Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (18 page)

“Did Colette pay?” Jenny asked.

“Well, I should think so!” Then the dialogue was resumed. “But she was not trapped by her senses. Most women are. There she showed the masculine side of her genius. She regarded herself, I have sometimes imagined, as an instrument for recording sensation, the taste of a Seville orange in contrast to a Sicilian one, the feel of a peach in her hand, so when it came to the big things, she may have suffered, but she kept her detachment—and then she was a pagan, of course, a natural being. Ah!” There was ovation in the way Mrs. Stevens lifted both hands, palms open, on the exclamation.

“It’s clear that you identify with this,” Peter said.

“Well, I don’t know.” The hands returned to their thinking position, the tips of the fingers just touching each other, as she leaned her chin on the peak of the arch. “No one brought up in Boston is a pagan,” and she smiled, “however much one might wish to be. But there’s no doubt that I have always regarded myself as an instrument. That’s the point about the Muse isn’t it? The moment she enters the scene one becomes the instrument of powers which one does not altogether control.”

“So that changes of style are, in a sense, life changes. Is that what you are getting at, do you think?” Peter had glanced at his notes and now lifted his head. “It is such an enormous leap, for instance, from those musically inspired poems in
Theme and Variations
, so sensuously rich, if I may say so, to the book of
Dialogues
which followed five years later, argumentative, passionate,” he hesitated, “and perhaps a little dry.”

“Damn it!” Mrs. Stevens looked nettled, “I was tired of being so sensitive and feminine! Besides, you forget the state of the world. It was the depression. I was involved, of course. How could one be alive in New York then and not be involved? For a brief time the intellectuals and the political Left came together in a rich ferment. It was rather wonderful while it lasted. One felt responsible.” She threw back her head and gave a short bitter laugh. “Things have changed since then.” And she added, still in that irritable tone as if, Jenny thought, she were holding something at bay, “My encounter with the Muse was a very hard one, very painful.” She seemed about to disappear, but roused herself by an effort of will. “I suppose …, really you will think I am mad, and perhaps I am.… I suppose I learned through it, and I was not young, remember, that I had to come to terms with the woman in me. A grotesque admission,” she said with a short laugh, getting to her feet once more, compelled to walk up and down, clasping her hands together, rubbing them together as if they held a rock between them, as if she were in physical contact with a hard substance.

“Yet the poems are, as you said, rather tough and in a quite different tone of voice to anything you had done or have written since,” Peter murmured.

“A watershed,” said Hilary Stevens.

Jenny and Peter exchanged a look. She was going to submerge again, clearly.

“There was so much anger, that is what was terrible. Everyone of the poems in that book had to be fought through out of violence, rage. I was sick with it.” She shook her head as if she were shaking off leaves or thick fog, and it occurred to Jenny that she had never in her life seen a person in whom thought became such a total process; thinking for this woman was a physical involvement. It added to one’s sense that she moved always surrounded by invisible presences. Things unseen were as powerful in her ambiance as anything visible. It made her words about becoming the instrument of powers which one does not control believable, authentic.

What, for instance, now possessed her with such force? She had picked up a small object on the table and set it down hard. “It was a fight for being, my own being.”

“Against what?”

“Do I know? Can I tell you?” She wandered around the big table, shifting a book here, a box there with restless uncertitude. “Give me a moment,” she whispered. “Give me time.”

And before they knew it she had stepped out through the French doors. She had vanished into the blaze. The sun, getting lower in the sky, struck the water and sent back this shimmer of reflected light.

Peter stooped down to take the
Dialogues
out of his briefcase, and leafed through it. “I don’t get it this time,” he said to Jenny. “I don’t know what she’s talking about. It’s a queer cold book.”

“It’s someone else’s voice—that’s what I felt. It’s all a huge effort.”

But even with Hilary Stevens out of the room altogether, the silence was charged enough to impose itself. And they whispered.

