When this shocking confession/memoir/prose poem first appeared in 1902, the publisher blandly retitled it — against the author’s wishes — “The Story of Mary MacLane.” That sounds quite innocuous, and unlikely to draw the immediate wrath of the Morality Police. Yet even renamed, the book sold 100,000 copies within a month. How could it not? In its sensational pages, the 19-year-old Mary MacLane proudly described her strong young body, her love for another woman and utter indifference to her family, the deep loneliness of life in turn-of-the-century Montana, her sexual and mystical reveries, an occasional impulse to suicide and, not least, her greatest wish of all: to marry the Devil, or at least be his plaything for a few days.
Shrewdly, Melville House has not only reverted to MacLane’s original title, “I Await the Devil’s Coming,” but also given its new paperback edition a design both chaste and subtly erotic. The cover is dominated by a photograph of the author, looking quite beautiful. She has large eyes, her close-fitting dress buttons tightly around her neck, and her thick hair — piled high on her head — is just slightly undone. The entire cover is also shadowed in dark crimson: In effect, MacLane appears in the midst of fire and brimstone.
(Melville House/Melville House) - ”I Await the Devil's Coming” by Mary MacLane.
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Her book opens with a diary entry headed “Butte, Montana, January 13, 1901”: “I of womankind and of nineteen years, will now begin to set down as full and frank a Portrayal as I am able of myself, Mary MacLane, for whom the world contains not a parallel.”
Let’s examine that sentence. The diction seems distinctly old-fashioned, but note the complicated syntax and that phrase “for whom the world contains not a parallel,” which echoes the beginning of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Confessions.” Is this happenstance? Perhaps not. It soon becomes clear that MacLane is hardly artless. She tells us that she graduated from high school with “very good Latin; good French and Greek; indifferent geometry and other mathematics; a broad conception of history and literature.”
In fact, MacLane is more widely read than most 21st-century adults. In these pages, she quotes, usually without acknowledgment, Shakespeare, Goethe, Longfellow, Tennyson and Lewis Carroll (“You are old, Father William”) and is clearly familiar with all the major Victorian novelists. Plus, she’s up-to-date, having read not only Henry James but also the best-selling Marie Bashkirtseff, whose once-famous diary serves as an obvious inspiration for her own cri de coeur.
While MacLane’s outpourings are often remarkable, there are many pages in which she sounds like a typical adolescent girl, scribbling that she is “unhappy, and filled with anguish and hopeless despair. What is my life? Oh, what is there for me!” She tells us that her soul “burns with but one desire: to be loved — oh, to be loved.” And that life with her family can be summed up as “the dreariness, the Nothingness! Day after day — week after week, — it is dull and gray and weary. It is dull, Dull, DULL!”
