Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (3 page)

Finally, Sarton and Mrs. Stevens are outsiders not least because, in this machismo age, violence and cruelty have offered them no satisfactions. Whatever Sarton has done, she has never imitated male writers, which may be what Hilary means when she says that women who have imitated men lack something. For to imitate men is not to want a place in the world, autonomy, a chance for self-creation, and the freedom to express anger and aggression. To imitate men is to remain enslaved to those standards men have declared eternal, and to deny one-self, because one is a woman, selfhood. Which is why, though Sarton, with the nostalgic eyes of the only child and the single adult, has looked upon marriage and family life less critically than she might, she has never limited the women of her creation to passivity, nor failed to be, long before the word passed into its current usage, liberated.

The reappearance of
Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing
is an important occasion, is, as Sarton has said in another connection, our “good luck in a dirty time.”

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

1
. At the meeting of the Modern Language Association in December 1973, a seminar was held on “The Art of May Sarton.” Ten papers were presented on many aspects of her work. They were by L. W. Anderson, Jane S. Bakerman, Fredrica Bartz, Melissa Cannon, Sigrid N. Fowler, Charles Frank, Susan Hauser, Kathleen Klein, Paula G. Putney, Henry Taylor. Dawn Holt Anderson, the discussion leader, has herself published an essay, “May Sarton’s Women,” in Susan Koppelman Cornillon, ed.,
Images of Women in Fiction
(Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, 1972), pp. 243–50. Agnes Sibley,
May Sarton
(New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972) is useful for chronology and biography.

2
. Noel Annan, “Love Story,”
New York Review of Books
, 21 October 1971, pp. 17–18.

3
. Oscar Wilde,
De Profundis
. Quoted in the Introduction by Jacques Barzun (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), p. xi.

4
. Joanna in
Joanna and Ulysses
is a painter, but this is one of those Sarton fictions which I prefer to call fables, as Sarton herself sometimes calls them. One would particularly like to recommend all four of them to those who interest themselves in books for youngsters; like the best books for young people, they were written for adults, are wise, and do not condescend or lie. There is nothing else produced in this line lately that is nearly so good as
Joanna and Ulysses, The Fur Person, The Poet and the Donkey
, and
Miss Pickthome and Mr. Hare
.

5
. Ruth Limmer, ed.,
What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan 1920–1970
(New York: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1973), p. 325.

6
. Louise Bogan,
A Poet’s Alphabet
, ed. Ruth Limmer and Robert Phelps (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), p. 64.

7
. W. H. Auden, “A Poet of the Actual,”
New Yorker
, 1 April 1972, p. 104. (Auden was reviewing a biography of Trollope.)

Part I: Hilary

Hilary Stevens half opened her eyes, then closed them again. There was some reason to dread this day, although she had taken in that the sun was shining. The soft green silk curtains pulled across the windows created an aqueous light and added to the illusion that she was swimming up into consciousness from deep water: she had had such dreams! Too many people … landscapes … fading in and out of each other.

“The thing is,” she told herself, “that I am badgered by something.”

Perhaps if she turned over it would go away.

Instead she was forced awake by the twice-repeated piercing notes of an oriole in the flowering plum just outside her windows. At the same moment the French clock cut through this spontaneous song with its rigid intervals. Six o’clock.

“Old thing, it’s high time you pulled yourself together!”

But the other party of the dialogue rebelled, wanted to stay comfortably in bed, wanted to ward off whatever was to be demanded, wanted to be left in peace. Lately Hilary had observed that she seemed to be two distinct entities, at war. There was a hortatory and impatient person who was irritated by her lethargic twin, that one who had to be prodded awake and commanded like a doddering servant and who was getting old, seventy as one counted years.

First things first. The mind must be summoned back, then one might manage to lift oneself out of bed. Hilary closed her eyes and set herself to cope with consciousness. But oh to slip back into that other world, where in her dreams she flew, covered immense distances with ease, and so often came to such beautiful understanding and peace with those ghosts who in reality had represented chiefly anguish. The past had been extraordinarily present all night …, she was preparing herself.

“For what?” the doddering servant wished to know.

“The interviewers, you old fool. They are coming this afternoon!”

This realization acted like a pail of water flung in her face, and Hilary found herself cold-awake, standing rather shakily, supporting herself with one hand on the night table. The room around her was in unusual disorder, open cardboard boxes of files standing about and, on the night table, photographs and old letters. Oh dear! She took refuge in the usual actions, those which began every day. She went first to the window and drew back the curtains. There in the distance, seen across granite boulders and an assortment of wild cherry and locust, lay the great quivering expanse of ocean, blue, blue to the slightly paler line at the horizon. There it was, the old sea, the restorer! Hilary drank it down in one swift glance, and then walked over to the bureau and, over the inexorable minute hand of the French clock, looked into her own eyes, shallow and pale in the morning light.

“God, you look awful,” she told herself. “Old crone, with hardly a wisp of hair left, and those dewlaps, and those wrinkles.” Merciless she was. But there was also the pleasure of recognition. In the mirror she recognized her
self
, her life companion, for better or worse. She looked at this self with compassion this morning, unmercifully prodded and driven as she had been for just under seventy years. The sense of who she was and what she meant about her own personage began to flow back as she ran a comb through the fine childlike hair, hardly gray, and brushed her teeth—her own, and those the dentists had had to provide over the years.

“Damn it!” she said aloud. It meant, in spite of it all, false teeth, falling hair, wrinkles, I am still myself. They haven’t got me yet.

They
, … the enemies. Who were “they” exactly, she asked herself while she put the kettle on, and admired the breakfast tray as she did each morning, resting her eyes on the red cocks painted on the white cup and saucer, the red linen cloth, the Quimper jam jar with a strawberry for a knob, rejoicing in order and beauty, as if she had not herself arranged it all the night before.

