Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

by May Sarton

  “But why does it go on then?” Hilary asked. “I can’t believe I am making all this up alone. I’m not that crazy!”

  “I can only tell you my truth. I can’t tell you yours.”

  “I feel as if I had been seized by the hair by some angel who won’t let me go until, until …,” and Hilary had rushed out of the house.

  How long had it taken before the wave did finally break? Six months? A year? Such experiences take place outside time, and old Hilary could not remember.

  But she remembered that once again chance had played its part, chance or the furies, who are never very far off where human passions are played out. It was after midnight on a spring night. Hilary, on her way home from the theatre, saw the lights on downstairs and walked in to say goodnight: Willa never locked her door. But no one answered Hilary’s call, and she had run upstairs, startled by the silence.… Was Willa ill, in need of help?

  Hilary stood at the open door of the bedroom, in darkness, and heard the quiet breathing of the magic person asleep. For a second she hesitated; it would be kind to tiptoe down and go out of the house, for surely that sleeping, frail humanity needed rest. But who could have resisted such temptation after such months of mounting need? She flung herself down on the bed, and Willa, wakened from the subterranean world where all we control in the daylight lives its strong irrational life, opened her arms to the child, to the poet, to the lover, and allowed the wave to break. Within those passionate kisses sexuality hardly existed, or was totally diffused in a fire of tenderness. The relief of it! The beauty of it! God knows, life had not stopped there when Hilary was twenty nine, but even now in her old age she knew their poignance and their power. She had used the word “trauma” to herself a few seconds before.… How could she have forgotten the blessing?

  Whatever the psychiatrists may have told us, there are no repetitions. Never again would Hilary experience passion as pure light. The consummation was as absolute as the initial break-through into personal feeling. There was, in fact, nowhere to go from there. And what had seemed to her, as she walked home early the next morning, the beginning of a new life, was in fact, the end of an episode. They did not meet again as lovers.

  When Hilary came back two days later, one of Willa’s sons was at the door, rather stiff and formal. He told Hilary that his mother had been taken to a hospital and was allowed no visitors. Willa had fallen down the stairs and been found in the afternoon of “the next day” unconscious, with a severe concussion. It had been a stroke, no doubt. John did not ask her in, and Hilary stood there, silenced, trying to read something more in the boy’s closed face, hoping for some sign, for some message, but there could be none, of course. She was merely one of the innumerable friends and acquaintances who must be told the tragic fact. She had no right to force her way in. She would not have dared.

  Flowers could be sent to the hospital. A ring which Willa had admired in a little box. This was returned a month later, unopened, by John, quite casually and without a word. The boys had been away at school so much that Hilary hardly knew them. On that occasion he stood at the door of her flat, and she did not ask him in. So, twice, they had confronted each other on a doorsill without the slightest contact or real exchange. Hilary was in a strait jacket, unable to move. She went to work every day like an automaton and came back to her dreary lodgings in Hampstead, to limbo. Her desk was littered with words, but they did not connect.…, the electric current was turned off. What she wrote, if coherent at all, had no form; as poetry it did not exist. After a time she recognized that there could be no relief in merely writing down cries of anguish, and threw it all into the wastebasket.

  Three months later Willa came home again and ostensibly resumed her life. People came and went; records were played, but the world that had existed so tangibly no longer existed, because Willa, as she had been, was no longer there. She looked suddenly old and gaunt; she moved carefully and spoke as if she had to plan how to articulate each word and utter it by the force of will. She had never been warm; now she seemed as cold and distant as the moon. So immense was the change that there could be no question of feeling what Hilary had felt three months before, and never in the years to come did she refer to what had taken place between them. By the time the book of poems appeared, as far as Hilary was concerned, it might have been written by someone else.

  Downstairs they talk so lightly about the Muse, the old woman on the bed was thinking. But I can’t tell them anything. It is all too strange, too terrible still. Even now, I understand nothing. As she forced herself to get up again, she felt bruised, as if in the last few minutes she had been battling with invisible forces and had been beaten.

