The Mary MacLane Project

Biography in Brief

by Michael R Brown

Mary Elizabeth MacLane was born on May 1, 1881 in Winnipeg, the youngest daughter of frontier entrepreneur James W. MacLane (1839-1889) and Margaret Lowe (1854-1939), daughter of a founder of one of Western Canada's earliest colleges. The family removed to Fergus Falls, Minnesota in the mid-1880s, where her father built a notable brick residence, platted one of the early additions to the town - to this day known as MacLane's Addition - and watched after his business interests. His death in 1889 from fever contracted on a cattle-inspection trip to Canada and her mother's rather rapid remarriage altered the course of Mary's life. Her new stepfather, H. Gysbert Klenze (1864-1924) - a former frontier photographer (whose pieces command high prices to this day) who had been involved in settling the estate - moved his new family to the booming mining state of Montana and began speculating. After several years in Great Falls, the family - including Mary's elder siblings John and Dorothy and younger brother James - moved to the mining center of Butte, where Mary's literary style and fame would be founded. She had begun writing in Great Falls in the mid-1890s, and in Butte quickly became editor of the high school newspaper. Her earliest surviving pieces date from her tenure on the paper and show her style fully developed. Upon graduating in 1899 with a brilliant oration on Charles Dickens, which was published along with several others in local papers, she prepared to attend Stanford University with Dorothy, who had waited for several years to go with her. Shortly before they were due to depart, however, their stepfather informed them that not enough remained of James' fortune to pay tuition. Their elder brother had found a path in athletics and military service and would shortly go adventuring in the Klondike, but the young womens' prospects - including their patrimony from James MacLane - were suddenly gone.

Exactly what Mary did for the year and a quarter after this shock is unknown (though at one point she applied to work with Dorothy as a librarian but was rejected due to her unconventional examination essays), but by mid-January 1901 she had begun her first book - the fiery, individualistic, multiply-persona'd I Await the Devil's Coming (published the next year as The Story of Mary MacLane). In three months' dated entries, ostensibly in the form of an irregularly-kept journal, she crafted an unforgettable portrayal of the world around her, her disdainful superiority to it all, her surges of joy and crushing moments of despair, her craving to be loved - particularly by her female high-school literature teacher, Fannie Corbin - in a sharp, high-voltage writing style wholly her own.

In early 1902 she sent the immaculately handwritten manuscript to - for unknown reasons - a prominent religious publisher in Chicago. George H. Doran, an editor and soon to become a famous publisher, recognized that "the most astounding and revealing piece of realism I had read" was as unsuitable for his employers as it would be perfect for the progressive publishers across the street: the highly-regarded Herbert S. Stone & Co. The manuscript was passed on to their editor Lucy Monroe, who three years earlier had been instrumental in their publishing Kate Chopin's The Awakening. She brought the manuscript home, and - according to news accounts a few weeks later - finished it overnight and the next morning told her employers they had another sensation on their hands, eliciting a telegram of acceptance that afternoon, a rapid book production job, and in late April 1902 books out to critics and - critically - lengthy excerpts of the Montanan's unique writing sent to major newspapers and wire services as news.

The sensation began almost immediately and reached proportions nearly impossible to credit. Reporters from other states began to travel to Butte to attempt, sometimes fruitlessly, to interview MacLane; in short order, headlines across the nation referred simply to "Mary" - and everyone knew who was meant; Butte's baseball team renamed themselves "The Mary MacLanes"; prize steer and thoroughbred horses were named after her as were cigars, ice-cream drinks, and a brand of tabasco pepper sauce. Newspapers in London, Paris, and Australia reported on the sensation, and before long the book was being discussed even in New Zealand.