“It’s amazing,” Jenny said, “how aware one is of what is not uttered. I feel it a great strain. I feel I am listening all the time to something way below—unspoken—I had no idea it would be like this.”

“It is altogether out of our hands now. We are witnesses.”

“Has it been like this before?”

“Most writers don’t live so near the surface, have more defences. She’s an odd one. Terribly endearing, I find.”

“A little frightening,
I
find. There’s so much tension. How does she manage?”

Hilary felt huge relief at having got away. She sat down on a stone, letting all that she had held back in their presence flow through her, not trying to control it any more, to be in command. After all, they were used to these absences, by now.

She was forty-five again. How young it looked from here, how old it had felt at the time! She was once more in the presence of the Muse, the crucial one, the Medusa who had made her understand that if you turn Medusa’s face around, it is your own face. It is yourself who must be conquered.

“Dorothea,” she murmured And Dorothea was there, conjured up to stand before her in all her cool antagonism and charm. Ten years older than Hilary, at the height of her powers, cynical, passionate, realistic. The anti-mystic by nature and by profession, for Dorothea was a sociologist. The attraction had been immediate, the attraction of opposites. The war had been immediate too.

“How can you turn people into numbers? What truth is there in statistics? How inhuman can you get?”

“You’re so incredibly personal. Can’t you ever get out of yourself? Must everything come back to
you?
”

They had plunged into argument the day they met at a cocktail party. Hilary remembered how the room had emptied finally and she and Dorothea were still at it, having driven the other guests away with their concentrated violence. I’ve met my match, Hilary thought, lying awake that night, and I have to understand her. But what she had meant was, of course, I have to justify myself to her. I have to be taken in to this utterly foreign world. I have to be accepted by it. Why? God knows why. She still did not know. All she knew was that she was in the presence of power equal to her own, but in a different universe. And at first she had felt relief. At last she had someone hard enough so that the truth could be battered out between them, inch by inch, no holds barred.

Dorothea was beautiful, casqued in white hair drawn straight back into a knot at the nape of her neck, steel-gray eyes, under fine dark eyebrows, an air of composure, an air of reason which she had fitted over a passionate temperament like a suit of armor. In her outward appearance there was nothing masculine, but the mind was masculine, and the mind towered.

“I’m through with personal relations,” she told Hilary the second time they met, for dinner, a week after that cocktail party. “For me, they seem not to work. I have a son. I married the wrong man, and that is that.”

“What nourishes you?” Hilary had asked.

“Music, poetry. I work hard and need to be alone when I come back from the office. My students exhaust me.” She smiled her rare elusive smile. “I feel I’ve done my duty by life when I come home after a day of conferences. You’ve never taught?”

“One, I’m uneducated. Two, it would be a temptation.…”

“In what way?”

“Oh, a sort of power, I suppose. Also the quick response—the sense of being immediately useful. You must realize, Dorothea, that a poet
never
feels useful.”

“Why would it be bad if you did?”

“It would be too easy.”

“I’ve read your poems,” Dorothea said then. “There’s something wrong with them.”

“You mean you’ve tabulated them out, put them through the machine, counted the words, and come to this conclusion?” Every hair on her head might as well have been standing on end. But because the person who has created something is always vulnerable, Hilary forced herself to listen. Perhaps this formidable creature sitting opposite her was right. But always the moment would come when all the withheld tension and anger exploded, and she hurled back her defence, or, in her turn, attacked Dorothea for an approach to art which remained in Hilary’s view, always just beside the point, just outside the true center.

“The trouble with you scientists is that you really begin to imagine you can reach all the answers by a method, some sort of trick, without participating, without being willing to be changed. How can you approach a work of art in that arrogant a spirit?”

It was really at first as if they were plunging into a huge exhilarating ocean, as if the very difference in their vision of life gave an enhancing excitement to their meetings. Up to the moment when the anger in Hilary became frightening, frightening to herself, a jinni let out of a bottle, towering there in the room with a real sword in his hands.

