Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (20 page)

“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 crossly. “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.”

“Yet the Muse is she,” Peter reminded her.

“Oh yes, even there, even then.…”

“Don’t think it, say it!” Peter implored, afraid she would disappear again.

“I’ll try.” Again she leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. “It’s harder this time because it was all so intangible.… I had felt the presence in the house every time I came in again to the dark and the cool after the blazing light. I felt Anne’s presence so strongly that it was as if she were there all the time, locked like the small grand piano in the
salon
. Luc told me how she used to sing, not a professional, but there was some quality in her voice that made people weep, ‘fresh and passionate,’ he said, like the voice of a young girl. One day I felt I had to open the piano and make it sound.… I played a few notes at random, then closed it again. I had all the time the sense that in that house music was just on the threshold, until I came to see that the silence itself was the music.”

“And then?” Jenny asked.

“Then I began to listen to the silence. Almost without my knowing it, my arid soliloquies, those imitation poems, were opening into dialogue.” Suddenly she sat up very straight and clasped her hands tightly almost as if she had made a tangible catch. “It’s
that!
When the Muse comes back, the dialogue begins …, that is what is meant by fertilization. How extraordinary that I never caught onto this obvious fact until now!”

“Go on about dialogue,” Peter said.

“It’s quite simple. One begins to talk
to
someone,
about
oneself. Each time one’s whole life seems to be. in play.”

“Yes, but …,” Jenny hesitated. “Dialogue means an exchange surely. I don’t quite see—.”

“Oh, the Muse never answers, that’s sure, probably hates Poetry, I’ve decided in the last five minutes. The Muse opens up the dialogue with oneself and goes her way. The poems of supplication are not the good ones. Do you remember?” Mrs. Stevens asked, revolving her empty glass in her hand, “that some English divine once remarked that it was a mistake to suppose that God is chiefly concerned with religion?” She gathered their delighted smiles and pounced, “So why should the Muse be concerned with poetry? She goes her way.…”

“So that silent voice in the house in France, the Muse who couldn’t be approached in the flesh, was the perfect Muse?” Peter asked. “What was it about her?”

“Hard to pin down even now. Let me begin with the house itself. It was tangible enough. It had an atmosphere!”

“What kind of atmosphere?”

“Cool and passionate,” came the instant response. “Like a note in music, it seemed to me an absolute. In the first place it was rather formal, long French windows downstairs, a few carefully chosen pieces of furniture, which managed to be both elegant and rural. Waxed, octagonal-tiled floors. There was always, as I remember, that sweet smell of wax and burned vine roots. When the evening chill came on, the custom of the house, I was told, was to start the fire with a bundle of dried vine twigs. That made a great blaze; then, when it was really going strong, one put on one or two gnarled old roots or small hard logs. There were several old mirrors in strategic places; they did not reflect oneself so much as the atmosphere, as if seen through water. When the light was fading through the branches of the fir trees outside, there was a moment of rather terrifying poignance. The purity of it all made me feel dreadfully lonely then. There is a difference between solitude and loneliness, as I need not tell you, and people who live alone come to know them both intimately.”

“Yes,” Peter said, “but do define them each, if you can?”

“Well,” Mrs. Stevens clasped her hands together. “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self. Will that do?”

“Thank you,” Peter said, and quickly made a note on his pad.

“Without Luc’s visits it might all have been impossible: together he and Anne challenged me, and in almost the same way, curiously enough. For him she had become, I sensed, a legend, a modern incarnation of the Lady with the Unicorn in the tapestry. She fitted in with his absolute ideas, was capable like him of living in an absolute world, and had bought the house to be near her own deep sources of feeling.” Hilary paused to light a cigarette, seemed about to go on, then censored herself. “I am not going to tell you her story. Even now, after all these years, I feel that telling it would be a betrayal. Suffice it to say,” she went on with crisp matter-of-factness, “that together Luc and Anne’s presence showed up my own chequered life in a pitiless light. Luc hated the complexity, the multiplicity, the ambivalence in me; so I was surrounded in every way by simplifying and unifying powers.”

“I begin to see what the word ‘Spells’ in your title means,” Jenny said.

