The Mary MacLane Project

Biography in Brief

Mary Elizabeth MacLane was born on May 1, 1881 in Winnipeg, the child 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 changed the course of Mary's life. 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 older siblings John and Dororthy and younger brother James - moved to the mining center of Butte, where Mary's writing style and fame would be founded. She had begun writing in Great Fallsin 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, military service, and would shortly set out adventruring 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 surging joys and crushing moments of despair, her craving to be loved - particularly by her female high-school literature teacher, Fannie Corbin - and 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, and soon to become a famous publisher, recognied 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 in turn 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 almost impossible to credit. Reporters from other states began to travel to Butte to attempt, often 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.

For her part, Mary maintained a public persona by turns incisively cool, eruptively fiery, surreally elliptic, and childishly antic - as news reports tallied the growing fortune generated by her best-selling book. The fame she had desired was at last hers. In July 1902, possibly prompted by being target of a kidnapping plot, she moved out of Butte on a voyage east that was covered by newspapers as if a royal procession. Her first major stop, in Chicago, was another change in the course of her life, as she met her Stone & Co. editor Lucy Monroe and her sister, Harriet. Lucy, who in 1910 would move to Beijing with her ambassador husband, and Mary would remain friendly for several years, but Harriet - who had written the famed Columbian Ode and would go on to found Poetry Magazine to support an authentically American style of modern poetry - would become one of Mary's great unrequited loves; they would remain in off-and-on touch for the rest of MacLane's life.

Mary's departure from Chicago was also national news, and upon word that she had decided 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 stay in Manhattan for some weeks and write of it for newspaper. She first went to her original destination - to Fannie Corbin, then spending time in Buffalo. Once she had spent time with Corbin, MacLane admitted a few newspaper reporters and gave interviews. Perhaps the best of all her encounters with the press came from this time, with a long and searching interview with Zona Gale of Pulitzer's World. Gale lavished care on the interview, 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 to declare that she had fallen in love with Miss Gale.

In time, MacLane departed Fannie Corbin for New York City - it is not known if they ever met again - and she commenced work for Pulitzer's World with a series of chaperoned visits to events and places to write about: Coney Island, Wall Street, a society wedding in Rhode Island, and so on. Her 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 World reported unprecedented mail for months after from in and out of the United States. MacLane had chafed at the 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: that the big city had dark things that lured her, and that she might well go off into it and into them.

In fact, MacLane departed from the still-raging 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, laregly to capitlize 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" - but cautioned that her writing, if rushed, could be very bad indeed.

The publisher impatiently waited for the second volume, and they bravely rushed it into print in July 1903. The critics and public were, by and large, puzzled. Rather than another volume of rampant and obvious Amazonian individualism, My Friend Annabel Lee was an entirely different animal, though as sui generis as I Await The Devil's Coming had been. Composed mainly of the dialogues and monologues of two fictional characters, one of whom is a porcelain figurine of a Japanese lady named Annabel Lee, who speaks in an often cutting and gnomic fashion, the other a rather passive and credulous person named "Mary MacLane" (who at most was one fragment of the author's variegated personality), the book - surely deliberately - frustrated those looking to pigeonhole it. Quiet throughout, almost retiring in tone, but still with that proto-Surreal quality, the book defies facile analysis. From tales of MacLane's high school years and an account of a visit to Canada after arriving on the East Coast to a story of some 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 the flood of her debut book, 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 by the publishers of I Await The Devil's Coming she had enthused about the New England tales of novelist Maria Louise Pool - she had not known that Pool had died two years earlier or that Stone & Co. had been her publisher. Later in 1902, she had gone to Rockland, Massachusetts intent on seeing 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.

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 a Denver paper - MacLane's 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 unnamed big city temptations - discovered an attraction to and a skill, like her father, at gambling. She had made an enormous 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 declared bankruptcy owing her significant royalties, and some of her best writing came in letters chasing one of the firm's principals, Melville Elijah Stone Jr., for the funds personally. He laudably undertook to pay the firm's debt despite having no personal obligation to, 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 that she depicted with startling candor in her last great series of feature articles.

In 1908, for reasons unknown, Branson and MacLane parted ways. MacLane wrote to Stone that Branson was leaving for Florida without her and that she was moving out of their home. Her disappearance made the papers, which speculated on MacLane's being financial embarassed, but she shortly gave interviews saying she had not disappeared but had simply moved to Boston. Moved by her appeals for more payments, Stone used his contacts to secure MacLane a job on Hearst's Evening Journal. MacLane was gratified but skeptical at the job's working out; she moved to Manhattan, but Hearst's most powerful editor, Arthur Brisbane, disliked her work and she left his aegis. MacLane again pursued Stone for money, but her city life motivated her to begin a serious book-project - a book 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 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 repay the remainder of MacLane's royalties, and took her back to the place 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 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 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 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 one of her most daring revelations, probably cannibalizing work from the book on New York women (which may never have been completed) - the women she had loved. Around 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 was palpable in this last 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 her ever-present proto-Surrealism glitters the better for the lesser bareness.

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 - would play a significant place in MacLane's professional and, it seems, personal life for the next few years. Harris, a boxer and boxing promoter, shortly involved MacLane in an announced project to report on prize fights across the nation, which - depsite an initial appearance at a fight in Thermopolis, Wyoming - seems to have never born fruit, and with him a more strident note of promotion enters MacLane's press persona, as with an announced "problem play" to be put on in Chicago which seems never to have come into being.

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 against 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 says, the epidermis, and in a series of prima facie separated songs of herself discloses, through a then-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 the book was published in 1917 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 she had wanted and thought only of a commotion in 1902 and was unchanged in 1917. The promotional copy 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 that the publisher had expected. In a letter to Harriet Monroe, William Morrow - who would found a great eponymous publishing house nine years later - expressed surprise that the book had not done better and bravely maintained 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 a relentless downward turn and relocated to Chicago, where Harriet Monroe still lived.

While getting settled there, a prominent Chicago movie company - Essanay Studios, home of such stars as Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, and Wallace Beery - proposed making 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 gamely transformed herself into a screen vamp to be desired by the various male types under her counter-objectifying microscope - the Callow Youth, Literary Man, Younger Son, Prize Fighter, Bank Clerk, and finally "the 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 made its way to the Southern Hemisphere to a rousing reception. It was still on tour several years later in some markets, but a cheeky, breezy 1918 feature article for Photoplay 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 her humorously-tinged proto-Surrealist feminism was not something that could be socially digested. She was, at least half-knowing it, art-making for a future audience.

With this, MacLane's public career ended. She made the papers 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 reminscence 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 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.

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, as insensitively described by newspapers as, "on the edge of the black-and-tan belt" of Chicago - and spent much time with her close Chicago friend, an African-American photographer named Ms. Williams, who had first met her on her tour through Chicago in 1902. Her health failed through the late 1920s, and in August, 1929 there was a last blare of sensation about a once-famous writer found dead of tuberculosis in a Chicago hotel.

Some of the news accounts hinted that she had committed suicide, writing that she had laid out old newspaper clippings "for a last inspection." One wire service added the colorful detail of a morphine syringe and a helpful doctor who would certify tuberculosis instead of suicide.

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

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

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

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

"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.