I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 77
SO it is finished: and I have oddly Failed.
I have slyly Succeeded and oddly Failed in equal degree.
I have Failed because I am too cowardly and too weak and too dishonest to write certain bruised and self-accusing places in my Soul and in my Heart and in my Mind which rightly come in the scope of this: there are the Stern and Delicate Voices one closes one's ears against: there are the starry grimy Actualities one drops from one's hands: there are the Thoughts one Does Not Think. Yet and yet: they too are in it, hanging cobweb-ish on my wordings and colons.
It is not a strong tale, and that is very well. This book is less I-written than it is I-myself. And Just Beneath The Skin no person is strong: not Theodore Roosevelt, true fearless American: not Bonaparte, splendid tyrant: not Joan of Arc, titanic martyr. They are strong in their depths and strong on the outside. So are many others. So am I, I think. But just under the skin all who are human are roundly weak.
Roundly weak, every one.
And with that, in my case, False.
This primarily is the picture of one who is made-False: False from her fingertips to her innermost concept.
It is belike because of that that this, as itself, oddly Fails.
It is as if I have made a portrait not of Me, but of a Room I have just quitted. My Gloves are left on a chair: my Hat is left on a couch: my taken-off Shoes are left on the floor: my faint-smelling Handkerchief is dropped by the door: my round ribboned Garter is hanging on the door-knob: my Breath is in the air: my Grief is on the walls clinging like smoke: my flat Despair is on the petunia-leaves in the window: my fragrant Horridness lingers in the curtains. I am not there! But I—I have just Quitted that Room!—
Therein I have slyly Succeeded.
My feeling at my book's-end is a prayer-feeling, both frantic and quiet: God have mercy on me! but not unless you want to.
And I feel barbarous and utterly solitary, solitary from here to Jericho, solitary from here to the cool stars.
There comes off the grim gray east hills a soft whelming taste of Sunset, bloody and full of human marrows.
And I feel a need of great Pain or great Sin to make and break me, Soul and bones.