Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

by May Sarton

“It might be easier to see if you weren’t so violent.”

  “I can’t help it, it’s my life. I’ve staked it all on one thing, writing a good poem, getting through!”

  “Well, you just said it yourself, you can’t take the gates of Heaven by storm!”

  When she was in this state, any opposition, any needling turned Hilary into a dangerous lunatic. Once she hurled half the rented china against the wall. More than once she rushed Dorothea as if they were wrestlers out to kill each other. And if the very violence relieved the tension for Hilary, every such scene froze something in Dorothea’s capacity for response, more especially if she had herself become angry as she sometimes did.

  “I too seem to be fighting for my life,” she said once. “And I won’t live in a relationship where I have to become an animal to survive!”

  If there had ever been true love it was turning rapidly into devastating, destructive rage. The summer ended in their mutual relief at going back to separate apartments in New York. It had been a costly indulgence in primary emotion.

  Would it have ended differently Hilary sometimes wondered at that time, if Dorothea had been a man? And just possibly it might have. But in all this the Muse vanished. The poems stopped. Hilary herself felt like a devastated city after a war. And in that mood she turned away from poetry and wrote her second novel, a novel about the depression years in New York which at the time caused a considerable stir—once more, as with her first, she was briefly in fashion—and left her feeling lost, high and dry. But at least its success taught her one thing: under Dorothea’s apparent sense of superiority, under her intellectual approach, there was (it now became clear) jealousy. Sooner or later, oh how those words of Willa’s “We are lepers. We are treated like lepers” came back with a vengeance—the creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the “creative” is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.

  Why had Dorothea had to needle her, over and over again, drive her toward those shameful rages, when a word of understanding, a word of admission would have brought her back to sanity?

  Sitting on her rock, suffering it all again like a single bolt of lightning that shot through her in a few seconds of acute perception, Hilary knew that she had been goaded because in spite of her failures as a writer and as a person, she still was a sacred animal, a kind of totem who must be destroyed for the world Dorothea represented to survive. I was the enemy, the anarchic, earth-shaking power. Oh, we threatened each other at the very source of our being! And very nearly killed each other. It had been too terrible.

  But here at the nub of acute pain and sorrow, Hilary lifted her head. Yes, it had been terrible, but we learn most about ourselves from the unacceptable, from the violent, from the mad one who weeps and roars in the subterranean caves: let this one out into the air and he brings the light with him, the light that has to be earned, the light of compassion for oneself, the strange mercy that follows upon any commitment of such depth when it is played out and so has to be faced.

  At the end we were each broken in half. The boy in me was dead. I had to go on as a woman. And Dorothea? She of the disciplined mind had to come to terms with the anarchic Aphrodite buried so deep in herself, who could not be brought to life except in agony. We were nearly dead; we each knew that this was a final relationship. There could be no other. But we had turned the Medusa face around and seen our selves. The long solitude ahead would be the richer for it.

  “Oh Dorothea!” Hilary murmured in love and mourning. Then she turned back into the big room.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, walking back into the circle of the chairs and the fire and the interviewers. “But a great deal has been happening. I have to sort things out. By now that must be clear to you.”

  She sat down, and clasped her hands tightly on her lap. “What I have to say is this. In a total work the failures have their not unimportant place. You felt the Dialogues as dry. Good God, man, they were wrung out of agony! But I see now that I was trying to use my mind, a big mistake,” and suddenly she laughed. “That sounds absurd. I was trying to buckle myself down to hard truths. Perhaps it would have been better to run wailing down the streets of New York, to let the furies out instead of trying to contain them. I got split up, and those poems were the means of trying to knit myself together again. Oh well.” And she shrugged. “That book doesn’t matter. What I became as a woman and a writer after it, does matter, does seem relevant. Did you think the novel a failure,” she turned to Peter, a shade anxiously, “by the way?”