“What is the matter with you, Hilary? You’ve gone mad,” Dorothea suddenly asked in a dead cold voice.

“The matter is that I want to kill you because you are the enemy. The matter is that I’m in love, damn it!”

“A strange sort of love, it must be.”

But whatever it was, the poems began to pour out. Hilary walking down Fifth Avenue on the way to her job, would be pursued by poems, lines running through her head, lines of dialogue. Day and night, it seemed, she was struggling like a little bull against a wall, and the wall was Dorothea. Well, she thought, I have met my match.

“I felt so dusty before you came,” Dorothea used to say. “I really thought I could never be like this again. I feel ten years younger, almost as young as you, if you must know.” For she often teased Hilary about the difference in their ages. So for a time, they were lifted up on the spring air, and when the endless argument became too fierce it could be resolved on another level. There was a secret joy when they walked down the street together (for at this time they often set out on long walks) to know that from the outside what people saw was two middle aged women, but inside they were wild children, wild with joy, feeling each of them that this (surely last and best) love affair was a great present from life, a source of renewed energy.

But there was never any peace, that was sure. And the battle became more and more exhausting. What was it really that was happening? What fierce flawed need in them both which flared up into anger, unappeased?

They spent a summer holiday near Ogunquit and for the first time lived together in the same house. Dorothea was the cook; Hilary washed dishes and was the driver and general factotum. There were long mornings of work, long afternoons of swimming and lying on the beach, far up in the dunes, away from the crowds. It should have been a time of healing the wounds. And so it began.

“I’m being born again,” Hilary felt. She remembered very well waking in the brilliant morning sunshine, watching a light bird on the ceiling, and thinking that she had never felt more womanly since the days of Adrian. Little by little in the months with Dorothea, Hilary had felt the boy in herself backing away, almost disappearing like an apparition, like a ghost who would not perhaps come back again, and the woman buried so long, taking possession.

It gave her immense pleasure to arrange flowers, to make curtains of a lovely soft yellow to replace the hideous ones in the rented cottage. Swimming about in the shallow water where it was sometimes not quite so icy cold, she imagined herself a seal, so sleek and plump and happy she felt. Let Dorothea advance into the harsh waves, dive into them, go flashing off with her strong crawl out into the deep waters where only her red cap could be seen, bobbing up. Hilary was content to stay close to home.

Unfortunately the summer was not entirely one of private lives. Earlier in the spring, Dorothea’s study of a mining town in Pennsylvania and of the effects of the shutdown over a period of years had been published. Rather unexpectedly, it was proving to be a great success, and not only in professional journals. She pretended to care less than nothing about a long review in the Sunday
Times
, or about a promised second edition in the fall. All this, she expounded, was quite irrelevant. The study was not intended for the common reader and she couldn’t care less. What did please her was the professional response.

Her attitude enraged Hilary, and Hilary was in a particularly sore state because the Vermont poems had also come out in the late spring, and had gone almost entirely unnoticed.

“I’m buried alive. I’m under a stone, trying to push myself out from under a stone, don’t you see?”

What mattered not at all to Dorothea was life and death to her.

“I want to be read by people, not poets. I want to be
heard!
”

Dorothea did try to be understanding, but if you try to put a poultice on a wounded bear you get scratched, and Hilary had had a wild hope that at last the critics would come to recognize her, not as a rather old-fashioned poet who had started writing eons ago and was still at it, but as someone worthy of discriminating praise in the present. She fought against the waves of depression, the sense of being annihilated, with fierce arrogance. Now more than ever Dorthea’s criticisms rankled …, and, alas, Dorothea’s success in her own field rankled too.

“You don’t know, you can’t imagine the difference!” Hilary shouted. “The risk I have to take is so much greater!” And later on “A book like yours can’t fail, if you’ve worked hard and honestly, don’t you see? We operate from different spheres. Will won’t help me. Intelligence won’t help me.”

“What will help you?” Dorothea asked in her ironic way. “A cold shower and a drink?”