Three oddnesses are in that dream:
that it is true to life in that I in my lightning Mary-Mac-Lane-ness would manage to cheat a gallows.
that it is untrue to life in that instead of writing of it in the true twilit poetry of my own sufficient prose I wrote it in the shallow trick-phrasing of rhyme, a little serenade to the gibbet.
that it catches and holds my Shadow-self who lives not inside me but beside me: the resembling dissembling shadow I cast when I stand between the daylights of the actual world and the quivering films of the region of dreams.—
My owned mysteries thrive apace. They are poetry and beauty and loveliness yet they bruise and batter me and split me to atoms. Withal are terrifyingly superfluous: they violently kill the wench to-morrow dawn who died restfully to-day at noon.
To-morrow
ALSO I am someway the Lesbian woman.
It is but one phase—one which slightly touches each other phase I own. And in it I am poetic and imaginative and worldly and amorous and gentle and true and strong and weak and ardent and shy and sensitive and generous and morbid and sweet and fine and false.
The Lesbian sex-strain as an effect is reckoned a prenatal influence—and, as I conceive, it comes also of conglomerate incarnations and their reactions and flare-backs. Of some thus bestowed it makes strange hard highly emotional indefinably vicious women, turbulent and brilliant of mind, mystically overborne, overwrought of heart. They are marvels of perverse barbaric energy. They make with men varied flinty friendships, but to each other they are friends, lovers, victims, preyers, masters, slaves: the flawed fruits of one oblique sex-inherence.
Except two breeds—the stupid and the narrowly feline—all women have a touch of the Lesbian: an assertion all good non-analytic creatures refute with horror, but quite true: there is always the poignant intensive personal taste, the flair of inner-sex, in the tenderest friendships of women.
For myself, there is no vice in my Lesbian vein. I am too personally fastidious, too temperamentally dishonest, too eerily wavering to walk in direct repellent roads of vice even in freest moods. There is instead a pleasant degeneracy of attitude more debauching to my spirit than any mere trivial traînant vice would be. And a fascination in it tempers my humanness with an evil-feeling power.
I have lightly kissed and been kissed by Lesbian lips in a way which filled my throat with a sudden subtle pagan blood-flavored wistfulness, ruinous and contraband: breath of bewildering demoniac winds smothering mine.
Lesbian essence is of mental quality. There are aggressively endowed women whose minds are so bent that they instinctively nurture any element in themselves which is blighting and ill-omened and calamitous in effect. There are some to which the natural inhibition of their own sex is lure and challenge. There are some so solitary by destiny and growth that the first woman-friend who comes into their adolescence with sympathy and understanding wins a passionate Lesbian adoration the deeper for being unrealized. There are some so roiledly giftedly incongruous in trait that they are prone to catch and hold any additional twisted shreds afloat in human air-currents.
Each of those influences biases the Mind of me, which is none the less a clear-visioned mind which rates no thing a truth which it knows to be a lie: though it batten on the lie.
—often here and there around this human world the twisted and perverted and strongly false concepts are the strong actual working facts and the straight road is myth—myth—existent but in visions—
I don’t understand why it’s so: I know it is so.
Not only so with me: so with millions whose stars jangled.
Not always. But often.—
The deep-dyed Lesbian woman is a creature whose sensibilities are over-balanced: whose imagination moves on mad low-flying wings: whose brain is good: whose predilections are warped: who lives always in unrest: whose inner walls are streaked with garish heathen pigments: whose copious love-instincts are an odd mixture of mirth, malice and luxure.
Its effects in me who am straight-made in nothing, but strongly crooked, is to vivify tenfold or a hundredfold or a thousandfold in my shaded vision the womanness of any woman whose inner or outer beauty arrests and stirs my spirit.
I see in some woman, some girl, any who attracts me—be she a casual acquaintance, or a Victorian poet dead fifty years whose poetry and portrait live, or an actor in a play, or a sweet-browed friend, or an Old Master—I see one such as if all her charm were newly painted and placed near me shining wet with delicate fresh paint. It is bewitching to look at: it has a deep seductive fragrance of smell: it is luxuriantly aromatic to all my known senses—and two senses unknown float from my deeps and rise at it. The Stranger becomes a dearly poignant fancy to dream over. My Friend turns into a vivid goddess whose fingers and hair I would touch tenderly with my lips.
