The edge of mist-and-silver

Hidden somewhere in the invisible unused air-plateaus is a little Child: mine: who has never been born.

A tenet in me is that a woman by every right and by old earthen law should, if she will, have her child--should be the warm-winged mother.

I am a devil and a fantasy, a jezebel and a wanderer in fields of inverted fungi: so I seem to me. I do not know my status--I but know my personal incidents as they happen. But I am also woman: a woman by inherence and by fact. Being woman I am the potential mother, mother of my Child who has not been born.

I feel myself a fitting mother.

I am bodily in good health--if not robust yet durable, as a mother should be: I am always tired as if from touches and weights of living as a loving mother should be: I am warm of blood, latently savage-toothed like a jungle-mother, deadlier than the male, as a brave mother should be. Though I have no child I have an ancient right in my Child, and I want my Child. My Child is, but has not been, born. Merely to want my Child makes me a fitting mother.

My Child often is realer to me than books I read and walks I take and the friend who writes me frequent letters.

Sometimes my Child is a soft pink baby smelling of rain-water, milk and flowers: lying close to the curves of my breasts in the hollow of my arms: feeding soft insistent baby hunger and feeding soft strong living hunger of my kissing mother-lips--

More often my Child is a little happy-voiced fellow, my small brave boy three years old: he clings to my skirt with his sweet tiny hand as we hurry along a frosty pavement in an early December morning. We live in New York in a little common quiet apartment and are gratefully poor, and I work in a factory for a little weekly wage for the living of my little fellow and me. Every day in the early morning we go out to a corner bakery to buy a long crisp loaf of French bread for breakfast. And in the December morning my heart contracts with a sort of happiness and a sort of grief at the sound of little feet in stout shoes yet frail shoes pattering-pattering gaily along beside me on the frosty flagstones. We start out hand-in-hand--his small hand is wonderfully firm and virile--but presently I let go his hand as we hurry along, to feel it instantly clutch the folds of my work-skirt: it pulls and drags at my waistbands and my Heart together with twisted sweetness that makes me ache from head to foot. ‘Mother, wait,’ he says in his happy voice, ‘wait for me.’ But I hurry faster. Always I hurry faster when my happy brave little fellow cries, ‘Wait, mother,’ for the sweet feel of that dragging at my mother-skirt--

More often my Child is the little girl six years old of the shy eyes and the sun-kissed hair and the firm child-mouth, full of high temper and strong will. All over her is need and demand of her mother to guard and adore and cherish her every moment of her life. We are together in a country field with oak-trees in it, and poplars, and daisies and bluebells and other field-flowers, and it is overgrown with long coarse fragrant wild grass. The noonday sun is bright-hot and I bring my Child there to dry her hair, for I have newly washed it with a square of white soap and a porcelain bluebird bowl: the feel of her small round wilful head was marvelously fulfilling in my cupped hands. She wanders around in the hot-brightness through the tall grass, gathering the hardy scentless field-flowers with her little brown fingers, and she shakes back her beautiful thick short damp curls. I sit on a flat stone like a Sioux squaw and watch her. The grass brushes her bare legs: the magic sun mixed with a faint cool breeze plays upon her head: the tragic delicate music of rustling poplar leaves comes down from tree-tops and catches her in a fairy song-net. She is always very new, very incredible, my Child. She looks toward me with her shy radiant eyes and she says, ‘Mother, look, my hair is nearly dry.’ Her hair is thick and heavy. In my experienced subdued mother-wisdom I know it will not be dry for an hour. I feel the damp of her hair rheumishly keen all over me: a menacingness for me to guard her from: a dear anxiety: an ancient mother-note in the long human gamut of sounds.

--it is precious wearing racking colorful romance to be her mother: each mother-day holds gold-and-blue foreboding: each mother-day holds thin insistent gold-and-purple sorrows: each mother-day holds deep gold-and-gray care, incessant and absolute: an aching wealth of beauty: no more but no less than the damp of her hair in the noonday field. My Child!--herself incessant and absolute: warm pure palpitant gold-of-my-life--

Someway realer than books I read and walks I take my Child clamors to be born.

My Child will never be born to any other woman. While she hovers and flutters on the edge of Mist-and-Silver--a border edge--there are ten million fertile hot milk-teeming bodies of women each ready to gather her in and wrap her in delicate-sweet flesh. Ten million other children hovering on the edge will drop off into the ten million matrix-cups--each woman mysteriously a fitting mother so only she wants her baby--though she be, besides, a thief or a traitor or a weakling or a murderer or a harlot or a drunkard or a fool.