  Peter hesitated. He was afraid of breaking the thread. Then shook himself in a queer way he had when he was thinking. “It’s good,” he said. “You did what you wanted to do. But I think what comes through is your generosity of mind rather than its intensity. One is aware of the effort to do what needed to be done at that time.”

  “Yes …,” Mrs. Stevens frowned. “I expect so.” She turned to Jenny, “Oh well, after all, Miss Hare, we agree I hope that neither the novel or the poem of ideas is woman’s work.”

  “Simone de Beauvoir—Mary McCarthy,” Jenny offered. “Sarraute?”

  “Precisely.” She paused, hesitated, then closed her eyes.

  “Oh please say more,” Jenny begged. “It will be off the record!”

  “My opinion about these writers can have no interest. I never pretended to be a critic.”

  “What is woman’s work, then?” Jenny asked, abashed.

  “Let’s explore, shall we?” Mrs. Stevens lit a cigarette and puffed at it thoughtfully. The question was light enough, yet Jenny and Peter both sensed that in the last few minutes, and since Mrs. Stevens’ return from the garden, the atmosphere had changed, as if they had all been through a dark tunnel and emerged; they were being included now. And if Peter glanced surreptitiously at his watch, it was because he so feared that there would be no time to reach these further ranges as they opened up. “It is a question which concerned me very much in those years of the novel and the dialogues. I had come through a lot of living toward some conclusions about just this. I was enormously open to what might happen next, to what I might find in me, ripe and ready to be harvested, so to speak. Woman’s work?” She half shut her eyes, and she was smiling. “Never to categorize, never to separate one thing from another—intellect, the senses, the imagination, … some total gathering together where the most realistic and the most mystical can be joined in a celebration of life itself. Woman’s work is always toward wholeness. Oh dear, that does sound vague!”

  “Not at all,” Peter answered quickly. He felt very tenderly toward her at this moment, and perhaps she caught the tenderness for she now turned toward him with great naturalness.

  “I have to place it somehow in relation to men. You see, I have come to understand a great deal through my friendships with men; there, I have been, it seems to me, extraordinarily lucky. I am thinking now of one man who taught me a great deal,” she gave Peter a mischievous smile, “at just this time when I was, so late in life, casting off my boy’s clothes, emerging from a long adolescence, emerging too from a crucial and devastating encounter with the Muse. All part of the same thing, don’t you know?” She stopped a second to gather in a thought. “The problem for an American woman with any real power seems to be that we are all haunted by Thurber’s cartoon of the huge threatening and devouring emanation over the house … and, alas, it comes too close to the American man’s fear of women. Do you agree?”

  “They are to be stuffed if possible on top of the bookcase?” Peter laughed.

  “Well, you know what I mean.… Powerful women may be driven to seek the masculine in each other. The men have been frightened off.”

  “Your man was not afraid, I take it?” Peter asked.

  “Oh!” She laughed, “He loved women. He understood them. Besides, he was French.” She lingered on the thought before she went on
, then said, looking up, “You know, in those years before the war and during the depression, France became a kind of nurse. We all found our way there—Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Fitzgerald, Mac-Leish—because we needed nursing, because we were starved for that deep rich loam. It was not so much escape, perhaps, as finding. Yes,” she repeated, nodding her head, “finding. You are aware, I presume, that I am about to speak to the point of Country Spells?”

  “The jump back to your own real voice after the Dialogues,” Peter affirmed.

  “Yes. I had been waiting, I suppose, for an epiphany.” Once more she half closed her eyes and leaned back in the big chair, as if she were talking to herself, “Sometimes I imagine life itself as merely a long preparation and waiting, a long darkness of growth toward these adventures of the spirit, a picaresque novel, so to speak, in which the episodes are all inward.”

  This time Peter pounced as she was about to escape into one of her absences. “This time say it aloud.”

  “Shall I?” She added, “Do I dare?” And finally, “Is that possible?”

  “Why not? Again as in Vermont, one senses that place as well as person was instrumental.”