Because of it a little flame, pale but primal, leaps from the flattest details of life. In such a mood-adventure a window-shutter blooms: a hair-brush glows: a sordid floor has gleams upon it. These bewildering frightful beautifulnesses in this life—.
—withal the same inherence which makes me someway Lesbian makes me the floor of the setting sun—strewn with overflowing gold and green vases of Fire and Turquoise—a sly and piercing annihilation-of-beauty, wonderful devastating to feel—oh, blighting breaking to feel—oh, deathly lovely to feel!—It is the bewitched obliquities that run away with me: grind, gnaw, eat my true human heart like bright potent vitriol.
What God means me to do with such gifts and phases—I don’t and don’t understand. I never get anywhere as I think it out. I don’t know shades of rights and wrongs since that ancient witch-light has found more trueness of human feeling in me than has any simplicity my life knows.
It began, they say, with Sappho and her dreaming students in the long-ago vales of Lesbos. It may be, I daresay. I know it did not stop there. And I know that—Greek, French, Scotch, Indian—Welch—Japanese—all women sense its light lyric touch. For myself, I know only it is part and parcel in my tangled tired coil.
I don’t know whether I am good and sweet in it or evil and untoward.
And I don’t care.
To-morrow
CLOSE at the east edge of this Butte is a barren ridge of Rockies that is sudden and big and breathing-looking, barbarously personal, touched with varying gifted color-moods and glowering morose color-passions: at the south the snow-topped Highlands lie long faëry solitary miles away, caressed at their summits by thin soft sun-rings and sun-vapors of salmon and sea-green and turquoise and mauve: at the west a gray-shadowed desert burns red-gold in the setting sun and sleeps in pearl-and-ashen stillness under midnight stars: at the north smaller spurs of the range break into foothills and bluffs and gulches, restful wastes of lonely stones and blurred radiances of tawny sand: on top of all the rarefied air of these plateau heights refracts the light into hot dazzling prisms at any vagrant flash of sun on a trailing storm-fringe. This Butte is capriciously decorated with sweet brilliant metallic orgies of color at any time, all times, as if by whims of pagan gods lightly drunk and lightly mad.
St. Paul-Minnesota looks a greenlier-prettier town: the Arizona Cañon looks vastly more fearfully beautiful: Wichita-Kansas probably looks more a regular town: Akron-Ohio doubtless looks more Americanly reassuring: Rome-Italy must have a more ‘settled’ look: New York is much larger and much brighter-looking.
Only this Butte looks deeply and exactly like Butte-Montana.
Its insistent charm is that it goes on strongly resembling itself year after year.
There is love in me for this Butte.
I am profoundly lonely in it: my life-tissues are long-familiar with the feel of it: its mournful beauty has entered like thin punishing iron into my Soul: and my love for it is made of those things. For no reason I feel love for this Butte.
As much as for the mountains in their mourning intimateness I feel love for all the outsides and surfaces of the town itself: the stone streets full of houses and shops and stores and brick walls and laundry-wagons and persons: the vacant lots where boys play ball: the school-buildings which for twenty years have needed the same green grass around them and the same playgrounds for school-children to play in (and will go on twenty years needing them): the little mines in unexpected midtown blocks with their engines and hoists and scaffolds and green coppery dumps: the big mines on the Hill busily working day and night, a bristling citadel of smoke-stacks and tall buildings above the treasure-drifts and tunnels that come down honeycombing the town under its streets and hoses and yield up wealths of monthly millions: the desolate wind-swept cemetery on the Flat: the Timber Butte: the School of Mines: the Brophy grocery-window full of attractive grocery-food: the St. Gaudens statue of Marcus Daly: the few sweet green trees on North Montana Street by the court-house: the edge of Walkerville: Ex-Senator Clark’s old-fashioned closed house in Granite Street: the stone Episcopal Church with the memorial windows: the surprising steep Idaho Street hill: the old Reduction Works reminiscent of the bygone Heinze and the bold buccaneering days: the Montana Street cemetery at last kempt and nurtured green as Beloit-Wisconsin: the little rocky Missoula gulch: the North Excelsior Street neighborhood where I wrote my Devil and Gray-dawn book: the Butte High School where I studied and meditated youngly: the old Library where I used to get a variety of books in my gangling girlhood: the electric ore-trains going to Anaconda: the vegetable Chinamen: the Post-Office News-stand: the Mexican tamale venders in the early night: the sweet green trees and other greenness in people’s yards garnered and cherished in a way which would astonish Toledo-Ohio: the brilliant sparkling look of the town from far out on the Flat late in the evening, like a mammoth broken tiara of starry diamonds, twinkling points of blue and orange and cerise and violet, fired and flung against a mountainside of dark velvet,—an aspect intensely Butte: the cool mosquitoless summer nights: the Anaconda Standard: the sulphurous smoky deadly-cold winter mornings: the Cornish and Irish and Austrian and Finn miners: the little slim green onions in the markets: the noise and color and morale of the crowds on a Miner’s Union day: the markets on the afternoon shade side of West Park Street full of crabs and lobsters from Seattle and shining fish from California, and mushrooms and froglegs and squabs and hothouse things from hereabouts: the Parrot smelter: the Chinese gardens at Nine Mile: the Italian village of Meaderville: the fortified battlemented look of the town at the east of South Butte: the mystic familiar sand-and-barrenness—
All of it has a feel of something aloof and metallic and distinctive and gray-purple and Butte-Montana. Gray-purple is the color of the town, its spirit-tone. Its odor and fascination are gray-purple.