Let them come, the ten million. The chrysalid children are clamoring, clamoring always for their birth: a wide ‘melody unheard.’

But my Child will never drop over the edge to any woman but me. She calls with veiled and dazzling flames of eagerness for her Birthday: but she will await my made-readiness through a long night, though it should last till the day-break of another age. Dimly I weep for her, my needing-me Child. I weep that she must come to this richly-cursed me. But I weep more that I have not got her in this sterile now, where is flawed passionate wealth of intangible life-stuff: but no small round wilful head of hair to wash: no little fellow’s feet on December flagstones and sweet dragging at my skirt: no soft pink-baby hunger--

It is hunger I feel from her. I feel her always hungry where she is and I can give her no nourishing--no warming food in all my strange unfertile passing life!

It is that less than my empty arms that makes blurred unrests and writhings in my Dreaming Womb.


A right shape and size

Sometimes I fancy me married--a responsible wife, a housekeeping matron: with my window-sills full of potted plants.

I have a woman quality which seems uxoresque: I am someway a Right Shape and Size to be somebody’s wife. My bodily and astral dimensions have outlines apparently suitable for something in the married-woman way.

The wild piquance of being myself--who but for extreme saneness would be mad--rises up and smashes that concept.

But being a Right Shape and Size I involuntarily imagine it.

Fleetingly I imagine a flat in the West Seventies in New York, or a bungalow on the Jersey side, or a middle-sized house in a middle-sized town in Middle-West Illinois--whichever might happen--with me set marriedly down in the midst of it like a suitable maggot in a suitable nut. Suitableness, diametrically opposed to Romance, is its keynote.

I fancy me walking about my married house mornings after breakfast in a neat linen dress and high-heeled satin slippers: snipping dead leaves off my window-sill plants, dusting bits of porcelain, giving my maid some tame household directions. My Body looks slender and supple and newly-married and in-the-drawing in the linen house-dress. The geometric gods regard me with immense satisfaction as being an exact proved theorem. I go to the telephone to order some Little Neck clams and some vermouth cocktails for dinner, and a roast and some Brussels sprouts and the assemblings of a salad: and in it I am ingrainedly domestic, dreadfully useful, a strong pillar of the vast good nice world.

Afternoons I go out to a modiste’s to fit a gown, or to a mild bridge-party along with other suitable women, or to a matinée with a suitable neighbor.

Everything is perfectly right in my insides and in my thoughts: my thoughts run in little troughs in which there is no leakage or deviation, thoughts of a dreadful niceness, thoughts which ever presuppose potted plants on my window-sills.

Evenings I go out with my husband, or sit around with my husband, or take leave of him for a few hours at the hall door.

My husband would be the sort of man that is called a Good Scout. And he would have married me not for my wistfulness or wickedness or weirdness but for that I am a proper Shape and Size, with a smooth proper covering of flesh, to make a suitable sizable wife. And he would be a heavy grappling anchor to hold me fast in an ocean of domesticness.

Men of the genus Good Scout are all fiercely alike. All women, no matter what their genus, are exceptions to the rule. But men--rich men, poor men, beggar-men, thieves: so only they are Good Scouts--are of marvelous sameness. It comes from the want of minute lifelong pinpricking care of petticoats and potted plants--a detailed intensely personal sort of pain which touches dull solid tones of individuality with vivid various spots of color.

Men are made in ‘job lots’ like their own cravats. Their cravats will differ in texture and color and quality and price. But each one is innately necktie. Use it as a garter or a tourniquet or a strangler’s noose: it still is a man’s deadly necktie. Its use may be ruined but its necktique is deathless. Except poets--and perhaps scientists--men are themselves like that. They cannot get away from the Adam. Nor can women get away from the Eve. But Eve was not a type but a somewhat pleasant human ensemble. While Adam was a type and a sufficiently nasty one: a rotter and a welcher: doubtless the Good Scout type of his day.

A Good Scout is the sort of man who if a woman trusts him with one one-hundredth of her heart will take the whole heart and twist and batter it: and read the paper and smoke his pipe and pay the bills: serenely unaware.

Which is beside the point in this. For in this image all my marriedness is a thing of outer Shape and Size and Suitableness. The odd but natural sequence is that I make an excellent wife. Excellent is the word. I keep a neat house with no dust left in the corners and no dead leaves on the potted plants. My husband is well looked after as to breakfasts and dinners and bodily comfort, and I am rigidly square with him and chastely true to him.

