"Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying, but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things." -- Mary MacLane
Mary MacLane (May 1, 1881 — August 1929) was a controversial Canadian-born American writer whose frank memoirs helped usher in the confessional style of autobiographical writing. MacLane was known as the "Wild Woman of Butte".
MacLane was a very popular author for her time, scandalizing the populace with her shocking bestselling first memoir and to a lesser extent her two following books. She was considered wild and uncontrolled, a reputation she nurtured, and was openly bisexual as well as a vocal feminist. In her writings, she compared herself to another frank young memoirist, Marie Bashkirtseff, who died a few years after MacLane was born,and H. L. Mencken called her, "the Butte Bashkirtseff."
"Genius of a kind has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent, strong woman's body and a pitiably starved soul.""I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.""I do not see any beauty in self-restraint.""I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.""I have never read a line of Walt Whitman.""I love devils.""I never give my real self. I have a hundred sides, and I turn first one way and then the other. I am playing a deep game. I have a number of strong cards up my sleeve. I have never been myself, excepting to two friends.""I read of the Kalamazoo girl who killed herself after reading the book. I am not at all surprised. She lived in Kalamazoo, for one thing, and then she read the book.""I want fame more than I can tell. But more than I want fame I want happiness.""I want to live quietly.""I want to write such things as compel the admiring acclamation of the world at large, such things as are written but once in years, things subtle but distinctly different from the books written every day.""I was born to be alone, and I always shall be; but now I want to be.""I would rather be a fairly happy wife and mother.""I've never made plans for more than a day ahead.""It is with pain that I read of the dire effects of my book upon the minds of young girls.""Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things.""Let me but make a beginning, let me but strike the world in a vulnerable spot, and I can take it by storm.""My intention to lecture is as vague as my intention is to go on the stage. I will never consider an offer to lecture, not because I despise the vocation, but because I have no desire to appear on the public rostrum.""Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.""One must always say things that aim to interest, because in the world one must after all pay for one's keep.""The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary form, it is not a diary.""The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then.""The world is like a little marsh filled with mint and white hawthorn.""There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.""Well, if I am not vulgar, neither is my book. I wrote myself. Suggestiveness is always vulgar. But truth never. My book is not even remotely suggestive. I call things by their names. That is all.""When I was three years old I was taken with my family to a little town in Western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and ordinary life until I was ten.""When I wrote my book I wanted to love someone. I wanted to be in love. Now I know that I shall never be in love - and I no longer wish to be.""You may think me crude, and probably I am crude, but I am not so crude as I was, for I am clever enough to see that the girl of nineteen who thought herself a genius was only an unusual girl writing her heart out."
MacLane was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1881, but her family moved to the Red River area of Minnesota, settling in Fergus Falls, which her father helped develop. After her father's death in 1889, her mother remarried a family friend and lawyer, H. Gysbert Klenze, and soon after the family moved to Montana, first settling in Great Falls and finally in Butte, where Klenze drained the family fund pursuing mining and other ventures. She spent the remainder of her life in the United States. MacLane began writing published material for her school paper in 1898. From the beginning, her writing was characterized by a direct, fiery and highly individualistic style. She was, however, also strongly influenced by such American regional realists as John Townsend Trowbridge (with whom she exchanged a few letters), Maria Louise Pool, and Hamlin Garland.
At the age of 19 in 1902, MacLane published her first book, The Story of Mary MacLane. It sold 100,000 copies in the first month and was popular among young girls, but was pilloried by conservative critics and readers, and lightly ridiculed by H. L. Mencken. Rather than embodied she had always chafed, or felt, "anxiety of place," at living in Butte, which was a mining town far off from the centers of culture, and used the money from her first book's sales of this book to travel to Chicago, then Massachusetts, settling for a time in Rockland, Massachusetts from 1903-1908 and then in Greenwich Village from 1908-1909, where she continued writing and, by her own account, living a decadent and Bohemian existence. She was close friends with feminist writer Inez Haynes Irwin, who is mentioned in MacLane's private correspondence and appears in some of MacLane's 1910 newspaper writing in a Butte paper.
Some critics have suggested that even by today's standards, MacLane's writing is raw, honest, unflinching, self-aware, sensual and extreme. She wrote openly about egoism and her own self-love, about sexual attraction and love for other women, and even about her desire to marry the Devil.
In 1917 she wrote and starred in an autobiographical silent film titled Men Who Have Made Love to Me - now believed to be lost to time.
MacLane died in Chicago sometime in early August 1929, aged 48. She was soon forgotten and her body of prose remained out of print until late 1993, when The Story of Mary MacLane and some of her newspaper feature work was republished in an anthology titled Tender Darkness.
