I Await the Devil's Coming - Unexpurgated and Annotated by Mary MacLane
Authors: Mary MacLane
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damnation? If this be damnation, damnation let it be! If this be the human fall, then how good it is to be fallen! At this moment I would fain my fall were like yours, Lucifer, “never to hope again.”
And so, bite by bite, the olive enters into my body and soul. Each bite brings with it a recurring wave of sensation and charm.
No. We will not dispute with the brilliant mind that declared life a tragedy to those who feel. We will let that stand. However there are parts of the tragedy that are not tragic. There are parts that admit of a turning aside.
As the years pass, one after another, I shall continue to eat. And as I eat I shall have my quiet, my brief period of aberration.
This is the art of Eating.
I have acquired it by means of self-examination, analyzing - analyzing - analyzing. Truly my genius is analytical. And it enables me to endure - if also to feel bitterly - the heavy, heavy weight of life.
What a worm of misery I should be were it not for these bursts of philosophy, these turnings aside!
If it please the Devil, one day I may have Happiness. That will be all-sufficient. I shall then analyze no more. I shall be a different being.
But meanwhile I shall eat.
When the last of the olive vanishes into the Stomach, when it is there reduced to animated chyme, when I play with the olive-seed in my fingers, when I lean back in my chair and straighten out my spinal column, - oh, then do you not envy me, you fine, brave world, who are not a philosopher, who have not discovered the art of the small things, who have not conscious chyme in your stomach, who have not acquired the art of Good Eating!
January 29
As I read over now and then what I have written of my Portrayal I have alternate periods of hope and despair. At times I think I am succeeding admirably, - and again, what I have written compared to what I have felt seems vapid and tame. Who has not felt the futility of words when one would express feelings?
I take this hope and despair as another mark of genius. Genius, apart from natural sensitiveness, is prone equally to unreasoning joy and to bitterest morbidness.
I am more than fond of writing, though I have hours when I can not write any more than I could paint a picture, or play Wagner as it should be played.
I think my style of writing has a wonderful intensity in it, and it is admirably suited to the creature it portrays. What sort of Portrayal of myself would I produce if I wrote with the long elaborate periods of Henry James, or with the pleasant ladylike phrasing of Howells? It would be rather like a little tin phonograph trolling out flowery poetry at breakneck speed, or like a deep-toned church organ pouring forth “Goo-Goo Eyes” with ponderous feeling.
When I read a book I study it carefully to find whether the author knows things , and whether I could, with the same subject, write a better one myself.
The latter question I usually decide in the affirmative.
A writer who charms me is Maria Louise Pool with her novels of New England. She is fascinating and she knows things. If she had written seventy years ago she would doubtless now be standard literature. One thing I have noticed about her books is that as I read them I find myself thinking not particularly of the characters therein, but of the author who somehow appears between the lines. And I find this very interesting. I have spent a great many half-hours thinking and conjecturing about Maria Louise Pool. Always I wonder what she likes to eat, and what she does on a pleasant Saturday afternoon when she has nothing else to do, and what kind of clothes she wears, and if she can possibly be as uninteresting at that stout, gray-haired age as most women are. I hope I may see her some day.
The highest thing one can do in literature is to succeed in saying that thing which one meant to say. There is nothing better than that - to make the world see your thoughts as you see them. Eugene Field and Edgar Allan Poe and R. Louis Stevenson
And so, bite by bite, the olive enters into my body and soul. Each bite brings with it a recurring wave of sensation and charm.
No. We will not dispute with the brilliant mind that declared life a tragedy to those who feel. We will let that stand. However there are parts of the tragedy that are not tragic. There are parts that admit of a turning aside.
As the years pass, one after another, I shall continue to eat. And as I eat I shall have my quiet, my brief period of aberration.
This is the art of Eating.
I have acquired it by means of self-examination, analyzing - analyzing - analyzing. Truly my genius is analytical. And it enables me to endure - if also to feel bitterly - the heavy, heavy weight of life.
What a worm of misery I should be were it not for these bursts of philosophy, these turnings aside!
If it please the Devil, one day I may have Happiness. That will be all-sufficient. I shall then analyze no more. I shall be a different being.
But meanwhile I shall eat.
When the last of the olive vanishes into the Stomach, when it is there reduced to animated chyme, when I play with the olive-seed in my fingers, when I lean back in my chair and straighten out my spinal column, - oh, then do you not envy me, you fine, brave world, who are not a philosopher, who have not discovered the art of the small things, who have not conscious chyme in your stomach, who have not acquired the art of Good Eating!
January 29
As I read over now and then what I have written of my Portrayal I have alternate periods of hope and despair. At times I think I am succeeding admirably, - and again, what I have written compared to what I have felt seems vapid and tame. Who has not felt the futility of words when one would express feelings?
I take this hope and despair as another mark of genius. Genius, apart from natural sensitiveness, is prone equally to unreasoning joy and to bitterest morbidness.
I am more than fond of writing, though I have hours when I can not write any more than I could paint a picture, or play Wagner as it should be played.
I think my style of writing has a wonderful intensity in it, and it is admirably suited to the creature it portrays. What sort of Portrayal of myself would I produce if I wrote with the long elaborate periods of Henry James, or with the pleasant ladylike phrasing of Howells? It would be rather like a little tin phonograph trolling out flowery poetry at breakneck speed, or like a deep-toned church organ pouring forth “Goo-Goo Eyes” with ponderous feeling.
When I read a book I study it carefully to find whether the author knows things , and whether I could, with the same subject, write a better one myself.
The latter question I usually decide in the affirmative.
A writer who charms me is Maria Louise Pool with her novels of New England. She is fascinating and she knows things. If she had written seventy years ago she would doubtless now be standard literature. One thing I have noticed about her books is that as I read them I find myself thinking not particularly of the characters therein, but of the author who somehow appears between the lines. And I find this very interesting. I have spent a great many half-hours thinking and conjecturing about Maria Louise Pool. Always I wonder what she likes to eat, and what she does on a pleasant Saturday afternoon when she has nothing else to do, and what kind of clothes she wears, and if she can possibly be as uninteresting at that stout, gray-haired age as most women are. I hope I may see her some day.
The highest thing one can do in literature is to succeed in saying that thing which one meant to say. There is nothing better than that - to make the world see your thoughts as you see them. Eugene Field and Edgar Allan Poe and R. Louis Stevenson
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