in half, waits in a white cocotte (a morning-after repast, maybe): a visual echo of her bountiful nipple. Lucian Freud called this painting Naked Girl With Egg.


 
The girl in question is Celia Paul. She was in her twenties when she sat for the painting; Freud was in his fifties. Sure, it’s that old story: the art student and the visiting tutor, a passion we might speak of as forbidden were it not so familiar. In her new memoir, Self-Portrait, Paul, now in her sixties, no longer student but master in her own right, writes of modeling for Freud in the fall of 1980, not long after they’d met and begun an affair that would last nearly a decade. She struggled under her lover’s scrutiny—she recalls that he “peered down” at her, though on canvas the subject’s body looms over the viewer. “I was very conscious of my flesh, and I felt myself to be undesirable.”

 
Of course, that’s Freud’s work: lush bodies and frank physicality, haunted faces with the suggestion of introspection. We might understand his nude figures as sexual, but they’re rarely sexy. Maybe Paul was just too young to understand that; maybe she thought modeling for her lover—intimacy with a complicated power dynamic—something close to a sex act. “I felt exposed and hated the feeling. I cried throughout these sessions.” She never gives her opinion of the finished work.

 
It’s probably wrong of me to begin with Freud, though I imagine there will be readers who come to this memoir looking for him. In life, his fame far eclipsed hers—we might call her an artist’s artist. Self-Portrait is not an exercise in setting the record straight, the unvarnished truth about a great man. Nor is it the work of an artist’s muse, speaking up at last. It’s an account of a life so rigorously dedicated to art and family that fame seems beside the point. Perhaps the most telling relationship in the book is Paul’s friendship and then rivalry with another girl, Linda, when she was only 15, both so obsessed with art that they became “secretive and mistrustful of each other.” Self-Portrait documents a woman learning to trust—not Freud, not other artists, but herself.

 
Celia Paul was born in 1959 in India, where her father was head of a seminary. Faith was important to both her parents. Her mother, frequently Paul’s model, used their sessions together to pray. Paul doesn’t speak of religion’s role in her own life, but I understand art—defined broadly—as the filter through which she sees all, perhaps as total as her parents’ Christianity. As a writer, she’s possessed of a heightened sensibility, a particular vantage on to the world. Here’s her recall of India, which she left at age five:

 
’The drumbeats from the Hindu festivals would echo up to our house across the paddy fields from the Hindu temple in Trivandrum. The drums would be accompanied by chanting and screaming, which would reach a crescendo and then suddenly there would be silence, punctuated only by the lonely howl of the jackals.”
 
This is less a memory than it is the colonial mythology that a woman now in her sixties would have been raised on. Of course, a memoir is as much a construction as a painting. Here are things as I see them: as dramatic, thrilling, extreme.

 
 ’’My mother had been radiant in her richly embroidered dresses and saris. I loved her passionately. When my younger sister Kate was born, I was so traumatised by being displaced in my mother’s affections that I resolved to die.”
 
 
Self-Portrait’s direct language doesn’t quite convey the intensity of the author’s feeling—those screaming Indian villagers, a mother so loved that the arrival of a sibling would make Paul want to die. There’s something similar in Paul’s paintings, which can appear placid and understated but upon closer study yield fervent emotion.

 
Paul’s mother was one of the painter’s most rewarding subjects. Several of the portraits of her appear in this volume, and even in reproduction you can read the affection in the 2005 oil My Mother. An elderly woman in a diaphanous dress, she is thinner than in a portrait made 15 years earlier: not wasted, but sainted, with her beatific smile, her feet that seem not to touch the floor. She’s seated, and only the modulation of light and color imply a physical space behind her; she’s in the studio, or she’s in the kingdom of heaven. When Freud looked at Paul, she felt reduced; when Paul looks at her subjects, they are exalted.

 

Self-Portrait is loosely organized by theme, in chapters titled “Lucian,” “Home,” “Being a Mother,” “My Mother.” From them, the reader can piece together the particulars of Paul’s life: a happy upbringing with her four sisters, an adolescent mania for art that carried her to the Slade School of Fine Art, where she met Freud. The two had a son, Frank, in 1984, and their romance ended in 1988. Freud died in 2011. In a recent documentary, an art historian referred to him in plain hyperbole as “one of the great European painters of the last 500 years.” Self-Portrait illuminates what Freud’s long shadow obscured: Celia Paul herself, and an altogether different way of being an artist.