  And yet …, standing now on her feet, coming back to the familiar room, to the warm afternoon light, to the glimpse of tranquil blue through the window, she dared herself to take down the book of sonnets and open it for the first time in many years. It was as if she had never really seen them before, at first too involved in the experience itself, and then finding any return too painful. “After all …,” she murmured aloud. After all, the poems existed. That strange marriage of two minds, from which they had flowed, still lived there on the page.

  But almost at the instant when she recongized this, she flung the book down, and the everlasting dialogue was resumed. “When did I learn—shall I ever?—that conquest is not the point!”

  Peter was writing so fast that he did not hear the light step as F. Hilary Stevens returned to them, but Jenny, lifting her head, was shocked. The old face had gone white; like parchment, it looked; fine wrinkles which she had not noticed before were apparent. Whatever had happened upstairs had taken a toll.

  “We are tiring you,” Jenny said, watching the trembling hands pour them each a stiff drink.

  “I’m all right,” she said testily. “At my age one ebbs and rises rather quickly, that’s all. Nothing a drink won’t cure!” And she lifted the glass, held the pause a second, and then, sending a gleam of a smile toward Peter, toasted “the Muse!”

  “Yes,” Peter said rather gravely, “the Muse! Whoever she or he may be!”

  F. Hilary Stevens took a small sip of her drink, as if it were some dangerous kind of magic, and tasted it before she spoke. Then she said gently, “ ‘Whom I desired above all things to know. Sister of the mirage and echo!’ … the Muse, young man, is she!”

  “So Graves tell us,” he answered.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Stevens now took a long swallow and set her glass down rather decisively. “That is the problem, you see. ‘Sister of the mirage and echo,’ ” she repeated, emphasizing the two final nouns. “It is very exact that phrase; it is prescient.”

  Jenny looked troubled, and the old hawk caught the look. “You don’t agree, Miss Hare?”

  “I don’t know,” Jenny answered, afraid. “I don’t quite understand.

  “No doubt the problem is different for you.”

  “I want to believe that a woman writer must be a whole woman,” Jenny said passionately out of her painful sparring with Peter, “and from what you said earlier, what you said about the great women writers never trying to be men.…”

  “Quite. Hoist with my own petard, eh?” She nodded two or three times half-mockingly. “Well, that’s the problem, you see—that’s it!”

  “Must the Muse be incarnate?” Peter asked. “Or is it just a symbol for inspiration itself?”

  “Ah, but what is inspiration then? Where does it spring from?” She shrugged her shoulders. “Out of the air?”

  “You tell,” Peter said quietly. “You know.”

  “Only for myself,” the answer shot back. “Only for myself. Not as a universal rule,” and she gave her light laugh. “Miss Hare may be relieved to hear!”

  “Is it wrong?” Jenny asked. “You see, I want to be married and have children.”

  “Yes.…” F. Hilary Stevens gave a long sigh. “Yes.…” Then as if she wanted deliberately to break the current of thought, she turned toward the Venetian mirror, “J
ust look at the light on the daffodils! This is the moment. I placed them there to catch the slanting rays, do you see?”

  And to Jenny it was as if she had answered, no man would have done that. Indeed, the setting sun, falling in one long beam on the mirror and the flowers made a kind of explosion, and the two heads which had been bent so intently toward Mrs. Stevens, turned to look. Perhaps this is what the old magician had intended. She sat back in her chair and half closed her eyes. They barely caught her murmured, “There is something ludicrous about women writing these supplicating poems.”

  “Not Sappho surely!” Peter shot back.

  “That was different. Renouncement was implicit, a question of religious belief, what? After all,” she smiled half cynically, “all those lovely girls, so passionately addressed and so mourned, were being prepared for marriage!”

  “Have we been corrupted by Freud?” Peter asked, with an air of innocence.

  “Perhaps.… Yes, perhaps we have come to see sex as the devil where actually feeling is the god.”

  “But we are so terribly afraid of feeling,” Jenny uttered on the wave of assent.