  Mrs. Stevens leaned forward, clasping her hands in the effort to evoke precisely. “It was a village in the Touraine, high up among the vineyards. It was an empty house lent me by friends. The extraordinary presence who had in habited it had recently died; I can understand why her family, for a time, decided to lend it rather than dispose of it, for the house had an intimacy, an atmosphere about it so personal, so dyed with its former owner’s presence, that it would have seemed like disposing of a living human being. For me, I can tell you, it was a godsend. I came to it, to the silence, to the solitude there, like a sailor who has been buffeted by high seas, who has come back from a long fruitless journey to lie down under a tree, to feel the earth under his ribs again.”

  “Like Antaeus,” Peter murmured. “You had to be grounded.”

  But now Hilary Stevens had taken flight, she did not pause to acknowledge him. “I was, I think, only really aware of the aridity of those years in New York when I got away from the city. Women do not thrive in cities. It was wonderful to make contact again with the fundamental business of living, with the vignerons for whom the weather was of paramount importance, a constant subject of anxiety and of discourse, those solid citizens who were still tied to ancient lore. You know,” she said to Peter directly, “they will not bottle the wine out of the casks when there is a full moon.” And to Jenny she said, “We could talk, you see, about primary matters, the death of a canary or a little dog with a broken leg.” Then she was silent for a moment before adding, “I must admit that I was starved, too, for what Luc Bernstein brought me.” She lifted her head to ask, “You do know who he was?”

  Jenny looked disconcerted.

  “Vaguely,” Peter answered. “One of those French critics—they really do not exist in Anglo-Saxon countries—for whom criticism becomes a mystique, who seem to be examining themselves as well as the subject. Someone a little like Charles du Bos. Am I right?”

  “I can see that this is not your kind of critic, but you do have the right man.”

  “I guess we are afraid of this personal kind of criticism. It seems suspect.”

  “You have to clothe your personal idiosyncrasy in some sort of Olympian pseudo detachment?”

  Peter laughed. “That puts me in my place all right.”

  “I only meant that criticism seems to me always personal, however disguised in abstract lingo. Never mind,” F. Hilary Stevens said, brushing away the digression. “The point was the man himself, a vision of life, don’t you know? A way he had of forcing me to confront myself again, to confront the essential problems.”

  “Such as?” Peter asked, taking out his pencil.

  “Wait! Let me first try to evoke him for you. You are so impatient for The Word, Mr. Selversen, but The Word is always incarnate!” She hesitated after this dogmatic statement, gave him a quizzical look, and added, “or are we once more split upon the feminine versus the masculine point of view?” She did not wait for an answer. “Bernstein was old in 1936 (he is dead now like everyone else) but such vitality! He used to walk over from his house three or four miles away across the vineyards, a pipe in his mouth, a rabbit, cleaned and ready to cook for our supper, in his knapsack. He looked like a peasant in the workman’s corduroys he always wore, a soft gray moustache and very black bright eyes flashing out from under an old straw hat. Do I make him clear?”

  “Go on,” Peter said gently.

  “The point is that he was radically himself, fierce about any pretensions one might have: he teased me first about living in such a grand house. The huge forged-iron grilled gate and the high wall around it did give it an air, but actually the house was quite small, a hunting lodge built by someone or other in the eighteenth century, perhaps to house a mistress and thus serve two purposes, for it had a distinctly feminine atmosphere. Luc had loved Anne, the former owner, but of course she was not a poet, and he thought poets should never be rich.” She laughed. “He suspected me of that crime, but I soon set him right!”

  “You were not rich?” Peter asked with a twinkle.

  “Hardly. I had scraped together enough to manage on for a few months, no more.” She stopped and suddenly scrutinized Peter as if his question had echoed. “After my father died I did inherit—I sense that you are on the scent—but we lost heavily in the depression. I have never been rich, thank God!” Suddenly she laughed and explained, “That’s just the sort of question Luc used to ask me. For a second you reminded me of him, those penetrating eyes!” She half closed hers for a second. “You know, I am not exactly religious, but I believe in fate.”

