Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (17 page)

“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, “Just 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 presume, …”

“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.

Peter took the initiative, “Sometimes you are like the Lochness monster, Mrs. Stevens. Now one sees you, now one doesn’t. You have a way of disappearing.… Come back! Please do.”

But the crossness was still there, as she turned on him, snatching at one word, “Oh, we are all monsters, if it comes to that, we women who have chosen to be something more and something less than women!” Then she turned to Jenny and softened, “Miss Hare of course, does not agree!”

“Why shouldn’t being a writer make one more human rather than less so?” Jenny too felt a little cross. The question had been aggressive; the answer was sharp.

“My dear child, one is nourishing a talent, expensive, demanding baby! Human? What does human mean? Having time and the wish to care intensely about someone else? This is what women will do, willy nilly, and what then?”

“But, but …,” Jenny persisted out of her own misery, “you seem to be saying yourself that you can’t write without love!”

“Love as the waker of the dead, love as conflict, love as the mirage. Not love as peace or fulfillment, or lasting, faithful giving.” Hilary gave a strange little sigh. “No, that fidelity, that giving is what the art demands, the art itself, at the expense of every human being.” The tone was edged with bitterness, but she added ironically, “Fortunately Madeleine was a sacred animal; she could not be hurt, but what a source … what genius she had! And to think you two have never heard that voice, so haunting, so exact!” She seemed to go off on a revery of her own, but suddenly brought herself back to reality with a laugh. “An impossible person, but when she sang she became a different animal. She had an impeccable sense of the exact weight of the smallest word and tone. She could sing a whisper. She could place a shade of meaning on a phrase which made shivers of realization run down one’s back.” She turned to Jenny suddenly with great intensity. “How do you explain it? The rarity of the artist, the ordinary sensual being that genius was housed in. Even I, even now, cannot bear to admit how awful she really was!” Then she resumed the dialogue. “But that voice …, a fountain of life.…
‘Mon enfant, ma soeur, songe à la douceur/ D’aller là-bas vivre ensemble/ Aimer à loisir/ Aimer et mourir/ au pays qui te ressemble,’ ”
Hilary recited, leaning back in her chair, her voice gentled and her eyes closed. When she opened them, she turned to Peter, “What I was after in that book was a poetic equivalent to certain musical phrases, so the villanelle, for instance, with its echos and variations, or the sestina, or even the ode with its long ebbing lines, became appropriate.” And to Jenny, “I learned a great deal from Madeleine as a musician, but why is it that women writers cannot deal with sex and get away with it?”

They were taken by surprise; neither could answer.

“Colette, of course, but she is untranslatable into English. How do it in our obtuse language? The language of sex is masculine. Women would have to invent a new language.…”

“Did you try?”

“Yes.” Pause. “Yes, I did. Thank goodness, I had the sense to tear those poems up.” She looked mischievous, delighted with herself. “So Madeleine, though her voice haunts that book, never actually makes an appearance. I had learned. That was a good book,” she added. “I’m glad you think so, Mr. Selversen. As for the Muse,” she took another sip of her drink and rested there a moment, “eventually her visitations must be paid for in human terms. And one pays, … one is glad to pay.”