WOMAN

By MAGDELEINE MARX

Introduction by
HENRI BARBUSSE

Translated by Adele Szold Seltzer

NEW YORK
THOMAS SELTZER
1920

Copyright, 1920, by
THOMAS SELTZER, Inc.

First printing June, 1920
Second printing July, 1920

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

BOOK I Being Born
BOOK II Being
BOOK III Becoming

INTRODUCTION

A splendid book in which a soul lives so profoundly human and so purely feminine that any words of introduction seem leaden and intrusive. You feel as though you were violating the essential delicacy and powerful life of this soul to comment upon the remarkable revelation of it between the very covers that contain the revelation.

Yet, as a modest friend of letters, I should like to express an opinion here—the author did not ask me for it—and pay homage to the brilliant originality of this work. I want to give myself the pleasure of saying how important I think it is.

It expresses—and this is a fact of considerable literary and moral import—what has never been exactly expressed before. It expresses Woman.

The more woman has been spoken about, you might say, the less she has been revealed. She has been hidden under a plethora of words. The supreme vision rising up out of these pages is as luminous as a heavenly revelation. From the author's tone, so simple and penetrating, you perceive that women feel differently about the things that we men see and proudly proclaim.

The thought and spirit of Woman will be a surprise and a shock to the old masculine traditions, in which women also acquiesce, probably because of their old traditions of slavery. But we know that always and everywhere the opposition such thought arouses is sublimely lacking in truth.

Here is a woman who cries out with magnificent impressive sincerity against the fallacy of the maternal instinct—the "call of the blood"—against the exclusiveness of love; who knows and asserts that death kills only the dead, and not those who are left behind; who recreates in new forms the law and the creed of the relations between man and woman, motherhood, and suffering. And this new expression of woman—a new expression, therefore, of the whole of life—this striking gospel, young and strong, which overcomes artificial, unnatural ideas, resounds at the very time when woman is at last entering humanity and is preparing to change her rôle of breeder of children and handmaid in common.

The book is strictly, religiously objective. Everything is perceived only through the eyes, the mind, the heart of the "heroine"—the word usage thrusts upon us for this woman who has no name, who is just truly herself. Through the commanding will of the author the creative richness of the book springs altogether from the magnificent oneness of a human being. No outside approach mars this unity. In no other book perhaps so markedly as in this has the integrity of an individual been more respected, and never has an imaginary character so consistently warded off whatever is not of itself. You don't even seem to feel that this "Woman" talks or tells a story. You simply know what she knows.

And because of this very fact, this intimate association which unites us jealously with this one being of all others, the book is poignant and moving. A world is born beneath our eyes. In some scenes, short or long but always important and vital, a tragedy shudders, and the entire succession of the events of life, ordinary and on a big scale, passes in the book in clear outline, in essential poetry.

To say this is to say that the author is a master, that her technique is subtle, that the action concentrates all the dramas of the world in one spiritual drama, and the book reveals a prodigious gift for presenting a whole of vast impressions which creates unity.

Woman does not belong to any class of writing; it is not tied down by any formula; it does not lower itself by imitating. It is a powerful, a rebel, a virgin work, and it ranks Magdeleine Marx among the loftiest poets of our age.

HENRI BARBUSSE.

BOOK I

BEING BORN

I

The sun was beginning to shine.

I had been walking and walking....

I had just left the brambly path which cuts a bed of sand through the forest, laying bare its rusty bowels.

I felt full-fed by the subtle nourishment that space distils, crammed with air, and my forehead seemed drawn taut. Was it the motes dancing in the sunbeams? I don't know. I was spent. The fancy throbbed beneath my temples, did its work, and I let it go.

You must have been sincere at least once in your life to know what an hour is face to face with yourself, a whole hour, step by step, minute by minute. And I never had been sincere. Now I escaped from my clogging limbs, from the clay of myself. Until now I had done nothing but breathe and sleep. All of a sudden I was alive. It was intoxicating....

Dizzy though I was I felt an exhausting need to keep on going.

I penetrated deep into the woods walking at random, my mind almost a blank. When the leafy undergrowth enclosed me, I let myself slide to the ground on to the dried-up grass, the fallen twigs, and the crackling russet pine-needles.

All about in a dense circle, the rugged plant life. A moving splendor in the play of the varying greens. Damp, aromatic smells. And a sense of invisible swarming life everywhere....

The silence, so fresh and penetrating, was like a living thing, and I turned round several times thinking I heard some one behind me panting. No one. The uneven trunks of the great trees; lower down, behind their serrated green, a slate-colored screen of mist; here, the shadow-broidered ground; above, the patches of blue sky—and I.

I....

I was a little ashamed to link my Self to myself in this way, to give my Self its value. The old attitude of humility, of attaching no importance to Self—was that going to begin again? Now I felt more profoundly alone than in the harmonious exaltation I had experienced while walking. In a mixture of alarm and idleness I tried not to remain motionless, but to plant my elbows on the ground and lie flat on the grass with my head between my hands, so as to divert myself with living noise.... I could not.

Then I stretched out on my back, my eyes fixed on the sky, my body relaxed; and the full-blooded tide of my thoughts flowed over me.

They flowed on, of themselves, no longer halting, as they had on the walk, on the edge of each discovery; I no longer kept saying to myself as when I hammered out my pitiless steps: "I have lied, I have always lied, I have lived only on the outskirts of my life...." The air was still, the soul alone sounded, and the soul also was at peace. I went down into the depths—to find the soul's sweet beginnings, I suppose.

There were no beginnings. Though my early memories came back obediently, they were not illuminating. The