 
Though there are appreciable differences in their styles, as artists, both Freud and Paul are interested in people, depicted in constructed vignettes that imply some elusive narrative, a drama of the self. Generally, in these pages, Paul speaks of Freud not as a teacher, but a lover, a man who both delighted and frustrated her. She does not engage in the question of what effect his style might have had on her artistic development, nor does she answer whether her youthful experience modeling for Freud informed her own practice of painting from life—particularly her mother, her sisters, and her son, Frank—but a comparison suggests itself.

 
   “I have noticed that the men I have worked from are interested in the process of painting and in the act of sitting. The silence, when I am working from men, is less interior. Women, in my experience, find it easier to sit still and think their own thoughts, and they often hardly seem to be aware that I’m there in the same room. For this reason, I usually feel more peaceful when I’m working from a woman, and more free.
”
 
In My Sisters in Mourning, reproduced in this book, Paul paints her four sisters in shapeless white frocks, seated close together. They are arrayed by age, faces similar, as biological siblings’ so often are; it’s almost the progression of a single person over the years. The sitters’ hands are folded, almost in gestures of prayer. Paul speaks of the silence of her subjects in the moments she is painting them, and that quality exists in the finished work, too: the process informing the product.

 

This exchange between artist and subject, inside the studio, is clearly important. It’s not merely an act of looking—“If I know my subject well, it’s almost as if I don’t need to look at them in order to give them intense attention,” Paul writes—but one nearer collaboration. For Paul, the model is an active presence. She notes that for some early paintings she let her sister Kate read a book while she modeled; the finished work is a failure, “the vital spark is missing.” For Paul, the peculiar dynamic between artist and model is almost a moral question. As a younger artist, she painted her mother:

 
  ‘’I peremptorily instructed my mother about what position she should assume: she should lie on her back and raise one leg slightly. When she faltered and didn’t get the position just as I had wanted, I shouted at her. I was very cruel. She cried and said that I was treating her like an object. I responded irritably to her tears and said that she didn’t believe in me.”
 
She says her best student life drawings were of a model who wept, echoing the artist’s mother’s feeling of being dehumanized.

 
  “I empathised with her because I had so often cried when I sat for Lucian, and I understood how an awareness of how exposed one is, when lying naked in front of someone, can undermine one’s confidence, if one is made to feel undesirable.”
 
Recall Linda, Paul’s adolescent artistic nemesis. In young adulthood, the two rekindled their friendship, and Linda became one of Paul’s subjects. An understated pastel of her, hands demure on her lap, eyes downcast, contains the same silence I divine in so many of Paul’s portraits. It’s a humane picture of a human being, with dignity and beauty and mystery. It is distinct from Freud’s glorious nudes because Paul is a different artist, yes. But it’s also a different approach altogether to the complicated matter of transubstantiating a real person into a work of art: the model as subject, not object.
 

 
If you want to know about Lucian Freud, William Feaver’s biography will be a better guide. He’s present in Self-Portrait, but he’s not very interesting. Paul recalls a double date: her and Freud, the painter Frank Auerbach and his never-named companion. It’s difficult not to cringe: “The woman doesn’t say a word and nor do I. We do not say a word to each other, either. Two dynamic scintillating men and two silent bewildered and embarrassed women sitting eating olives.”

 
Given time, Paul would assert a dynamic, scintillating personhood all her own. If Paul is correcting the record here, it’s to engage with the perception that she must have been the older artist’s muse at best or victim at worst. Freud had an unorthodox personal life, the father to 14 children by six women, but he and Paul were happy enough for the decade of their entanglement. That she writes of him with neither fondness nor exasperation isn’t a consequence of the author’s attempt at objectivity. It’s because he’s not the point.

 
There are moments, indeed, when it’s clear that Paul was not so much a muse as an influence—a far more active thing—on Freud. A teacher at Slade deemed her study of her parents and her sister Kate, Family Group, 1980, completed when she was 21, “a great painting,” and “Lucian admired it, too.”

 
“”In the weeks after seeing it, he often seemed preoccupied. He said, “I’m thinking of your painting.” He started to think about doing a big painting involving several sitters, and he ordered his biggest canvas yet to be stretched.”
 