“Yes, I forgot to say that when the dialogue with the Muse is set up, its tangible effect is that lines begin to run through one’s head, without the slightest volition on one’s own part. Poetry was there when I began to go out for long walks among the vineyards, closed the iron gates behind me, and left the intense, silent enclosure to walk out into the open world, the mysterious, gnarled, ordered world of the vines, row on row, high up on the windy plain, in the distance a few cypresses making their sharp exclamation points against a church tower.”

“All this you capture in the poems,” Peter said, “yet under them, under the austerity and order, as you put it, I feel a kind of anguish, or tension. One is very much aware that for you the landscape is symbolic. The way the Loire comes back, for instance, the presence of the river.…”

Jenny was moved by how closely, how sensitively the young man at her side could participate, so that now when he asked a question, it was almost as if Hilary were asking it of herself, and she answered on the same current.

“I couldn’t see the river from the house, but it was always there as a presence like Anne herself. Symbolic?” She raised an eyebrow. “Perfectly real. Itself. Herself. But,” she granted, “you’re right. There was a tension like anguish. Every visitation of the Muse is disturbing. And here it seemed as if I were being cross-examined, pinned down in a pitiless light.”

“Pitiless? All the images you use are gentle ones—a woman seen at dusk in a lighted farmhouse, cutting a loaf of bread across her breast,—that is one I remember.”

“Exactly! All these images of rooted human life attacked mine! Anne with her long, faithful, hopeless love, her one love; Luc and his absolute values; a woman cutting a loaf of bread—. Oh,” she said with vehemence, “don’t you see how they affected me? By their light I had to examine and come to terms once more with my own life. I have not concealed from you—how could I?—that it has been chequered, a life of many encounters, riches, poverty, already fertilized by many people, many landscapes. In the presence of so much wholeness and purity I felt deeply challenged. I had to set something against it. I had to come through to my own source, to my own reality. It was a struggle.”

“What did you set against ‘wholeness and purity’?” Peter asked. “What do you mean when you say ‘my own source’?”

“Oh dear,” Mrs. Stevens passed a hand over her forehead, and sighed. “May I let that question pass? I did not sleep in Anne’s room, but at that time I used sometimes, before I went to bed, to push open the door and stand for a long time at her window. Swallows made lightning arcs through the air; there was a smell of roses. The evening light over the spacious land. And when I turned away in almost total darkness the great carved bed with its air of desolation affected me like the presence of a huge, haunting dead animal or spirit …, never evil and never frightening, only powerful. Oh, I was under a spell, you are right there!” And before they could speak, she went on, “Without Luc, the whole experience might have been too strange, too unreal.”

“Did you feel this presence as a question?” Jenny asked.

“Of course. The Muse is always a question—that’s what sets up the dialogue.” Now once more for a few seconds F. Hilary Stevens closed her eyes, “And one always imagines that the question might be answered some other way, but it can only be answered through writing poems. The dialogue is not with the Muse, but with oneself.” She opened her eyes. “Once I remember saying to Luc, ‘Anne wouldn’t have liked me. I would have shocked her.’ ”

“And what did Luc say?” Peter asked.

The answer was that light, self-revealing laugh, “Oh he was kind. He knew a little of the self-disgust I had been suffering. After all, he needled me pretty relentlessly himself. He said it would have been interesting to see us together, the eagle and the dove!” She gathered up the answering smiles. “‘Conflict,’ he said, ‘is your element—what would you do with peace of mind?’ He. was very well aware, that wise creature, that the Muse destroys as well as gives life, does not nourish, pierces, forces one to discard, renew, be born again. Joy and agony are pivoted in her presence.” Then for the first time in nearly an hour Mrs. Stevens got up and began her prowling to the French windows and back, stopped a moment to pick up a Japanese carved ivory mouse and turn it in her hand absent-mindedly.

When she came back to her chair, she leaned over the back of it a moment before sitting down again. “I suppose what I really understood that summer was that it was time I stopped borrowing other people’s houses, other people’s lives, and made my peace with myself in a house of my own creation: this house is the daughter of that house in the Touraine, you see.” She came back to the interviewers, sat down, clasping her hands in the now familiar gesture, and looked into the fire.