There were moments when Hilary saw life as tending always toward chaos, when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart. She gave orders to the doddering servant about all this, but the old thing was getting slow.…

Now, for instance, she had almost forgotten Sirenica in the cellar! Released, the white cat wound herself round Hilary’s legs and purred ecstatically, lifting first one paw and then another and stretching it out into the air, giving a single high-pitched mew when she heard the frigidaire door slam and saw her plate being lifted down.

“Who are ‘they,’ Sirenica?” Hilary asked aloud, but there was no time to make an answer, for it was necessary while the eggs boiled to put the two little turtles into warm water to wake them up; they looked up at her with eyes as cold as her own, then swam wildly about waiting for their disgusting breakfast of mealy worms. Hilary had bought them on an impulse in the five-and-ten. Their coldness was restful; and she delighted in their beauty, like animated pieces of jade. Also it had been rather comforting to read in a turtle book that they might live to be forty, that the absurd creatures would outlive her. Still, any life is in constant peril, and before she knew it, she had taken on another anxiety, worried when they did not eat for a day, found herself involved, trying to imagine what they might enjoy, an hour outdoors in the sun, or a little piece of fish for a change. She gazed down into the bowl intently, now, studying the delicate webbed feet and tiny tails, often kept wound in under the shell. She forgot about her toast. It was cold when she finally buttered it and took the tray upstairs.

Heaven, to get back into bed for this best hour of the day!—the hour when the door between sleep and waking, between conscious and unconscious, was still ajar and Hilary could consider the strange things that welled up through the night, could lie there looking out to sea, and feel energy flow back while she drank two or three strong cups of tea. With the first, she found herself observing Sirenica, who had jumped up on the bed (hoping no doubt there might be bacon this morning), and had settled down to wash her face. It was a long, intricate process; it began with the long rose-petal tongue lapping all around her mouth and chin, up and down and around, at least fifty times. When every taste of fish and every drop of oiliness had been savored, a washcloth paw lifted, to be licked in its turn, then rubbed back of the ears, round the nose, past the strong whiskers. Hilary watched it all as intently as a cat watches a bird: this was something she had never managed to “get down” in a satisfactory form, but she still had hopes.

With her second cup of tea the unfinished dialogue about “they” was resumed, and she lay back on the pillows ruminating. Of course “they” varied a good deal. At one time in her life, “they” had certainly been the critics. Even the accolade on her last book of poems had left a slightly sour taste. She could not help suspecting that it might be a consolation prize, given rather for endurance than achievement. Her distinguished contemporaries had been dying lately, one by one, so it was all very well to be praised for her vitality and intensity, but …, anyway Hilary felt it degrading even to consider the critics. “Old fool,
they
are your own demons,” she adjured herself, “the never-conquered demons with whom you carry on the struggle for survival against laziness, depression, guilt, and fatigue.” She had hit on the only possible answer to the question. It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful, and always, she had to admit, interesting. What sort of questions were those interviewers going to ask? It would be exhilarating to be set what Hilary called “real” questions … in fact she had agreed to this visitation because it appeared to be a challenge. Hopefully, she might be forced to confront certain things in her own life and in her work that seemed unresolved, and she was just about to consider these prickly matters when she heard a familiar whistle under the window.

“Drat the boy! What does he want?”

She nearly tipped the whole tray over getting out of bed, and of course Sirenica jumped down at once in a huff. Hilary threw an old Japanese kimono over her shoulders and went to the window, peering down into the strong sun-light. The boy teetered there on the stone wall, head bent, his whole figure betraying unease. She could guess, though she could not see it, that the face under the shock of tow hair, was frowning.

“What is it?” Hilary shouted. “It’s the day, you know. You might have let me have my breakfast in peace!”

“What day?”

“The day the interviewers are coming!”

“That’s not till four.” Now he looked straight up, and she saw something in that face she thought she knew by heart, something she had never seen before.

“Up all night, I suppose.” What was it? She asked herself, trying to probe the sullen shadowed eyes looking up at her.

“I’ve got to see you, Hilary. Just a half hour!”

“Oh all right, come back in an hour or so. Give me time to pull myself together.”

He was gone before she closed the window, off and away, while Hilary stood there wondering what sort of night he had spent? Curiously enough she sensed some affinity with her own night of troubled dreams after her long vigil raking up the past—the effect, at least, was the same, for Mar looked exactly as she felt, dissipated, ruffled, a seabird who has been battered by wind, whose wings are stuck with flotsam and jetsam, oil, tar, God knows what.

“Trapped by life,” Hilary muttered. She almost fell on one of the cardboard boxes. Oh dear, the morning which had begun rather well, all things considered, was already disintegrating into confusion. Back in bed, she leaned her head against the pillows so she could look at the appeasing ocean and forget all that stuff on the floor …, but she could not really rest. She must hurry up if she was to be ready for Mar. Trapped by life. There was, even at seventy, no escape. One did one’s work against a steady barrage of demands, of people … and the garden tool (It was high time she thought about sowing seeds.) It was all very well to insist that art was art and had no sex, but the fact was that the days of men were not in the same way fragmented, atomized by indefinite small tasks. There was such a thing as woman’s work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. Each single day she fought a war to get to her desk before her little bundle of energy had been dissipated, to push aside or cut through an intricate web of slight threads pulling her in a thousand directions—that unanswered letter, that telephone call, or Mar. It really was not fair of Mar to come this morning with his load of intensity, his deep-set blue eyes, his grief. Oh, she had recognized him all right, the very first day when he turned up to ask if he could moor his boat off her dock!