If, some dinnertime, as I sit opposite him in a soft pretty chiffon gown, my secret thoughts overflow their troughs and I passionately forget the potted plants and the window-sills and want horribly to rise up and bloodily murder my husband for being such a Good Scout: that would be a genuinely powerless matter, a cobweb trifle, compared with my actual potent Shape and Size which are so suitable for a wife.

I make truly and simply an excellent wife.

--by God and my Soul-and-bones! it would be honester, finer, sweeter--more comfortable to be the dirty beggar-woman in the wet slippery streets--

But it’s facilely fancied because I am of Right Dimensions to be some Good Scout’s wife.

A curious subtly pitfalled world: in it my Shape and Size, and my Weight which is also Right, could betray me into being an excellent wife: and by that a lying chattel, an inexpressibly damaged woman.


Ice-water, corrosive acid and human breath

I have love for two towns. One is this Butte that I tiredly love inside me. And the other is New York that I smoothly love with all my surfaces.

It is some years--a little lump of years--since I have seen New York: and it is two thousand miles away. So I see and feel its hard sweet lurid magnetism now ten times sharper than when I lived in it. But I felt it sudden and sharp at every turn then. A surface emotion which hits one’s flesh and spreads wide over one’s area is more exciting than a spirit emotion which pierces inward at one tiny point: an ice shower-bath on the white skin is more anguishing than an ice-water drink down the red throat. The spirit emotion lives longer and works more damage and buries itself at last in proud shaded soul-reserves. The surface emotion stays always on the surface and lives actively in the front of one’s senses and musings.

The feel of New York is a mixture of ice-water, a corrosive acid and human breath sweeping someway warmish against one’s flesh.

It is immensely ungentle, New York: immensely human: immensely intriguing to all one’s selves. It is too big to have prejudices and traditions of locality: so it leaves its dwellers free, by ones and multitudes, to be human beings.

In South Bend and Toledo and Beloit and St. Paul and all the tight-built inland towns they murder you with narrowness and harshness and rancorous ill-will: they are scowlingly annoyed with you for making them murder you.

In New York they murder you with a large soft wave of indifferent insolence--no annoyance, no friction. New York eats you as it eats its dinner, rather liking you.

And my love for New York is made of liking: a plaisance of liking.

made of liking: a plaisance of liking.

I like New York with a charmed restfulness for varied things in it: subways, and Fourth Avenue, and the River, and Fifth Avenue on a sunny October afternoon, and the statue of Nathan Hale, and old cockroachy downtown buildings, and the soft rich whelming creamy boiling-chocolate fragrance from the Huyler factory in Irving Place. And mostly I like it for the people in it--People--Persons--People: they are human beings.

In the inland towns people are half-afraid of thoughts, half-afraid of spoken words, half-afraid of each other, half-afraid of the fact of being human.

In New York they are not afraid of any humanness. Even when they are in themselves craven-cowardly, cowardly enough to turn their own stomachs, they still turn their humanness unfearfully face-outward like upturned faces of a pack of cards.

An Italian organ-grinder grinding out his loud fierce music in a long deep New York side-street is a human organ-grinder: he bestows his rasped melody widely on everybody in ear-shot, not individually--since all around him is a spreading world of strangers--but jointly. So it feels-like.

A beggar-woman at a subway-entrance with a whine and a dirty face and the deadly black cape and chicken-coopish beggar-odor is a human beggar-woman. She throws out an inner savor of herself like a soiled aura on all collectively who pass her. Each-and-all of New York by tolerating and owning her partakes of her mean human essence.

A stout-hearted worn-bodied Jew factory girl working at a hard greasy little machine day after day gives all New York her bit of young virtue which is hardy and heroic and unaware: the whole Island of looseness and vice has an equal gift of impregnable surprising sordid purity thriving on sixes and sevens of poor dollars-a-week.

All of it is because New York is one Large Condition made of human breaths and the worn scrapings of tired Youth rather than one large town made of individuals and stone houses.

And in that is an odd enchantment for me who am born and grown in the places of Half-fear with an old isolated whole fear always on me.

In New York I am a partaker of that smooth manna of humanness as I am of the air and the sunshine and the little black specks of coal-soot: partly from choice, partly willy-nilly, partly in the sweeping unanalyzable pell-mell-ness of massed human nature.

And it is in New York I have those strangest things of all: human friendships. Not many friendships and not of spent familiarities: for I don’t like actual human beings too much around me. But yet friendships made of the edges of thoughts and vivid pathos and pregnant odds and ends of nervous human flesh and fire.

