from The Confident Years
by Van Wyck Brooks
Dutton, New York, 1952
pp 318-320

Few Western writers of this earlier time [i.e., the early years of the Twentieth Century] could bear comparison with the least of these [i.e., the great Eastern writers], for Fuller and Bierce alone were consciously artists, and Hamlin Garland, at best a heavy-handed craftsman, had largely lost the intensity of his early stories .... All the forts and agencies had their own visiting painters now who found the ragged Indians in tinsel and store-clothes as picturesque as Italian lazzaroni, but the books in which [Hamlin] Garland stated their case - for example, The Captain of the Grev-Horse Troop - were as undistinguished as The Story of Mary MacLane. This book by the Montana Marie Bashkirtseff was a great sensation in literary circles when the author went East to be lionized in Boston and New York after looking out, from her window in Butte, for several years before 1902, on the "deep, high, heavy, silent, sombre" mountains. For Butte was in the heart of the mountain West where in every little town no doubt there were other girls who felt they were "set in the wrong niche" but who were unable, like Mary MacLane - as they walked the "long lonely streets" with "long lonely thoughts" - to whistle in the dark. But, waiting for the devil, as she said she was, or a man who was "bad to his heart's core," this diarist who liked to think of Messalina had little else to think about except the things she might have done if she had not been "half buried ... in this barren ground." She was maddened by the six toothbrushes in the family bathroom, she wrote pages about the art of eating an olive, and she wandered over the green coppery dumps by the mines on the outskirts of Butte with a crazy old crone from Dublin Gulch.

Surveying, in her windy Montana town, the "grim wall of the arid Rockies that separates this Butte from New York," Mary MacLane would have been predestined for Greenwich Village a decade later - she was one of the types of the Villager of the pre-world-war years. Her "unleashed sex-fancy," as she described it, her confessions of the Lesbian and the demi-vierge for whom there was nothing more monstrous than a virtuous woman, made her for a while the most talked of young writer in the country; but her diary was much more cry than wool and Mary MacLane was a startling figure only because the times were so colourless and mild. In poetry especially the prevailing note was saccharine and timid, conventional and thin if also fastidious in form, so that William Vaughn Moody's poems and plays, suggested in part by the mountain West, seemed startling too at the time in their boldness and talent. In Chicago, teaching at the university, Moody had known Hamlin Garland, and in 1901 the two had taken a horseback camping trip through the cattle-raising country of Colorado and the wilder Rockies. They had crossed the flower-strewn, mountain meadows that were scattered between the canyons and peaks and the scenes of Moody's play The Great Divide, a Bret Harte story dramatized in a miner's cabin in Arizona, which Mood visited again in 1904.

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