  “Because fate has been kind?” Peter asked.

  “No,” she shot back, “after all, at that time, I was in eclipse as a poet. I was full of rage and hatred. The critics had gone overboard for crude propaganda, as if the so-called literature of protest did not need to be literature at all. On the other hand, those of us who had tried to live out the protest rather than writing about it, were already being accused of being ‘prematurely anti-fascist’ as reaction set in. It was altogether a nasty time. Never mind,” she pulled herself up short. “Let’s get back to Luc. You see, I believe we are on earth to make contact, to influence each other, to experience, if you will. People like to believe they are self-made. They are often afraid to admit the influences, either in reality—and then they close the door on experience—or if they are writers of literature itself. I have always been open to influence.”

  “Most people are afraid,” Jenny murmured. “I wonder why.”

  “There’s no standing still. Life at best is terrifying, don’t you agree? One either keeps on growing and changing (and that is painful) or one begins to fossilize, take your choice! When I met Luc Bernstein I was, I now see, poisoned by frustrated ambition, the ignoble kind. I was already being dropped out of the anthologies. I felt I had ceased to exist!” Even now they caught the echo of a scream in the way this was spoken. “In Luc I was confronted with someone as violent, as intransigeant as I am myself. I met my equal in intensity. What a relief! Perhaps he loved me just because I had become so impossible, wild, with all my hackles raised, don’t you know? And because he loved me, he attacked. He answered my complaints with that scornful laugh of his, ‘and you care what that canaille, bought and sold every day in the market of fashion, you care what they think!’ ”

  “Strange,” Peter said, “that there is nothing of the ‘poison’ in the poems. The poems are not angry.”

  “Oh, I hadn’t written a real poem for a year when I met Luc. I was high and dry, beached.”

  “What do you do when you are beached?” Jenny asked.

  “Well, I don’t lecture or teach, which is what a lot of poets do!”

  “Why don’t you?” Peter asked. “Is it such a bad solution?”

  “I haven’t been exactly sought out these last years,” she said cros
sly. “You forget what a dodo you have come to interview!” Then she leaned back and picked up the familiar dialogue. “Am I being honest with you? The fact is that I have lived with the belief that power, any kind of power, was the one thing forbidden to poets.”

  “Why?” Jenny asked.

  “It’s the end of personal freedom, for one thing, and the poet must be free to love or hate as the spirit moves him, free to change, free to be a chameleon, free to be an enfant terrible. He must above all never worry about his effect on other people. Power requires that one do just that all the time. Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked. No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people; a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what?”

  “It has been done, I suppose,” Peter mused.

  “Well, of course nakedness can become exhibitionism on the platform,” Hilary answered tartly. “I don’t see myself as a strip-teaser,” and she gave a kind of grim hoot. “But to go back to where we were before this digression, what I do when I am in a dry period is to write imitation poems, exercises.…”

  “But isn’t that dangerous?” Peter asked.

  “Of course. It’s better than taking to drink, that’s all. Luc helped me see that it was high time I burned a lot of stuff I had been carrying around like an albatross round my neck. He had an unerring eye for the false impulse, for the willed poem, don’t you know?”

  “It’s wonderfully consoling,” Jenny murmured.

  “Consoling?” Hilary was suddenly cross. “After I burned the lot, I was ill for days.”

  “I meant that it is consoling that even you have occasionally hated your own work and burned it!”

  The old woman stopped and turned quite gently toward the young woman, “There is so much failure one has to stomach, isn’t there? Nausea. Doubt. Anxiety …, always and forever anxiety of the most acute kind. How do we manage? I don’t know. But the thing about Luc was that I could play it all out against him, with him. We had fierce quarrels, of course, and then a few days later rushed into each other’s arms.” Suddenly she laughed a merry free laugh. “Oh what a relief it was for me!” She paused, nodded her head as if she were answering a question she had herself asked and said, “Women have moved and shaken me, but I have been nourished by men.”