This Butte is bodily a young rich present-day city of a hundred-thousand population, all told: miners who bulwark its foundations: masses who make and manage its business: millionaire-members who spend most of their lives and dollars in New York: all are Butte-made. But its soul is still the soul of the frontier mining-camp which sprang into copper being when the Comstock mine in Virginia-Nevada failed of its silver-ish promise.
A very few years ago—what one could count on one hand’s fingers—there were no lids in this Butte. Every summer bony thoroughbred horses from Juarez and Denver raced round the oval track on the Flat, watched by a shrieking betting throng of Butte citizens and citizenesses, ridden by silk-bloused black-booted jockies, their finish-spurts under the wire chaperoned by a flock of bookmakers. Roulette and poker and faro were wide-open in the town and flavored the air with a taste of gray-purple hazard. Gin-palaces and mining-camp dance-halls, highly de-luxe’d, lent their tinted breath to the current. Noodle-ish and little bacchanalian dives flourished in unexpected nooks. The police court on a Monday morning resembled the debris from an alcoholic human volcano, a condemned but owned portion of this Butte in its Butte-Montana-ness. All of it was but one element in an isolated prosperous town of many elements, but it someway tinctured all.
No pagan-wild sunset burst above the west desert but suggested that the vague lid was off the town, and vaguely lost: a lost lid.
The gambling lid is fast on now—if they gamble they gamble under it. And no more do ribby horses and surprising-mixed crowds disport them at the deserted race-track.
But the setting Butte sun suggests the same wealth and wildness as if always its celestial chemistry were shot with essence of mining-camp: rich, generous, feverish and virile.
Brophy’s grocery-window and the Marcus Daly monument and the Parrot smelter and the Clark house and the Idaho Street hill—all of it—owns the gray-purple which is not St. Paul and not Wichita and not Pittsburg and not Spokane: not anything except intensely Butte-Montana.
I have felt it since I first lived here in little young short-frocked days, and I felt it when I lived away from Butte: I feel it all these now-days to the roots of myself.
I have no reason: but the contrary: to love Butte as a townful of human beings.
I have no friends in it, no feel-of-friendship, no human friendliness.
And the sculpturesque poetry of the outlying deserts and buttes pushes and presses hurtingly upon the lonely and introspective gazer in Body and Soul: I knew it as child and girl and woman.
There is nothing benign, nothing enlightening—no gentleness, no pity—in its barren beauty. But its hard chaste influence on the sensitive spirit is beyond any analytic power to gauge.
Its wonderful Aridness starves human nerve-soil till the sad wide eyes of the Soul grow bright—fever-bright, light-bright, star-bright—from denial and unconscious prayer: involuntary worship: homage of the unsuppliant unhoping dévotee.
Because of that—and because of all its long-familiar outsidenesses—mournful, beautiful, mystic, lavish, madly-mixed, gray-purple—a fascination beyond plaisance or pain—I feel love for this Butte.
To-morrow
WHEN I was twenty I was one strong Cell firmly, primly closing many little cells different from each other but each greenly intact.