That would become Interior W11 (After Watteau). It’s a startling painting, five figures huddled together in a shabby interior. Paul modeled for it, alongside Bella, one of Freud’s two daughters with Bernardine Coverley, and Suzy Boyt, herself once a student at Slade, where she met Freud, by whom she had four children. Kai, Boyt’s son and Freud’s stepson, also appears in the composition, as does a young girl unrelated to the rest of this blended family. Though the title credits the eighteenth-century French painter, Paul wants us to recognize her role in this work’s genesis.

 
We cannot understand Paul as Freud’s prey, as we often do when an older, established person takes up with a younger, vulnerable one; they had a long relationship, not a brief affair. Infidelities and complexities aside, theirs was a union of mutual respect, and Paul makes it clear that their son is one of the great joys of her life. I liked the fact that the flat in which Paul continues to work—captured here in Room and Ghost of the British Museum—was a gift from Freud; if he gave her nothing else, he gave her this liberty, her own space. Freud’s final depiction of Paul, Painter and Model, shows Paul in spattered garb, brush in hand, tube of pigment beneath her feet. “I felt honored that Lucian should represent me in the powerful position of the artist.” He saw her as she truly was; what is that but love?


 
Celia Paul is a more gifted writer than she has any business being; it’s almost unfair. She joins the ranks of Anne Truitt, the great minimalist sculptor who wrote meditatively of her development as an artist, and Sally Mann, whose memoir Hold Still is a beautiful document of her life. By contrast with those artists’ memoirs, though, Self-Portrait reads like a novel. Paul alights on a topic, offers asides and digressions, circles back to her main point. The work is written with intention but wears it lightly.

Paul paints people she knows. You can read that intimacy in the work, or perhaps once you hear her explain this, you see the paintings anew. Her painting is not an act of close observation—she’s seen these people before—but some deeper communion with the person she’s aiming to fix on canvas. It’s impressive that she’s able to render them in words, too, on the page: Freud, her parents, and, of course, herself. You hear it in the book’s title: She’s no longer a naked girl with an egg—she’s granted that girl a self. 
 
Celia Paul Redefines the Artist’s Model. By Rumaan Alam. The New Republic, October 29, 2020.
 

‘I have made my life my own story,’ the painter Celia Paul writes in the introduction to her recently published memoir, Self-Portrait. ‘Lucian, particularly, is made part of that story rather than, as is usually the case, me being portrayed as part of his.’ The Lucian in question is Lucian Freud, with whom Paul had a painful ten year relationship and a child. Despite the suggestion of reclaimed narratives, chapter one of her life story is titled ‘Lucian’. He remains the dark sun under which this grimly compelling narrative unfolds.
 
 The book, told through Paul’s reminiscences, historic diary entries, paintings and photographs, begins in 1977, on the day the pair met. She was 18, a student at The Slade School of Fine Art in London. He was 55 and a celebrated painter, who arrived at The Slade for a job as a visiting tutor dressed in an expensive woollen suit. Paul’s first impressions describe a man with comically ghoulish charisma. His face, she writes, ‘had an eerie glow as if it was lit from within, like a candle inside a turnip’. She showed him some earnest studies she had made of her mother. He invited her back to his flat.
 
What follows is an unedifying pursuit. ‘I watched him kissing me and my mouth was unresponsive,’ Paul writes of their first physical encounter, sprung on her unannounced. ‘I was frightened.’ When she skips school to avoid bumping in to him, he calls her at home. They arrange to meet in Regent’s Park, where he unties her skirt and starts to kiss her waist, an experience that made her ‘very sad, also unnerved’. On other occasions he pushed her against a wall and pinned her to the floor. ‘I felt hemmed in,’ she remembers, ‘I needed to get out.’ One evening, Freud lights a fire in his bedroom made from wooden paintbrushes, a novelistic detail suited to a man who comes across as an emotional arsonist with a blazing ego. Nervous, romantic and no doubt aware of the asymmetry between them, Paul recites him He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by W.B. Yeats. The poem is addressed to a more powerful lover, and ends with the following plea for kindness: ‘I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’ Freud was not a man inclined to tread softly. Instead, he took the girl to bed.
 
