Aside from the story, which is a sort of Spoon River of thoughts, emotions, rebellions, unconventionalities, humor, the writing of those parts which promised to be poetry in the whole became a too-pretty prettiness, a kind of Ladies’ Home Journalness. There is a way some maiden ladies hold a brush when painting still-life—we call it Spencerian.... But what makes me the most weary is the tape-worm words: Feel-of-my-Fingers, my Boredom-of-the-Moment, etc., etc. It is an amusing book. It is an unhappy book, and it is surprising in all kinds of ways. It is chiefly surprising because it is not the contradictions that contradict: it is the potentialities, the affirmations. Whatever she affirms in the letter—that she is artist, pagan, radical, outlaw, humorist,—she denies in the spirit. She is really a rather set little conservative with a Presbyterian conscience. She is an interesting and entertaining neurasthenic. Her book is surprisingly ungrown, surprisingly commonplace. It is surprisingly not a surprise. She makes much talk of her old soul “worn by long cycles of time”; she names herself an artist—a double title to a universal consciousness; and then proceeds to analyze toward a universal consciousness. She lovingly cherishes her free analytical mind and then in chapters like “I am someway the Lesbian woman” and “I am not Respectable nor Refined nor in Good Taste” she refutes her free analytical mind in the best manner of the “good non-analytic creatures.” I cannot find the interest to a free mind, to any thinking mind, in questioning the refinement of the natural feelings induced by a shower bath in the solitude of a mountain gorge. A grown mind does not consider whether it is unrefined to be natural or expect that it ought to feel “timorous, sexless, or hygenic” under such circumstances. A grown mind does not question the integrity of its emotions. _I, Mary MacLane_ is good fun to read and there is enough charm in its abrupt realism to make up for its cloying fancifulness. It is annoying and exasperating—annoying because it makes you feel sorry for Mary MacLane and exasperating because it makes you wish you could help her clear up the design a bit. It is too personal. It is an intrusion. The artist reveals not how he lives but how he Exists, not his objects but himself. And if he chooses himself as his object, as Mary MacLane has done, he has not made his task any different or less difficult. It is as foolish to talk about the artist as the man as to talk about Art as life. Whether an artist tells out his whole soul in a single verse or in great creations through a long life time, or only exists fully and no one has known how he passed one of his “human days”, what he has created will tell forever how he Existed. It is never what life does to the artist; it is what the artist does to life.