For her part, Mary maintained a public persona by turns incisively cool, eruptively fiery, surreally elliptic, and youthfully antic - as news reports tallied the growing fortune generated by her best-selling book. The fame she had desired was at last hers, but it was not without dangers. In July 1902, informed of a foiled kidnapping plot, she moved out of Butte on an eastward voyage that was covered by newspapers as if a royal procession. Her first major stop, in Chicago, was another life-altering event, for there she met her Stone & Co. editor Lucy Monroe and Lucy's sister, Harriet. Mary and her editor, who in 1910 would move to Beijing with her ambassador husband, would remain friendly for several years, but Harriet - who had written the famed Columbian Ode and would go on to found Poetry Magazine to foster an authentically American style of modern poetry - would become one of Mary's greatest unrequited loves; they would remain in on-and-off touch for the rest of MacLane's life.

Mary's departure from Chicago was also national news, and upon word of her decision to bypass New York City the Board of Aldermen passed a resolution urging her to come to Manhattan, observe it, and address them. The newspaper titans did them one better, and Pulitzer's New York World made the already-wealthy young writer an offer she could not refuse, and she committed to come, stay, and write for several weeks. She first went to her original destination - to Fannie Corbin, then spending time in Buffalo. After several days, MacLane admitted a few newspaper reporters and gave interviews. The best of her career's press encounters - largely because of a sympathetic yet critical interrogator - was a long and searching interview with Zona Gale of Pulitzer's New York World. Gale lavished care on the piece, communicating (and preserving for later days) the unmistakable aura of the young author's presence, and its quality proved professionally important for the future prize-winning dramatist. MacLane for her part, telegraphed her publishers with whimsical daring that she had fallen in love with Miss Gale, warning them to "beware Mary MacLane in love."

In time, MacLane departed for Manhattan - it is not known if she and Corbin ever met again - and she began work for Pulitzer's World with a series of chaperoned visits to Wall Street, Coney Island, a society wedding in Newport, and so on. Her resulting feature articles were announced with enormous fanfare, and when they appeared - complete with photos of the enigmatic writer and samples of her handwriting, and a style that, like parts of I Await the Devil's Coming, was pure proto-Surrealism - the newspaper reported unprecedented mail for months afterward from all over and beyond the United States. MacLane had chafed at chaperonage, and at the end of her longest article - a set of vignettes of her time in New York - she introduced something new to her public persona: a magnetic lure of the dark things in the big city, and the suspicion that she might well go off and into them.

In fact, MacLane departed from the still-burning sensation as soon as her stint with the World was done and took up residence in a somewhat remote hotel on the Massachusetts coast. It would not be the first time that MacLane walked away from the public eye, nor the last time readers and press would wonder what had become of her. She agreed with Stone & Co. that a new book was needed, largely to capitalize on the sensation, and she set to work at it that autumn. She reported many months later that work was going slowly - "I work at it not like a genius inspired - but rather like a beaver building a mud-dam" - and cautioned that her writing when rushed could be very bad indeed.

The publisher waited impatiently for the second volume, and they bravely rushed My Friend Annabel Lee into print in July 1903. The critics and public were, by and large, puzzled. Rather than another volume of rampant Amazonian individualism, it was an entirely different animal (though as sui generis as I Await the Devil's Coming had been). Composed mainly of dialogues and monologues of two fictional characters, one a porcelain figurine of a Japanese lady named Annabel Lee, who speaks in an oft-cutting and gnomic fashion, the other a passive and credulous person named "Mary MacLane" (who at most was one fragment of the author's variegated personality), the book - surely deliberately - frustrated all attempts to pigeonhole it. Quiet throughout, retiring in tone but with a more consistent proto-Surreality, the volume of twenty-five chapters strongly resists analysis. From tales of MacLane's high school years and an account of a visit to Montreal to a story of spoonbills who learn at the last moment the meaning of life, the book gave a skeptical press and a bemused public nothing to hang a label on. Though sales were respectable (if nothing like her debut work), the press called the book a disappointment and the public didn't know what to make of it. One wonders if MacLane, with her conflicted relationship to her own fame, had wanted it that way.