It is in New York I go to the apartment of a Friend at the end of an afternoon. In the apartment are some persons having tea, men and women. The Friend greets me at the door. She wears maybe a dress of thin dark and light silk, shaped in the quaint outlandish fashion of the hour. And she has shrewd kindly eyes like a Rembrandt portrait, and a worn New-York-ish Latin-ish brain and heart both of which are made of steel, sparkle and the very plain red meat of living. She says, ‘Hello-Mary-Mac-Lane,’ and clasps my hand, and we exchange a glance of no real understanding at all but suggesting warmed challenge of personality, and an oblique sweet call of depth to depth, and of friendship which by mere force of preference and of our separate quality and calibre is true rather than false. So close and no closer may friendship be. And friendship, with-all, is closer than any love. It is the closest human beings ever come to meeting.

In a New York doorway I, made in broad loneliness of self, get suddenly companion-warmed at the little pleasant twisted fire of someone else.

It might be so in some other town, even Beloit, but it feels only like New York to me.

I go in the room where the others are and they say, ‘Hello-Mary-Mac-Lane,’ and I drink some tea and listen and talk in fragments of half-meanings. And I get warmed and half-warmed and cooled and slightly scorched in the easeful unevenly-heated humanness of the women and men sitting around.

In the inland towns they throw their thoughts and ideas at you at tea-time, inland thoughts and ideas, which hit you and then drop off like little pebbles and nuts and hard green apples.

In New York they throw those things in the form of long ribbons, heated from being worn next their skin, which fly out and wrap around your skin: pleasantly or foolishly or fancifully.

The point of it is that nobody is afraid of that.

It is nothing fulfilling, nothing satisfying. It is merely human. It is half-lyric.

It reassures me as a person: it makes me feel human in all my surfaces.

Which are harder to humanize, in everybody, than any deepest deeps.

And it is therefore with all my surfaces, smoothly and restfully, I love New York.


Rhythm

Now and again I think I catch some truth by the sweat of its Rhythm.

Often I read the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount and feel their truth in the blood-sweating tune of their Rhythm--Rhythm unspeakable and ecstatic.

The prophet Christ believed himself divine and was all Rhythm in his utterances: and so sounds true as the scheme of digestion and the laws of hygiene.

He said, Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Everybody who has tried it knows that to be true with the flawless Rhythmic truth of health and illness.

Mourn frightfully a day and the next day will be a day of soothed warmth and quiet like a grateful pitiful heat current in the breast. Mourn a week and that will come the week following. Mourn a year and the next year will be the year of peace. For anguish: peace. For peace: anguish. It never fails.

The great thing lacking in Christ, the sense of humor, permitted his perfect personal Rhythm. Humor oddly wants Rhythm. The human race is made in Rhythm like its beating heart: but humor is an ‘extra.’ Everybody is so full of lies that humor, an ‘extra,’ always wonderfully appetizing and out of season, and inexplicably God-given, feels like a great keystone of the race. So it is: but in a lying race. And Christ in his beautiful dual rôle would lack humor. As a God come among the human race to save it, knowing it as he did: his measureless worldly wisdom being paramount even to his gentleness: his mind and his personal tenor could be set only in intense terrific gloom.

The Rhythm in the Beatitudes is equal Rhythm of sense and Rhythm of sound: Rhythm of music and Rhythm of meaning. Equally, half and half.

The most Rhythm thing in it is: Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

I feel it soft-prickling just under my skin. Rhythm--Rhythm and ecstasy!

I have read it many times since I was a child: till I know it in my brain, in my Soul, in my hands, in my breast, in my throat, in my forehead, in my gray eyes, in my aching left foot. I know it and feel it by its Rhythm. There is barbarous justice in it. It cuts everybody off from seeing God.

Pure in heart I take to mean pure in motive. A fool has an equal chance with a philosopher: a harlot with a horse-thief: a nasty rag-picker with a small sweet child. But none is pure in motive.

Of other persons I don’t judge. But me I know to be murderously un-pure of heart.

If I could open a window or unlock a door with only the simple mechanical motive in the act-- But I can’t. There’s a romantic impurity in even the look of my hand as it touches the window-sash or the door-key. There’s a pervasive delicate infusion of impure motive all over me, Soul and bones, as I perform the act. It is one curse in the Necklace which God himself bestowed on me so long ago.

It is not my fault that I am un-pure in heart.