  “Still,” Mrs. Stevens barely acknowledged the statement. “The problem remains. Why can’t there be a female Dylan Thomas, for instance? Can you answer me that?” She turned rather aggressively toward Peter.

  Catching the ball, he held it a moment in his hands. But it was Jenny who answered,

  “The Dionysian woman would be mad!”

  “You see?” F. Hilary Stevens laughed. “She knows!”

  “Oh,” Jenny said with a subdued glance at Peter, “I wish I did!”

  Mrs. Stevens let her penetrating eyes rest a moment on that young open face, narrowed them, and said, “Of course, it would be fatal if, at your age, you knew how it would come out, that delicate, difficult, perhaps even harrowing balance of art against life.… Life comes first, don’t you know? You would be a monster if it didn’t.”

  “By life you mean people, of course, personal relationships,” Peter asked.

  “Naturally.” She reached over and took a cigar from a box on the little table at her side. Peter rose to light it for her and accepted one himself when he had done so. After she had taken two or three quick puffs, with evident relish, she blew a perfect smoke ring. “There, I’ve done it! I can never make a perfect ring when I try for it,” and she looked as delighted as a child who watches a soap bubble float away, but as the smoke vanished into the air, she returned to the theme, “Odd that there has been no great religious woman poet …, that would have seemed to be one way out.”

  “Out?” Jenny asked.

  “Out of the dilemma of the personal, out of the dilemma of the Muse.” Once more they watched the inner dialogue being resumed. She closed her eyes and when she opened them said quite briskly, “But one does not write poems to the Ground of Being.”

  “And poems are written to someone?” Peter asked.

  “I think so.” Then she paused. “But you make me wonder with your simple questions which are not as simple as they look. Let me leave that question on the table for a moment. What about Theme and Variations? Overlooked by the critics, that book is something of a creation.” But she quickly withdrew. “Or is that wild statement the effect on an old lady of one strong drink?”

  “It’s a fine book,” Peter said warmly. “I liked it best of all, except for this last one.”

  “Did you? Did you really?” Her pleasure was delightful to see. It had brought a pink flush to her cheeks, so pale a few minutes before. “I mean, isn’t it absurd to care so much? To care really what anyone thinks except oneself and God.”

  “God?” Peter lifted his eyebrows.

  “Yes, God,” flashed back. “God as the ultimate arbiter of whether one has exploited a talent or served by means of it, the still small voice, don’t you know? Have you never heard it, Mr. Selversen? You are lucky!”

  “I’ve heard it,” he said, rubbing his head with one hand in a shamefaced gesture. “I’ve heard it now and then.”

  “Conquest or self-conquest, eh?” Hilary Stevens leaned back in the big chair and took a long puff on her cigar. “Self-conquest. In that third book of poems I began to learn something about it, how to transpose, how to be there inside the poem yet outside of it.” She looked quite fierce. “I knew the book was good. It was bitter to have it ignored. From then on I felt as if I had been buried alive and was trying to lift the tombstone over my head!” Before either of them could answer, the tone changed. “Ridiculous! It is just as well to have been forced to cut ambition out, to go it alone. I have no regrets on that score. Well, where were we?” she asked a shade anxiously. “You must stop me when I ramble on.…”

  “Would you like to come back to the craft itself for a moment?” Peter laid down his cigar and took up his pencil.

  “Yes, by all means.”

  “How did you come to remake yourself into the intricate forms you chose to use in that neglected book? To me, perhaps I am wrong, they suggest musical forms,” Peter ventured.

  “Yes, yes …,” she assented eagerly. “How perspicacious you are!”

  “And there was a gap of years between the sonnets and this new book. Can you explain why, what happened in the interval?”

  “I tore up a lot. It was a time of non-transparency toward life. I fumbled.” She came to rest, standing behind the wing chair, resting her elbows on its back, so she looked absurdly small, and more like an owl than ever. “Also I was worried …, the struggle to earn a living, don’t you know? It was the depression; you’re both too young to remember that!” And she came around the chair to sit down again, hands folded on her knee with a curiously dutiful air. “My father lost heavily at that time.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Poverty is all very well as long as one doesn’t starve; but total insecurity is bad for a writer, and at that time I was at a loose end. The wind at my back.”