Her personal life, however, showed no signs of conventionality. In a passage cut from I Await the Devil's Coming she had enthused about the books of New England writer Maria Louise Pool, not knowing that Pool had died two years earlier or that Stone & Co. had been her publisher. Later in 1902, she had gone to Rockland, Massachusetts to see Pool's house. Caught in a rainstorm, she had sheltered in the basement of a small house attached to the property - unbeknownst to her, the residence of Pool's life-partner Caroline Branson. Branson, hearing someone downstairs when she returned, called the police, who clapped MacLane in jail for a night until Branson visited and the two women sorted it out. Branson withdrew the complaint and, though it is unknown what form their relationship took, MacLane and the significantly-older Branson lived and traveled together for the next six years. It would be MacLane's only known cohabitation; in letters home, filled with news about vegetable plantings and riding the electric cars out to the beach, MacLane called Branson her friend - as, in a letter to Harriet Monroe, she called Branson's Pool's friend.

MacLane lived in the small house Branson had inherited from Pool - the grand house next to it that Pool and Branson had shared was now owned by others - and was reported to be working on new writing of her own and on completing novels Pool had left incomplete. Nothing came of either effort - MacLane is reported to have destroyed several books she completed in the 1900s - but she appeared to enjoy being far away from reporters and fans.

Without fuel, the initial sensation had faded by the end of 1902, and by 1904 people were asking what had become of her. She resurfaced now and then, as with a brief series of feature articles commissioned by the Denver Post - her name still had cachet - but she was focused at this time on a non-public life. She began summering with Branson in St. Augustine, Florida and - in echoes of her attraction to tempts of the big city - discovered an attraction to and, like her father, a skill at gambling. She had made a fortune from her first book, and one lucky turn at a gambling table brought her 30-to-1 odds, but money was no longer endless.

In mid-decade Stone & Co. had gone bankrupt owing her significant royalties, and some of her best writing ensued in letters chasing one of its principals, Melville Elijah Stone, Jr., for the funds personally. He laudably undertook to pay the corporate debt despite having no personal obligation, and for several years was chased, charmed, threatened, and flirted with by MacLane. She called it alimony, and he seems to have gamely paid her $25 and $50 when he could - usually after she had creatively expressed the latest crisis. Her accounts of impoverishment to Stone make curious reading against her later accounts of discovering in those years a taste for hedonistic living, which played out in a strikingly female-only New York City lifestyle depicted with startling candor in her last great series of feature articles two years later.

In 1908, for reasons unknown, Branson and MacLane parted ways. MacLane wrote to Stone that her friend was leaving for Florida with another friend and that she would be without a home. Her abrupt disappearance from Rockland made the papers, which speculated on MacLane's being financial embarrassed, but she shortly gave interviews saying she had simply moved to Boston. Moved by her appeals for money, Stone used his contacts to secure MacLane a job on Hearst's New York Evening Journal. MacLane was gratified but skeptical at its working out; she moved to Manhattan, but Hearst's most powerful editor disliked her work and she left soon after arriving. MacLane again pursued Stone for funds, but her city life motivated her to begin a serious book-project - a set of character sketches of the extraordinary New York women she was meeting. She contacted the Croesusian Montana mogul F. Augustus Heinze - then hamstrung by multiple indictments over his involvement in the Panic of 1907 - for an advance on expected royalties. He was evidently disinterested, but MacLane worked on the book and threw herself deeper into a hedonistic, lesbian-tinged Manhattan underworld that to this day is inadequately documented or understood. She worked at the book and caroused among her source material until her financial condition became so precarious that her stepfather came to New York, convinced Stone to pay the remainder of the royalties, and took her back to where she had departed from on the wings of the book that sang out her hatred of the place: Butte.

MacLane arrived on Christmas Eve, 1909 and found the night view from the train of the town lights sparkling on the valley floor magical. She wrote a feature article for one of Butte's leading papers declaring her return to Butte, updating the populace on her doings since leaving in 1902, and teasingly proclaiming her love for the place and the people. She dramatically concluded, "I am once again a citizen of Butte" - and on the day it the piece appeared was struck with a near-fatal case of scarlet fever with complicating diphtheria. The newspaper carrying her feature article also reported that so many telephone calls were being received that the line had to be disconnected and that there were endless well-wishing visitors, but that MacLane's prognosis was not at all good.

