Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing Read online

  Yet many women readers, particularly those who are or who have been teachers, have found The Small Room to be important, because it treats of openness, of the pressures inevitable on any campus (but without the usual cruel humor), and of the never easy student-teacher relationship. Hitherto, with the rare exception of a book like Olivia by Dorothy Bussy, this relationship has always been depicted as a woman teacher with a male student (The Corn is Green), a male teacher with a female student (every fifth American novel), or a male teacher with a male student who is a son or disciple. For all its minor conventional languors, The Small Room broke through into the world where women function as individuals.

  Oddly enough, after the teacher-student relationship in The Small Room, there is no case in Sarton’s works of a woman artist passing on to a younger woman her own convictions of the dedicated life; there are no young female heirs. Sarton seems almost to draw back from such a thought, as if to argue for her life as opposed to the normal destiny of a woman were too terrifying a prospect. Kinds of Love, her popular novel of a few years ago, again is without an artist figure, except for a young girl who writes poems and whose inspiration ceases when she falls in love or, rather, is fallen in love with. We cannot fail to notice that in Mrs. Stevens the woman interviewer is used for one part of the dialogue, but that the more interesting youthful foil is the boy, Mar, someone far closer to Sarton herself, but who is also, of course, an aspect of Hilary. It is only young males like Mar whom Sarton will accept, within the novels, as poets of the future, as those who will dare to confront life.

  In her own life, Sarton continued as exile, turning into poems and memoirs her dialogue between solitude and love. Plant Dreaming Deep has probably affected more single or lonely lives than any other memoir published in recent years, but the response was in small rooms; again, the masculine critical world was largely uninterested. In this memoir, Sarton attempted to confront, as she had done in Mrs. Stevens, the life of the artist and single woman. Her accomplishment was the more impressive in that she had seen what no one else had seen: the outsider as single woman. We all know who are the outsiders of our society: Jews, like Leopold Bloom and his numerous American progeny; Blacks; the poor. But though Sarton has always been sympathetically drawn to the persecuted and excluded, she has not made them the embodiment of her own sense of exile, but has kept that where she has lived it, in the woman artist, alone in a house, eschewing social life, in a town of which, when she moved there, she knew nothing.

  “We have to make myths of our lives,” she wrote in Plant Dreaming Deep. “It is the only way to live without despair.” This was an extraordinary gift to the women who read her: the idea that their lives, which they had formerly conceived only as an aspect of failure, might be mythologized into achievement. There was a fallacy here: Her readers were rarely artists, and the order she had created of her life seemed, though she had not intended this, more easy of achievement than it was. The Journal of a Solitude, published last year, was written in an attempt to let people know of the rages, the assaults from the critics, the despairs. Yet for all that, Plant Dreaming Deep did give us for the first time a new myth, that of the single person, and a woman, recovering her identity through work and discipline. Unique as a memoir in American letters, it brought her, not critical notice, but an adoring public given to writing endless letters and turning up on the village green at dawn to survey her house through field glasses.

  The two books published in 1973, The Journal of a Solitude and As We Are Now, although the first was mutilated by enforced excisions and other difficulties, mark a new courage in her work, and a new, more forthright assault upon the barriers between people. Once more she has celebrated that openness which many people now are learning as the necessary prelude to the discovery of identity. To those barriers she has always kicked against has been added now the barrier of age. In The Small Room Sarton quoted from an essay by Simone Weil: “Two prisoners in contingent cells, who communicate by blows struck on the wall. The wall is what separates them, but also what permits them to communicate. So it is with us and God. Every separation is a bond.” As We Are Now is the story of old age confined to the cell where our society relegates the old, separated from life, a cell on whose walls no one knocks. If Sarton has not been a revolutionary against the ingrained ideas of women’s destiny and place in marriage, she has recognized the barriers between the sexes and the generations for what they are: walls which, will we but strike them, can carry our communication.

  “Is there no compassion?” a friend asked me./ “Does it exist in another country?” This question, from the poem “A Hard Death,” is not the least of this century’s questions; it is one which Sarton has never ceased to ask. Compassion is usually conceived as a malady from which we struggle to recover. It has never been so for her. Her own personal suffering and rage, her own quarrels with the world, have never been muted as her compassion has never been muted. Louise Bogan, in a letter to Ruth Limmer, calls some poems of Sarton’s “sentimental,”5 an easy charge, a palpable danger to any writer not barricaded against revelation. But what appears sentimental to the society Mrs. Stevens envisioned as composed of male critics is an inevitable aspect of the compassion which, in Sarton, has never cowered behind the usual defenses. As a result, life is never absent from her work as it is from, to name a master, the work of Flaubert. And even Bogan must have understood something of this. Writing of Elizabeth Bowen’s crystalline and pristine prose, never for a moment lax or sentimental, Bogan observed, “The Death of the Heart is too packed, too brilliant, for its own good. What Miss Bowen lacks is a kind of humility.”6

  Sarton has another too little celebrated virtue: She gives pleasure. “Though large sales are not necessarily a proof of aesthetic value,” Auden has written, “they are evidence that a book has given pleasure to many readers, and every author, however difficult, would like to give pleasure.”7 Sarton gives pleasure and (notice this in Mrs. Stevens, a book in which “nothing happens,”) the reader is carried along on a current rather than, as in many more celebrated books, swimming his way upstream like a spawning salmon because it is his duty to do so. E. M. Forster has remarked that one always tends to overpraise a long book because one has got through it, and one wonders if, in the academic world, the same does not also apply to books that make hard reading.

