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.
_A familiar sharp twist_