  Jenny had the impression that all the above was off the top of Mrs. Stevens’ head as if she were tunneling through it toward what she really wanted to tell them. It now burst out in an abrupt sentence, which Peter at once jotted down.

  “Intensity commands form,” Mrs. Stevens said. “I had lost it. Then it came back.”

  “How?” Peter asked.

  “This is the question, isn’t it?” She smiled, “And Mr. Selversen’s pencil is poised, but I can’t possibly give you a simple answer!” She sat there, her hands placed fingertip to fingertip to make a Gothic arch, as if what she were about to utter must be felt out as well as thought out. “Well, it’s a conjunction …, or if you like, one becomes an intersection. Someone lent me a house in Vermont for two months; the landscape after those hard years in New York did something to me. I felt at home there. Odd, isn’t it?” and she laughed her light laugh. “How one does not escape one’s roots. All those years abroad. Then a few bare pastures, a rather locked, lonely landscape all told, poor country at best, moved me.” She paused. “Also there was time. I had space and I had time. Someone sent me Traheme whom I had not known; I discovered Herbert that summer. And,” she dropped her hands to her lap and looked off at the sea, “the Muse reappeared after a long absence.”

  “The mirage, the echo?” Jenny murmured.

  “Yes,” and Mrs. Stevens laughed the light laugh which always reappeared like a note in music in relation to this theme, as if there were cause here for a shade of shyness and of irony at her own expense. “The Muse is never wholly absent on such occasions. One must at least glimpse the hem of her garment, as she vanishes into her radiant air.”

  “Perhaps,” Peter said gently, “the time has come to be explicit. Until now the Muse has been very elusive indeed.”

  “You would have me pin down the mystery?” She laughed now teasingly, a crowing laugh. “But I can’t.… That’s just the point. The mystery cannot be pinned down!”

  “You could try,” Peter entreated. “A landscape that moved you, time, the discovery of two poets with whom you could identify, I presum
e, …”

  “Especially as a craftsman.”

  “And?” The question was heavily underlined.

  “The precipitating presence, I suppose.” Mrs. Stevens now looked unhappy, frozen where she had been so free and gay a moment before. “I don’t know really that I wish to be probed,” she said. But at once the dialogue was resumed, “I might try first in metaphysical terms.” She leaned back and closed her eyes. “Let me see.…” There was a considerable pause before they heard her thinking aloud. “It is in the gift of the Muse to polarize the poet, to transport him into a state of privileged perception.” She opened her eyes again, and spoke out to Peter directly, “Think of a mixture of properties in a chemical test tube: sometimes when two elements are mixed, they boil; there is tumult; heat is disengaged. So in the presence of the Muse, the sources of poetry boil; the faculty of language itself ferments. Does that say anything to you?”

  “In a word the poet becomes a lover?” Peter asked.

  Mrs. Stevens looked startled. “Well,” she granted, “yes, since poets live in the concrete, the Muse is incarnate. Yes,” and she smiled her most elusive smile, “and no, in the sense that this lover cannot live out the experience as it is usually understood, for what the precipitation makes, the new substance, is poetry, not love. They are not quite the same thing, are they?”

  “Yeats and Maud Gonne,” Jenny offered.

  “Exactly. Yeats married someone else. But the Muse was Maud Gonne.”

  “And there in Vermont, the Muse appeared as.…”

  Mrs. Stevens waited a second and then answered quite matter-of-factly as if she had come to a decision, “A great singer, Madeleine HiRose. You recognize the name, of course?”

  Peter and Jenny exchanged a look, and shook their heads.

  “No?” Hilary Stevens gave a deep sigh. Then, as if she were upset about something, she said drily, “Anyway Madeleine had taken a house nearby with her accompanist to prepare for a concert tour. Really,” she said quite crossly, “it is too odd that you do not know the name of HiRose. I find it hard to bear.” For the first time age had become a barrier.