  Finally, Sarton and Mrs. Stevens are outsiders not least because, in this machismo age, violence and cruelty have offered them no satisfactions. Whatever Sarton has done, she has never imitated male writers, which may be what Hilary means when she says that women who have imitated men lack something. For to imitate men is not to want a place in the world, autonomy, a chance for self-creation, and the freedom to express anger and aggression. To imitate men is to remain enslaved to those standards men have declared eternal, and to deny one-self, because one is a woman, selfhood. Which is why, though Sarton, with the nostalgic eyes of the only child and the single adult, has looked upon marriage and family life less critically than she might, she has never limited the women of her creation to passivity, nor failed to be, long before the word passed into its current usage, liberated.

  The reappearance of Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing is an important occasion, is, as Sarton has said in another connection, our “good luck in a dirty time.”

  Carolyn G. Heilbrun

  1. At the meeting of the Modern Language Association in December 1973, a seminar was held on “The Art of May Sarton.” Ten papers were presented on many aspects of her work. They were by L. W. Anderson, Jane S. Bakerman, Fredrica Bartz, Melissa Cannon, Sigrid N. Fowler, Charles Frank, Susan Hauser, Kathleen Klein, Paula G. Putney, Henry Taylor. Dawn Holt Anderson, the discussion leader, has herself published an essay, “May Sarton’s Women,” in Susan Koppelman Cornillon, ed., Images of Women in Fiction (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, 1972), pp. 243–50. Agnes Sibley, May Sarton (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972) is useful for chronology and biography.

  2. Noel Annan, �
��Love Story,” New York Review of Books, 21 October 1971, pp. 17–18.

  3. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis. Quoted in the Introduction by Jacques Barzun (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), p. xi.

  4. Joanna in Joanna and Ulysses is a painter, but this is one of those Sarton fictions which I prefer to call fables, as Sarton herself sometimes calls them. One would particularly like to recommend all four of them to those who interest themselves in books for youngsters; like the best books for young people, they were written for adults, are wise, and do not condescend or lie. There is nothing else produced in this line lately that is nearly so good as Joanna and Ulysses, The Fur Person, The Poet and the Donkey, and Miss Pickthome and Mr. Hare.

  5. Ruth Limmer, ed., What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan 1920–1970 (New York: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1973), p. 325.

  6. Louise Bogan, A Poet’s Alphabet, ed. Ruth Limmer and Robert Phelps (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), p. 64.

  7. W. H. Auden, “A Poet of the Actual,” New Yorker, 1 April 1972, p. 104. (Auden was reviewing a biography of Trollope.)

  Part I: Hilary

  Hilary Stevens half opened her eyes, then closed them again. There was some reason to dread this day, although she had taken in that the sun was shining. The soft green silk curtains pulled across the windows created an aqueous light and added to the illusion that she was swimming up into consciousness from deep water: she had had such dreams! Too many people … landscapes … fading in and out of each other.

  “The thing is,” she told herself, “that I am badgered by something.”

  Perhaps if she turned over it would go away.

  Instead she was forced awake by the twice-repeated piercing notes of an oriole in the flowering plum just outside her windows. At the same moment the French clock cut through this spontaneous song with its rigid intervals. Six o’clock.

  “Old thing, it’s high time you pulled yourself together!”

  But the other party of the dialogue rebelled, wanted to stay comfortably in bed, wanted to ward off whatever was to be demanded, wanted to be left in peace. Lately Hilary had observed that she seemed to be two distinct entities, at war. There was a hortatory and impatient person who was irritated by her lethargic twin, that one who had to be prodded awake and commanded like a doddering servant and who was getting old, seventy as one counted years.

  First things first. The mind must be summoned back, then one might manage to lift oneself out of bed. Hilary closed her eyes and set herself to cope with consciousness. But oh to slip back into that other world, where in her dreams she flew, covered immense distances with ease, and so often came to such beautiful understanding and peace with those ghosts who in reality had represented chiefly anguish. The past had been extraordinarily present all night …, she was preparing herself.

  “For what?” the doddering servant wished to know.

  “The interviewers, you old fool. They are coming this afternoon!”

  This realization acted like a pail of water flung in her face, and Hilary found herself cold-awake, standing rather shakily, supporting herself with one hand on the night table. The room around her was in unusual disorder, open cardboard boxes of files standing about and, on the night table, photographs and old letters. Oh dear! She took refuge in the usual actions, those which began every day. She went first to the window and drew back the curtains. There in the distance, seen across granite boulders and an assortment of wild cherry and locust, lay the great quivering expanse of ocean, blue, blue to the slightly paler line at the horizon. There it was, the old sea, the restorer! Hilary drank it down in one swift glance, and then walked over to the bureau and, over the inexorable minute hand of the French clock, looked into her own eyes, shallow and pale in the morning light.