Six weeks later, MacLane returned to a precarious health. As soon as she was able, she wrote a feature article describing her illness experience and thanking the people of Butte for the unexpected outpour of sympathy and care. Her joy in surviving and returning to life is palpable, and this feature, written just before she turned twenty-nine, inaugurates her final feature article arc that would see some of her finest writing. Her articles over the next two months - written, as she said, on a hammock on the porch "in the role of a yellowed skeleton" - ranged from depictions of the men who had loved her to her only sustained reminiscence of her tomboy childhood to - in perhaps her most daring revelation, likely cannibalizing work from her New York book (never published, probably never completed) - two articles on the women she had loved. By 1906 she had become devoted to vaudeville and formed close friendships with such British musical hall stars as Marie Lloyd, her sister Alice, and Cecilia Loftus. This influence is palpable in this final circuit of feature articles, and explicit: "If only the citizens of Butte would regard me as vaudeville and read me, with a patter and kettle-drum chorus, only to be entertained! But no, the stuff comes out on Sunday and so they read it at breakfast and assuage their consciences for not going to church by knocking it and me." The result was a warmer, more human quality in which the ever-present proto-Surrealism glitters the better in a fuller setting.

After the articles had run their course, MacLane returned for the most part to public silence. Her pieces had been syndicated nationally, and the agent responsible - Calvin Harris, never publicly mentioned by her - would play a significant role in MacLane's professional and, it seems, personal life for the next few years. Harris, a boxer and boxing promoter, shortly involved her in an announced project of reporting on prize fights for a national syndicate. Despite an initial appearance at a bout in Thermopolis, Wyoming, this plan - like others apparently under Harris' influence, such as an announced "problem play" by MacLane to be put on in Chicago and, several years later, an announced plan to go to war-slashed Europe to volunteer for nursing work - seems never to have born fruit. With Harris a more strident note enters MacLane's press persona, and one suspects that she had significant conflicts over participating.

Around 1912, MacLane began - as far as is known, wholly apart from Harris' influence - work on her final and most self-revealing book: 1917's I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days. In I Await the Devil's Coming MacLane had pushed out into the world - for all the complaints and hand-wringing - a martial, armored Amazonian persona, and in My Friend Annabel Lee she had put it in abeyance and been far more receptive. In her last book, MacLane tears off the armor and, as she writes, the epidermis, and in a series of prima facie separated songs of herself discloses, through a new hyper-modernist style, her inner doubts, fractures, and fear of disintegration in sometimes quivering intimacy. She appears to have worked at the book in snatches but with great intensity - her 1914 testifying at the court trial of a roadhouse operator accused of running a bawdy house testifies that her tastes were unchanged.

When I, Mary MacLane was published in 1917, a few months after the country had entered World War I, it was to significant press attention, which almost uniformly spoke of her 1902 sensation as epochal but a thing of the past and the new book not sufficient to spark a revolution. Left largely alone was the issue of MacLane's actual intent: perhaps unavoidably, reporters insisted that in 1902 she had wanted and thought only of a commotion and in 1917 was just the same. The book's jacket and advertisements contained laudatory blurbs from MacLane's acquaintance Gertrude Atherton and from D.H. Lawrence's friend Witter Bynner and, though it sparked public notice and discussion, appears to have sold only respectably well and not to have been the comet the publisher had expected. In a letter to Harriet Monroe, who had penned a thoughtful criticism in Poetry Magazine, William Morrow - who would found a great eponymous publishing house nine years later - expressed surprise that it had not done better, commenting that he had not thought writing of such quality was still being done in the United States.

As with I Await the Devil's Coming, MacLane took the completion of a book and swelling press attention as a prompt to leave Butte. She moved out at the very month that Butte's metals production crested and began relentlessly heading downward and relocated to Chicago, where Harriet Monroe still lived and worked.