Freud is known to have been something of a bastard in his affairs with women. (He fathered at least 14 children, although some have estimated the number as closer to 40.) From infidelities to gas-lighting, there is plenty of evidence of this in Paul’s book. Given his domineering tendencies, and the formative years she spent with him, the distinction between their painting styles is all the more remarkable. Much of the difference derives from the treatment of the subject. Paul works from a place of intense sensitivity and quietude, focusing on spirit and atmosphere over anatomy, an approach she says is only possible when she has a meaningful bond with her sitters. Tellingly she struggled to paint Freud, who would not allow her to dictate the dynamic between them. ‘Although I was Lucian’s subject,’ she writes, ‘he wasn’t mine.’ In contrast, Freud’s strength lay in his capacity for cruelty, in a gaze capable of dominating and exposing a subject like a cat toying with a bird. Paul recalls the uncomfortable experience of sitting for him naked in 1980. ‘I felt like I was at the doctors, or in hospital, or in the morgue.’
 
The subjects to whom Paul is most bonded are her female relations, in particular her mother who sat for her many times. ‘The drawings that I showed Lucian at our first meeting at The Slade were the first true works of art I had made, because they were of my mother’, she writes. ‘They were necessary because I loved her.’ Included among the works reproduced in Self-Portrait is My Mother (2005). In the painting she sits in a chair, emanating an old, familial intimacy – the kind of thick, claustrophobic, heavy love that is capable of warping perspective, causing us to encounter those we are closest to through a haze of emotion and memory. Her small body, with its oversized feet and shrunken head, has become one with the ambience of the room. A green fog that hangs in the air is of the same substance as the ghostly pallor that illuminates her skin.
 
An eponymous exhibition of Paul’s paintings at Victoria Miro in London coincides with the launch of her book. Most of the works on show were made after her mother died in 2015 (Freud had passed away in 2011), but even when she is not the subject she remains present by her absence. My Sisters in Mourning (2015–16), a large oil painting depicted in shades of grey and blue, shows Paul’s four sisters in the aftermath of her death. The women appear like a gathering of saints, sitting in prayerful silence. Paul has added red and navy marks to their noses and eyelids, so that their features appear raw and swollen from sorrow. 
 

The religiosity of Paul’s paintings is no surprise. Her parents were missionaries, and she spent her early years in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala. Later, her father became the Bishop of Hull. One sister is a theologian, another a priest and she counts a former Archbishop of Canterbury as a brother-in-law. Her mother used her time sitting for Paul for prayer – ‘a gift for a Christian,’ as she put it. Although she is not personally religious, Paul’s upbringing seems to have instilled a belief in vocation, an interest in the incorporeal presence of her subjects and a respect for cross-bearing. Painting is treated as a call that must be answered, no matter the cost. Three weeks after giving birth to her son Frank in 1984, she left the boy to be raised by her mother. Freud had bought her a flat overlooking the British Museum and she returned here, alone, to paint. The separation may have been a cause of great sadness and anxiety, but she considered it a necessary burden. ‘I had a strong sense of the rightness of the world,’ Paul writes of the happiness she felt after giving birth, ‘I knew it couldn’t last.’
 
Today Paul still lives and works alone in the flat across from the British Museum. She left Freud after the birth of her son, following one infidelity too many, and later married – although her husband does not live with her and she hasn’t given him a key to her flat. The story she relates through images and words has the feel of a painter’s parable, in which hardship, sacrifice and solitude lead, eventually, to something like grace. There are times when her Christ-like embrace of suffering may grate, but Paul is uninterested in making herself appear more palatable for the benefit of a reader. She accounts for her life like a person peeling off her bandages, often asking her audience to share in her experiences of difficulty and hurt. In the recent painting Self Portrait, Early Summer (2018), on display at Victoria Miro, her martyrdom is complete. She depicts herself sitting at home in her self-imposed convent for one. The light shines down upon her from above, she holds her hands serenely in her lap and looks out towards the viewer. Her tattered studio clothes have transformed into a robe, upon which the encrusted flecks of oil shimmer like gemstones.
 
 
A Muse in Her Own Words: Celia Paul’s ‘Self-Portrait’. By Rosanna McLaughlin. Frieze, November 26, 2019.
 

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)