  “God, you look awful,” she told herself. “Old crone, with hardly a wisp of hair left, and those dewlaps, and those wrinkles.” Merciless she was. But there was also the pleasure of recognition. In the mirror she recognized her self, her life companion, for better or worse. She looked at this self with compassion this morning, unmercifully prodded and driven as she had been for just under seventy years. The sense of who she was and what she meant about her own personage began to flow back as she ran a comb through the fine childlike hair, hardly gray, and brushed her teeth—her own, and those the dentists had had to provide over the years.

  “Damn it!” she said aloud. It meant, in spite of it all, false teeth, falling hair, wrinkles, I am still myself. They haven’t got me yet.

  They, … the enemies. Who were “they” exactly, she asked herself while she put the kettle on, and admired the breakfast tray as she did each morning, resting her eyes on the red cocks painted on the white cup and saucer, the red linen cloth, the Quimper jam jar with a strawberry for a knob, rejoicing in order and beauty, as if she had not herself arranged it all the night before.

  There were moments when Hilary saw life as tending always toward chaos, when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart. She gave orders to the doddering servant about all this, but the old thing was getting slow.…

  Now, for instance, she had almost forgotten Sirenica in the cellar! Released, the white cat wound herself round Hilary’s legs and purred ecstatically, lifting first one paw and then another and stretching it out into the air, giving a single high-pitched mew when she heard the frigidaire door slam and saw her plate being lifted down.

  “Who are ‘they,’ Sirenica?” Hilary asked aloud, but there was no time to make an answer, for it was necessary while the eggs boiled to put the two little turtles into warm water to wake them up; they looked up at her with eyes as cold as her own, then swam wildly about waiting for their disgusting breakfast of mealy worms. Hilary had bought them on an impulse in the five-and-ten. Their coldness was restful; and she delighted in their beauty, like animated pieces of jade. Also it had been rather comforting to read in a turtle book that they might live to be forty, that the absurd creatures would outlive her. Still, any life is in constant peril, and before she knew it, she had taken on another anxiety, worried when they did not eat for a day, found herself involved, trying to imagine what they might enjoy, an hour outdoors in the sun, or a little piece of fish for a change. She gazed down into the bowl intently, now, studying the delicate webbed feet and tiny tails, often kept wound in under the shell. She forgot about her toast. It was cold when she finally buttered it and took the tray upstairs.

  Heaven, to get back into bed for this best hour of the day!—the hour when the door between sleep and waking, between conscious and unconscious, was still ajar and Hilary could consider the strange things that welled up through the night, could lie there looking out to sea, and feel energy flow back while she drank two or three strong cups of tea. With the first, she found herself observing Sirenica, who had jumped up on the bed (hoping no doubt there might be bacon this morning), and had settled down to wash her face. It was a long, intricate process; it began with the long rose-petal tongue lapping all around her mouth and chin, up and down and around, at least fifty times. When every taste of fish and every drop of oiliness had been savored, a washcloth paw lifted, to be licked in its turn, then rubbed back of the ears, round the nose, past the strong whiskers. Hilary watched it all as intently as a cat watches a bird: this was something she had never managed to “get down” in a satisfactory form, but she still had hopes.

  With her second cup of tea the unfinished dialogue about “they” was resumed, and she lay back on the pillows ruminating. Of course “they” varied a good deal. At one time in her life, “they” had certainly been the critics. Even the accolade on her last book of poems had left a slightly sour taste. She could not help suspecting that it might be a consolation prize, given rather for endurance than achievement. Her distinguished contemporaries had been dying lately, one by one, so it was all very well to
be praised for her vitality and intensity, but …, anyway Hilary felt it degrading even to consider the critics. “Old fool, they are your own demons,” she adjured herself, “the never-conquered demons with whom you carry on the struggle for survival against laziness, depression, guilt, and fatigue.” She had hit on the only possible answer to the question. It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful, and always, she had to admit, interesting. What sort of questions were those interviewers going to ask? It would be exhilarating to be set what Hilary called “real” questions … in fact she had agreed to this visitation because it appeared to be a challenge. Hopefully, she might be forced to confront certain things in her own life and in her work that seemed unresolved, and she was just about to consider these prickly matters when she heard a familiar whistle under the window.

  “Drat the boy! What does he want?”

  She nearly tipped the whole tray over getting out of bed, and of course Sirenica jumped down at once in a huff. Hilary threw an old Japanese kimono over her shoulders and went to the window, peering down into the strong sun-light. The boy teetered there on the stone wall, head bent, his whole figure betraying unease. She could guess, though she could not see it, that the face under the shock of tow hair, was frowning.

  “What is it?” Hilary shouted. “It’s the day, you know. You might have let me have my breakfast in peace!”

  “What day?”

  “The day the interviewers are coming!”

  “That’s not till four.” Now he looked straight up, and she saw something in that face she thought she knew by heart, something she had never seen before.