While getting settled there, she was approached by a prominent Chicago movie company - Essanay Studios, home to such stars as Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, and Wallace Beery - to make a film of her 1910 Butte article on men who had loved her. Within a few months, Men Who Have Made Love to Me was in production with well-known director Arthur Berthelet at the helm, company co-founder George K. Spoor as producer - and Mary MacLane as screenwriter, subject, narrator, and star. Though without acting experience, MacLane agreeably transformed herself into a screen vamp hungered for by the various male types under her counter-objectifying microscope - the Callow Youth, the Literary Man, the Younger Son, the Prize Fighter, the Bank Clerk, and finally that "most exasperating" - the Husband of Another. Her director praised her talent and spoke of MacLane's ability to triumph over any circumstance; her personality, he commented, reminded him of an actress he had known some years earlier: Sarah Bernhardt.

The film showed nationally, was somewhat controversial (and banned in at least one area), created some of the usual press furore and perplexed criticism, and in time got all the way to the Southern Hemisphere to a rousing reception. It was still on tour several years later in certain markets, but a cheeky, breezy 1918 feature article for Photoplay Magazine on her film-star adventure and prior movie fanhood would prove to be MacLane's final public work.

The film was a repeat in essential ways of her first public performance. It broke barriers socially, thematically, and technically; it was heatedly discussed, attracted international attention - but the central point, and the profound unusualness of what MacLane was pulling off, was largely missed. She was born too early and was, at least half-knowing it, making art for a future audience.

With this, MacLane's public career ended. She made national news a year later, in 1919, having been arrested in connection with gowns from the film that had never been returned to the modiste. The matter - which MacLane said was due to a misunderstanding - was settled without further legalities, and apart from an occasional letter to the editor MacLane was publicly heard from no more. She remained in touch with Harriet Monroe, who would later recall MacLane's failing health in the 1920s - it appears she had never regained vigor after her illness of 1910 - but evidence indicates that MacLane found a home in Chicago among progressive writers, anarchists, and other creatives who frequented Chicago's club scene. One reminiscence likely from the early 1920s portrays MacLane taking the stage at a Chicago club to read from "Men Who Have Made Love to Me" - having been introduced, without irony, as the most intelligent women in the United States.

As the 1920s went on, the press began to ask - with increasingly sincere interest - what had happened to her. When a fan asked, in the pages of H.L. Mencken's periodical The American Mercury in 1925, if she was still alive, she answered him two issues later.

Yes, I am alive. I live in Chicago and like it. I am fond of the memory of my book of 1902, and any reference to it gives me a little thrill. I don't quite know what has become of me, but I believe I've changed remarkably little since I wrote that bit of revelation. I'm in these times more of a human being than a writer, but if I should feel again that I have something in me worth writing I'll doubtless write it. So voila. I have my thrill, and Lawrence J. Grant has his answer. And that's that.

It was a fitting last bow. She did no more known work. She had moved to a hotel - respectable enough, but insensitively described by newspapers as "on the edge of Chicago's black-and-tan belt" - and spent much time with her long-time companion and likely lover, an African-American photographer named Lucille Williams, who had first met her on her whirl through Chicago in 1902. Her health failed through the late 1920s, and in early August, 1929 there was a last blare of newspaper sensation about a once-famous writer found in a Chicago hotel room dead of tuberculosis.

Some of the reporters' accounts hinted that she had committed suicide, claiming that she had laid out old newspaper clippings "for a last inspection." One wire service added the colorful detail of a bedside morphine syringe and a helpful doctor who would certify tuberculosis instead of suicide. Some reporters wrote of a scornful smile on her painted lips.

Perhaps it was true. Or perhaps the press was doing what it had done so often in the past. As MacLane had said to a group of newsmen who had, she said, nearly kidnapped her on her 1902 arrival in Chicago from Butte, "We are all out for the dough"!

Yet she had also, in 1903, in the personae of Annabel Lee and "Mary MacLane," said:

"And are the poems forgotten, also?" I inquired.

"Yes, forgotten, except by a few. But when they remember them, they remember them long[,]" said Annabel Lee.

"Then which is better, to be remembered, and remembered shortly, by the multitudes; or to be forgot by the multitudes and remembered long by the one or two?"

"It is incomparably better to be remembered long by the one or two," said Annabel Lee.

(rev. date 5 November 2018)