And it is not God’s. It is a comfort to me that I can reason out that it is not God’s fault. He knew I needed the Necklace and each blue-green stone in it to rhyme and balance me. In the wide surprisingness of the universe everything will be rhymed and balanced. In me, being savagely complex, that balancing took a bit of doing: hence my unusual Necklace. It comforts me that I can reach that analytic point. It leaves me a lightning conviction that God is worth seeing.

And if a day dawns for me when I can open a door with no ulterior motive: thinking only of the door and the fine small muscular power of smooth hand and supple wrist given me to open it: thinking only that I want to get the door open: then back of that door I know I shall see God!

It is so written in that barbarous blood-sweating worldly Rhythm on the Mount.


A prayer-feeling

So it is finished: and I have oddly Failed.

I have slyly Succeeded and oddly Failed in equal degree.

I have Failed because I am too cowardly and too weak and too dishonest to write certain bruised and self-accusing places in my Soul and in my Heart and in my Mind which rightly come in the scope of this: there are the Stern and Delicate Voices one closes one’s ears against: there are the starry grimy Actualities one drops from one’s hands: there are the Thoughts one Does Not Think. Yet and yet: they too are in it, hanging cobweb-ish on my wordings and colons.

It is not a strong tale, and that is very well. This book is less I-written than it is I-myself. And Just Beneath The Skin no person is strong: not Theodore Roosevelt, true fearless American: not Bonaparte, splendid tyrant: not Joan of Arc, titanic martyr. They are strong in their depths and strong on the outside. So are many others. So am I, I think. But just under the skin all who are human are roundly weak.

Roundly weak, every one.

And with that, in my case, False.

This primarily is the picture of one who is made-False: False from her fingertips to her innermost concept.

It is belike because of that that this, as itself, oddly Fails.

It is as if I have made a portrait not of Me, but of a Room I have just quitted. My Gloves are left on a chair: my Hat is left on a couch: my taken-off Shoes are left on the floor: my faint-smelling Handkerchief is dropped by the door: my round ribboned Garter is hanging on the door-knob: my Breath is in the air: my Grief is on the walls clinging like smoke: my flat Despair is on the petunia-leaves in the window: my fragrant Horridness lingers in the curtains. I am not there! But I--I have just Quitted that Room!--

Therein I have slyly Succeeded.

* * * * *

My feeling at my book’s-end is a prayer-feeling, both frantic and quiet: God have mercy on me! but not unless you want to.

And I feel barbarous and utterly solitary, solitary from here to Jericho, solitary from here to the cool stars.

There comes off the grim gray east hills a soft whelming taste of Sunset, bloody and full of human marrows.

And I feel a need of great Pain or great Sin to make and break me, Soul and bones.

[Transcriber’s Notes:

As the first lines of the paragraphs in the original are not indented, in some cases the presence of a paragraph break is not entirely certain. In such cases, insertion of paragraph breaks was determined according to the structure and content of the surrounding text. Page images of the original are available at the Internet Archive: American Libraries (http://archive.org/details/imarymclanediary00macl).

Except for the following changes, spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation have been preserved as printed in the original.

Page 43, comma after “husband’s” was deleted (my husband’s temper). Page 59, “ecstasy” was changed from “esctasy” (hunger and ecstasy). Page 64, “I’d ’a’” was changed from “I’d’ a’”. Page 82, a period was added after “bastard lacy valentines”. Page 96, “Cornwallis” was changed from “Corwallis”. Page 138, “calefacient” was changed from “calefaciant”. Page 142, “listlessly” was changed from “listessly” (I listlessly change). Page 160, “four-and-twenty” was changed from “four-and twenty” (at four-and-twenty). Page 169, “arresting ruination” was changed from “arrest ingruination”. Page 174, “patrician” was changed from “partrician” (slim patrician hands). Page 175, “Mérimée” was changed from “Merimée” (long-adored Mérimée). Page 194, a period was added after “remembrance of myself”. Page 205, “of” was changed from “if” (herself out of it). Page 217, “Soul” was changed from “soul” (Said the Soul: ‘Glad?). Page 227, “philosophers” was changed from “philosphers”. Page 237, an em dash was added before “I keep on”. Page 256, “or” was changed from “of” (or a Blue Shadow). Page 276, “highly” was changed from “hightly” (highly emotional). Page 294, a closing single quotation mark was added after “are sweeter”. Page 300, a comma was added after “little fellow cries”. Page 306, “opposite” was changed from “spposite” (opposite him).]