Distinctly Montana Magazine

w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m 53 Although she left Butte for a second time, MacLane never again experienced the fame and financial comfort that her first book had secured for her. She did write, direct, and star in the semi-autobiographical silent film Men Who Have Made Love to Me, which includes the earliest recorded instance in serious cinema of breaking the fourth wall. The film unfortunately has been lost. She died alone in a seedy hotel room in Chicago at 48 years old in 1929. When her body was found, she was reportedly surrounded by newspa- per clippings from her glory days, although this rumor may be more rooted in exaggeration than fact. THE GRAY-PURPLE The reader must wait for the last twenty pages of I, Mary MacLane, to at last experience her confession of love for Butte. The entry is entitled "The Gray-Purple," and that it isn't quoted more often in anthologies of American or Mon- tana literature is to the detriment of both those canons. It is exquisitely written and worth reading in its entirety: "[Butte's] insistent charm is that it goes on strongly resembling itself year after year [...] I am profoundly lonely in it: my life-tissues are long familiar with the feel of it: its mournful beauty has entered like thin punishing iron into my Soul: and my love for it is made of those things. For no reason I feel love for this Butte. "As much as for the mountains in their mourning inti- mateness I feel love for all the outsides and surfaces of the town itself [...] the little mines in unexpected mid-town blocks with their engines and hoists and scaffolds and green coppery dumps [...] The edge of Walkerville, the surprising steep Idaho Street hill, the North Excelsior Street neighborhood where I wrote my Devil and Gray-dawn book […] the markets on the afternoon shade side of West Park Street full of crabs and lobsters from Seattle and shining fish from California […] All of it has a feel of something aloof and metallic and distinctive and gray-purple and Butte-Montana. "[...] Its wonderful Aridness starves human nerve-soil till the sad wide eyes of the Soul grow bright—fever-bright, light-bright, star-bright—from denial and unconscious prayer: involuntary worship: homage of the unsuppliant unhoping devotee." For all that she is accused of being self-absorbed, what characterizes MacLane as a writer is her awareness of her own fallibility. Of her writing, she laments, "It is as if I have made a portrait not of me, but of a room I have just quitted." Although she is not known for her brevity, here she expresses succinctly the frustrations faced by every writer worth their salt: the slip- periness of language and the inadequacy of words, especially when writing about oneself. It is this tension between her sub- ject and her voice—both irrevocably and forcibly herself—that defines MacLane's literary legacy.

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