MARY MACLANE, BUTTE AUTHOR

Mary MacLane’s whatever-it-is -- a chant, a declaration -- is a necessary and welcome antidote to the male devotees of “Deadwood” and Butte, Montana, two frontier mining communities.   At 5,500 ft in altitude, Butte is higher than Deadwood (4,500) and on a mountain ridge rather than in a valley.  To Mary MacLane it was a desert, both environmentally and socially.  Now, of course, it is famous for its huge poisonous lake.  But in MacLane’s girlhood (1900) it was a teeming anthill of miners killing any men it didn’t enrich and abusing every woman, rich or poor.  The time was just before WWI, that Edwardian period we so love, but MacLane doesn’t see herself as Anne of Green Gables in a dress with puffed sleeves.  She sees herself as a kind of Anne Shirley on meth, except that she hardly knows how to be wicked in the modern sense.  She gives us her metaphor: the row of toothbrushes in the family bathroom (they HAVE a bathroom in 1900) in which the other brushes are ordinary but hers has a silver handle.  There are too many sibs and they are riding down into poverty on the coat-tails of an incompetent step-father.  Until fifty years ago (MY childhood) most families were dependent on the success of the father.

So Mary walks the sandy alpine ridges where little grows and fantasizes escaping from this trap while “I Await the Devil’s Coming,” the title of her first book, written when she was 19.  It could as easily have been written by a modern suicidal Goth girl convinced that her salvation will come from fucking the Devil Himself.  Or Herself.  And yet Mary MacLane, proud of being Scots, says her only beloved is “the anemone woman,” her gentle and ladylike English teacher.  Of course, the Devil is a devious fellow but pretending to be a nurturing angel is not the usual strategy.  More likely the demonic Al Swearingen would slap her face, tear off her clothes, and put her to work.  I do not think this was what she had in mind.  Something more like Lily Langtry exchanging barbs with Oscar Wilde, maybe.

There is no information about how Mary was be able to waltz with the Devil without producing any “spawn,” but clearly part of the entrapment of the women of the time had to be the unavailability of birth control: it’s hard to imagine Al Swearingen tearing open a new packet of Trojans.  She starred in a silent film:  “Men Who Have Made Love to Me,” but it has disappeared.  

Her second book, published after the First World War, was “I, Mary MacLane” which one gathers is a more rueful account of the decadent life and less appealing to book buyers who just wanted to be peaceful.  At the age of 48 she was found dead of TB in a cheap hotel.  She had been back to Butte to live with her mother for a while.  She had managed a year in Greenwich Village.  There’s no mention of ever leaving the continent.  (She was born in Winnipeg.  Do you know Winnipeg?)  

She was marked and marketed as BUTTE.  Sensational lecturing supplied her main income -- not prostitution, at least not officially.  She really WAS a beautiful woman but used it to lead girls astray, not to seduce men.  Of course, the men probably appreciated it.  Both the looks and the other.

The genres of biography, autobiography, memoir and so on -- all mostly mis-defined anyway -- are by now pretty well abused to death by incoherent but incredibly emotional teen girls on the Internet.  What seems to be trendy at the moment is “interpretation” or even “reinterpretation.”  The “Bookslut” bloggist, Jessica Crispin, salutes our heroine as carrying the flag ahead of womankind whilst they parade their declaration of ignoring all limits, to be as wicked as they like.  But another interpretation is that MacLane was simply caught between two forces: the respectable Midwestern religious propriety in which she was raised (and which taught her she needed a male to be fulfilled) and the desire to bust-out, to find something more, more, more and far more distinguished.  The trouble was trying to find out what the “more distinguished” thing really was.  

L.M. Montgomery did not tell the truth, which was that she was raised by hard-bitten cold grandparents because her mother died and her father ran away.  She didn’t tell about being used as a servant by her father’s second marriage nor about marrying a respectable Presbyterian minister so crippled by depression that she had to front and cover for him to keep him employed while raising their two sons.  Her family didn’t acknowledge her suicide.  Likewise, Louisa May Alcott kept up the front while her family nearly starved and she herself considered suicide.  She really WAS a feminist and at least ran in a high brow crowd before dying of either mercury poisoning from misguided medicines or from an autoimmune disease like lupus.  

Mary MacLane does not write at all like either of these women.  But she sometimes does sound like a dark version of Anne Shirley, who succumbed to the hell of the English classroom.  In modern times, Mary MacLane would only be able reach the acme of wickedness with the help of a lot of specialized equipment and substances -- or maybe with the help of a transgender operation she could BECOME Al Swearingen.  It’s tough to keep from being pressed back into the role of “anemone lady.”  Today it’s not enough to wait for the Devil’s coming -- one must become one’s own Satan.  Many did even then.  According to David Milch and Edith Wharton, the anemone ladies were laudanum addicts.  

Today by Mary’s age, 19, we are assured that most girls have at least acquired sexual experience -- along the lines of sucking off the whole football team -- and yearn for a peaceful homebound mom-life baking cupcakes.  If MacLane was the result of the collision between a moribund, paralyzed and confining life for women in bourgeois families and the desire to fly free without knowing quite what that means, then maybe some new best seller will respond to the collision between way too much waltzing with Lucifer and how one becomes a mom when the needed biological equipment has been so hard-used.  Or maybe it will just explain to us finally how we escape both gender-bullying and good-bad dichotomies.  Or are we still trying to come to terms with European class structures and privileges versus the uncertainty and hard-labor of the hard-luck masses?  Does the Devil still have his hard-on?

Here’s a modern-sounding sample of MacLane:  "I should like a man to come, I said calmly to myself today as I walked slowly over my barrenness -- a perfect villain to come and fascinate me and lead me with strong, gentle allurements to what would be technically termed my ruin. . . 

"I would then jerk my life out of this Nothingness by the roots. . . The man would be bad to his heart’s core.  And after living but a short time with him my shy, sensitive soul would be irretrievably poisoned and polluted.  The defilement of so sacred and beautiful a thing as marriage is surely the darkest evil that can come to a life.  And so everything within me that had turned toward that too-bright light would then drink deep of the lees of death."

As far as anyone knows, MacLane never married.  But the Demon Lover lives on everywhere -- now a vampire or werewolf.  That hints that the contemporary dilemma is about what it means to be human.  Even in Butte.