When I was thirty the Cell had burst in dusty worldly winds and loosed the little cells. Those in turn had subdivided, losing strength by the cellful but gaining in shadowed truth by a roundabout road. And they showed me my fates and inevitablenesses as in a broad wrecked field misty but plain to view. And thus I see me in the subdivided cells:
a piece of a normal woman.
a piece of a child.
a piece of a poet.
a piece of a Lesbian woman.
a piece of a writer.
a piece of a jester.
a piece of a savage.
a piece of something someway brave.
a piece of a student.
a patriotic American.
a lump of tiredness.
My strength is in knowing the evil from the good and the false from the true in it.
My weakness is in wildly waveringly inclining toward the false.
Except for love of my country I am ardenter, determinder, stronger in my falseness than in any of my shadowy truth.
To-morrow
THE first beauty in my life is John Keats.
In John Keats is my faith in some resurrection.
Without John Keats human nature feels to be something broken, menacing, unspeakably despicable and lost—lost in the shade. With John Keats the lights break across it and reflect the blazing yellow sun again from eyes and foreheads and fingers and shining hair.
There are world-and-human things which it thrills me to think about and dwell on: Nathan Hale on the British gallows: the charge of Pickett’s Confederate infantry at Gettysburg: Henry V, prince among kings and men, at Agincourt: Charlotte Corday in prison: Columbus with his felon crews sailing westward: Susan B. Anthony—a woman made in a strange still heroic splendor half-incredible: Alexander Hamilton: Arnold Winkelried: the sea-worn Pilgrim women disembarking into bitter Novemberness.
Those thrill me because they are brave persons and brave things full of idealistic strife: but they still are made of very struggling-garbled world-stuff—they are mere human fabric—till I think of John Keats: and at once they grow informing and eternal.
In his light the detailed world burns and glows!
John Keats! John Keats!—
Other poets have written Nightingales and Grecian Urns and Sonnets and Mirth-and-Passion things: but he wrote them in his glorious and wistful pain. He wrote the sweet headaches of his spirit into his delicate beaten-gold verse: the precious fevers of his mental veins: the bone-aches and muscle-aches of his thoughts: the darling skin-damps and palm-damps of his divine fancy:—all in the Song of his lilied youth.
There is no poet but writes his poetry out of inner travails and immense wistfulness. But they all write just beside their travail, not in it: just beside their wistfulness, not with it. A poet who feels the throat of his soul aching and swollen and inflamed writes—not just that astral diphtheria, not till another time: but instead the fine smothering of a hope, perhaps, the oblique suffocating of a love. A poet whose brain-hands throb with some horrible dulcet-ish tiredness from handling the heavy bright tools of his craft writes instead the throbbing of his brain-soles and brain-insteps from walking small odd hard rutted daily ways.
It rouses me—it heats my eyeballs with salty honeyed warmth as I read: but it is not John Keats: who writes his own immediate magic sickness in perfect sudden obvious blood-warm golden Now!
It is always old, old-fashioned ailment, worn of ages. The drowsy ache of the Nightingale goes a thousand years back and a thousand years to come: the restless ecstasy of a thousand thousand Nightingales, one for each who reads, in any age, all ages. Long, long after the jeweled English language is gone, dead as Homer’s, Keats’s Nightingale will flutter lyric-winged in the nervous jeweled lovely Now.
‘Weep for Adonis,’ wailed the differently-lovely Shelley, ‘he is dead.’ But he isn’t dead. He is terribly living, passionately living.
Each day of my life I feel him living. He breathes. He breathes close to me, pantingly, like a swimmer breasting waves or a playing child in a summer day.—John Keats!
Just Beneath My Skin he is my God-of-the-World, my Fetich and my Lover. He has been my Lover for seven gold years.
He is the first beauty in my flawed futile life. He is the most beautiful thing in the living and dying world. John Keats—John Keats!—
In everyone else I can feel mixed motives, tough tangled silk threads of self woven into wonderful wefts of days and deeds: in everybody, from Iscariot to Toussaint L’Ouverture, from Jeanne d’Arc to Victoria Woodhull, from Paul of Tarsus to Aaron Burr.
Only John Keats stands out alone, a true-breathing Poet, an Inmost Heart bleeding outward.
