I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 65
I AM so Clever. I am the Cleverest human being I know.
I have thought my Cleverness an outer quality, a mountebank's cloak, and as such not belonging in this book of my own self. But there are no outer qualities. Everything in and about me is my own self.
My Cleverness is of high quality—even supernatural, I have thought—and is of unobvious tenors.
To any essentially false nature, such as mine, a quick and positive Cleverness is its needfulest resource in coping with this pushing world. To any un-sanely sensitive nature such as mine Cleverness is its fender against human encounters and onslaughts.
There is no Cleverness in this I write. There is writing skill and my dead-feeling genius. But my Cleverness is beside those points.
I use Cleverness when I encounter people.
Sometimes I like people and wish to impress them.
Always I am vain and sometimes I wish my vanity catered to.
And I can get from people whatever tribute I choose.
I mostly choose to bewilder and half-fascinate which is easiest: I talk about anything, nothing, everything with a tinsel-bright complexity which captures average intellects. And even very Clever people seem not Clever to me because I feel so exceeding Clever to myself. I am a little more intuitive, a little falser, a little lightning-quicker than the most artistically antic mentalities I have known.
I am a lady with the ladies, a woman with women, a highly intelligent writer with writers, a loosed fish with the loose fish: being all the time nothing but my own self, unspeakably incongruent. Having never found anyone remotely matching me in barbaric and devastating incongruity of nature I use in human encounters whatever phase makes the occasion most gently befit me. I cater, or I thrill some bastard dull brain, or I grow roundly versatile: all with a sudden coruscant Cleverness which is not in itself any of Me but is my mountebank's scarlet cloak.
But its main cause and reason is not vanity nor a fancy for piquant trickery, nor the wish to try my superior wings in glowing human atmospheres—the preponderant impulse to fly because I can fly. It's none of those, but a need of protection, of a bright armor to keep other people's superficialities from touching me. There's a human effluvium which I feel from people which would touch, wrap, enclose me in a harsh vapor—a half-froze, half-stinging worldly cloud. It hurts with thin cruelness like a corroding spray of acid on my skin: unless I send out the sudden air of my own Cleverness to keep it off and away.
It is long months since I have encountered people with any impulse save hastily to avoid them. But if I should meet, with an aggression of mettle and mood, some woman or man or little group of human sorts (except children of and for whom I have always a fear and a respect) I should then suddenly be casual and half-fascinating and phosphorescently glowing and insolent: being inside me haggard from solitude, wistful from a bereftness and a beauty-sense, suffering and lost.
Ah, I'm notably Clever!
I write a letter of Clever delicate surprisingness—it is the only Clever writing I do. There are twenty people, now long outside my life, to whom a Mary-Mac-Lane letter is the agreeably-vividest thing that could come into a day. The letter, which is an unapparent cater, is not real Me who am someway a strong and contemptuous spirit—but instead one tinsel facet. And it makes people—people! people!—admire and defer to me in a subtlest human aspect: an unwilling antagonistic homage. It stays me, buoys me for the time.
I am profoundly Clever in that I who am in reality so futile, so wavering, so sensitively lyingly artistic, can still show myself aggressively Clever to other persons. I must, being false, be Clever in order to get by.
It is at its best a trickster's quality: and so much the more am I Clever in stretching it out over my shaded life like a strong bright cloak-of-mail.
Just to be Mary MacLane—who am first of all my own self!—and get by with it!—how I do that I can not quite make out.
I'm by odds the Cleverest human being I know: more than likely one of the Cleverest who ever lived in this world.