The lyric poet is the true poet. The lyric poet achieves no end in his art. He turns fragments of light and life into terms of beauty and sends them flying forth on flaming word-wings which translate the smooth human flesh they brush-by into delicious flesh-of-gold, flesh-of-petals, flesh-of-fire! But he makes no morals, teaches no lessons, finishes nothing. It’s as it should be. Nothing is finished. The mixed world is all unfinished, a glorified Mistake. The race is a millionfold Mistake: lives it, breathes it, battens on it—coarsely and finely and lamentably and musically and bravely. So that all poetry which wanders from the lyric is only a play or a picture or an airship or a cause which aims at fait-accompli, attaining an object: it is limited and man-made: its beauty is lopped off like boughs and branches after a storm: its wings are clipped. Its distanceless spaces, little and large, are visibly engineered by mathematic hands. But the lyric poetry is the true luminous and bloody interpreting of humanness.
John Keats wrote by the lights of his living and he lived all his days in joyous lyric anguish.
Once he wrote, ‘Ever let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home.’ It is a factful of himself—lawless, radical and non-civilized, agleam in the mixed world. It is everybody—poets, burglars, nursemaids: everybody. He wrote it in a hundred other ways, but it is all in that: it is the lyric epitome of every day. Pleasure never is at home.
And ‘Heard melodies are sweet,’ he wrote, ‘but those unheard are sweeter’—
There spoke the wild delicate wiseness of his brain and the passionate delicate wonder of his heart.—John Keats! John Keats!
But everything he wrote, the Grecian Urn itself, is immeasurably less lyric than himself writing it and being it.
He is rich bright-wet living lyric for this Me in this Now though he has lain dead in Rome nearly the full hundred years.
My garbled life and my thinking hunger feed upon him.
He was the one human one who walked on in the way before him: not around the jagged little stones and icy little pools that were in it: but straight on through them all, though his lyric feet were quivering shuddering sensitive, sensitive beyond knowledge of commoner feet that walk around.
It fattens my leanest self to keep that in my constant remembrance.
The thought of his brave radiant loveliness reassures me to myself, by the hour.
I am futile: but he is mysteriously omnipotently useful and I catch some of it from him.
I am half-full of vanity: but he is of a lustrous priceless vanity himself that justifies mine and all the world’s.
I am fearing and false: but he is so brave, so true to infinite form, that by it he leavens the lump of the whole world’s mendacious cowardice.
My brain is full of wilding darknesses, snarled and knotted gifts and penchants: but into his strong brain the strong fresh yellow rain-washed sun shines straight down—through the wide twin-brightness of his Eyes. I look down his Eyes—twin public wells (he belongs publicly and privately to all this mixed mad world, and anyone may look!—)—I look into that titanic vibrant brain, and mine catches some of it: a blest and precious Disease, oh, a rare Disease!
My Heart—my Heart feels strange and tired and dead, a bit of dead-sea fruit: but his heart, warm and real and boundlessly unsatisfied, is always the deep quick fragrant Rose of this World.
A Hero!—a Poet-at-arms!—John Keats!
‘He has outsoared the shadow of our night,’ wrote that Shelley, and wrote no truer word.
I have read so many of the strange and splendid things—bits of them: Vergil and Homer and Villon and Goethe and all the English poets, and prose writers like Carlyle who in places out-poet poets,—and moderner ones and the new poets, imagists and others: John Keats feels a noticeably braver thing, and always, always a little way beyond. He is purely lyric.
When he loved a woman he loved the dubious fascinating Fanny Brawn—sordid-brained, worldly: to him a mixed living devilish-glowing goddess. A higher-souled woman would neither have so tortured nor so held him. He was purely lyric. He cared truly nothing for the verdicts of critics and reviewers: and in the sweet-lipped boyish beauty of his youth they truly and easily killed him. It would be like that—it had to be. He was so purely lyric.
He died in the sweet fierce dazzling cause of Beauty.
I have so many thoughts and my thoughts are always my own. There are endless written thoughts deeper than mine—finer, stronger, anything-you-like. But mine answer for me: no written thoughts affect them, though they thrill my reading hours. Only John Keats’s thoughts can enter in and crush and cripple mine.
Because everybody is a little bit like John Keats I have a starry thin edge of faith inside me. He is food for my hunger of thought, fire for my passion of life.—John Keats!
He is the resurrection and the life.—
From my desk he gazes at me in a frame of old-gold. Every day the sunset on the glass blurs his large mournful joyous eyes with strangest agonized sunset tears: he shows me the sweet, sweet intoxication of his lyric grief.
He died young, unfinished—and oh, but it’s a shivering ecstasy to think of all those lyrics in him he never wrote!—the sweeter melodies—‘Unheard.’
To-morrow
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.
To-morrow
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.
To-morrow
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.
To-morrow
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.
To-day
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.