Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (2 page)

Most obviously, Hilary is homosexual or, more accurately, bisexual; but for her it is the love for another woman that inspires. This, of course, was the shocking element in the novel when Sarton’s agent read it and advised against publishing. We are a good deal less inclined to be shocked these days. Sarton revealed, with the publication of this book, her own homosexuality which, like Hilary’s, has not been absolute. She was, in her youth, in love with several men, including one she thought of marrying. Sarton knows, and through her I have learned, how many women writers have had homosexual lovers, and I think the matter is not of particular importance here, except to suggest that it is about time we got such matters into better perspective.

It is time also, perhaps, to suggest that when the great homosexual novel, which Noel Annan tells us has not yet been written, appears, it may well be a woman’s. “There are many important novels in which homosexual characters and situations appear,” Annan writes in reviewing Forster’s
Maurice
, “and a number of technical attempts in minor works have been made to explore this or that part of homosexual life. At the moment it appears impossible because, while we may accept that homosexual relations are as normal and as unremarkable as heterosexual relations, the subject with all its history and hysteria and social overtones comes between the writer and his work and between him and the reader. Implicitly he is still explaining as Forster felt bound to explain.”
²
But Annan, of course, is thinking of the male homosexual novel with all its social anguish.
Mrs. Stevens
is outstanding because its homosexuality is not seen in its social or shocking aspects at all. It is used, thematically, to discover the source of poetry for the woman artist.

It is in its second or metaphoric sense that Hilary’s concept of the muse is important: because, as a lover of women, Hilary cannot possibly assume that women can achieve art through passivity, fecundity, or the avoidance of their own anger. Each time the muse appears to Hilary, it is Hilary who acts, Hilary who loves, Hilary who rages and pursues and writes the poem. Sexuality apart,
Mrs. Stevens
is a novel which unites absolutely the artist and the active principle. We remember Lily Briscoe who refused to solace Mr. Ramsay’s soul, and we see why the givers of solace are never painters or poets, and never can be.

What is therefore apparent is that
Mrs. Stevens
is meaningful for women who are not homosexuals, who may indeed have found their inspiration in male lovers they do not or are not called upon to serve. It seems likely that muses, like artists, come in both sexes. One needs above all to remember that neither Sarton nor Hilary has failed to understand the quality of the relationship necessary to a writer, homosexual or not. “I blame myself,” Oscar Wilde wrote, “for allowing an unintellectual friendship … to entirely dominate my life. An artist, the quality of whose work depends on the intensification of personality, requires the companionship of ideas.”
³
Hilary never made Wilde’s mistake; there was no Alfred Douglas in her life. The quality of the relationships, like the active role Hilary played in them, are more important than the sex of her particular muse.

Sarton’s first novel,
The Single Hound
, was about a young man who wanted to be a poet. So probably was Hilary’s first novel, but hers, more daringly, was also “about women falling in love with each other.”
The Single Hound
, not about this, did present two figures of accomplished women artists. Doro—only slightly an adumbration of Hilary—is an elderly poet who has published a book of poems under a male pseudonym. The young male poet, Mark Taylor, seeks her out because her poems have, literally, inspired him. The moment he sees her he knows she is the poet, although he had expected an old man:

Her femininity reveals itself as inevitable. The other woman artist, with whom Mark Taylor becomes infatuated, is Georgia Manning, a painter and, incidentally, a vivid and perhaps unique fictional portrait of Elizabeth Bowen in those years. The novel’s title is from a poem by Emily Dickinson which might stand as motto to Sarton’s whole accomplishment:

Adventure most unto itself

The Soul condemned to be;

Attended by a Single Hound—

Its own Identity.

The women artists of
The Single Hound
were not to appear again in Sarton’s novels until
Mrs. Stevens
, although she came close to the theme often.
⁴

Sarton has said that if she had no readers, she would still write poems, but not novels, which are a continuing exploration of the individual straining against the forces of disintegration in the twentieth century; such an exploration in a novel becomes in part a dialogue with the reader, while in a poem there is the dialogue with the self alone. Partly for this reason, she continued in her novels to present marriages, and marriage became for her the ground upon which the needs of the struggling individual are played out. There was always, perhaps, an undue admiration for marriage as such, an unsearching acceptance of stereotyped sex roles, and a certain lack of daring in the solutions. Perhaps this represents the refusal of an outsider to assault too brutally so long established an institution as marriage. She did present a marriage where the wife was the breadwinner in a business inherited from the mother and passed on to the daughter (
The Bridge of Years
) and, in
Faithful Are the Wounds
, took up a different subject altogether: that of a man, modeled on F.O. Matthiessen, who committed suicide in despair during the McCarthy era.
The Small Room
, set in a women’s New England college, includes two older women who are homosexual lovers, and other adult female characters who do not wonder, as does Melanie in
The Bridge of Years
, if “her dreams had been a man’s dreams.” But again, there is a marriage, this time of a young professor who threatens to “spank” his wife, the wife who speaks of taking her sons away to Italy to grow up into men “who are not threatened by the power of women,” and the students who are described as “not cranks or creeps, girls in spectacles, girls who walk with their heads down, … [but] frighteningly healthy and natural.” It is this sort of conventionality which has, I believe, helped to keep from Sarton the critical attention she deserves. Searching female readers do not welcome stereotypes, and male critics are not interested in conventional women unless they appear in novels by and about men.

Yet many women readers, particularly those who are or who have been teachers, have found
The Small Room
to be important, because it treats of openness, of the pressures inevitable on any campus (but without the usual cruel humor), and of the never easy student-teacher relationship. Hitherto, with the rare exception of a book like
Olivia
by Dorothy Bussy, this relationship has always been depicted as a woman teacher with a male student
(The Corn is Green)
, a male teacher with a female student (every fifth American novel), or a male teacher with a male student who is a son or disciple. For all its minor conventional languors,
The Small Room
broke through into the world where women function as individuals.

Oddly enough, after the teacher-student relationship in
The Small Room
, there is no case in Sarton’s works of a woman artist passing on to a younger woman her own convictions of the dedicated life; there are no young female heirs. Sarton seems almost to draw back from such a thought, as if to argue for her life as opposed to the normal destiny of a woman were too terrifying a prospect.
Kinds of Love
, her popular novel of a few years ago, again is without an artist figure, except for a young girl who writes poems and whose inspiration ceases when she falls in love or, rather, is fallen in love with. We cannot fail to notice that in
Mrs. Stevens
the woman interviewer is used for one part of the dialogue, but that the more interesting youthful foil is the boy, Mar, someone far closer to Sarton herself, but who is also, of course, an aspect of Hilary. It is only young males like Mar whom Sarton will accept, within the novels, as poets of the future, as those who will dare to confront life.

In her own life, Sarton continued as exile, turning into poems and memoirs her dialogue between solitude and love.
Plant Dreaming Deep
has probably affected more single or lonely lives than any other memoir published in recent years, but the response was in small rooms; again, the masculine critical world was largely uninterested. In this memoir, Sarton attempted to confront, as she had done in
Mrs. Stevens
, the life of the artist and single woman. Her accomplishment was the more impressive in that she had seen what no one else had seen: the outsider as single woman. We all know who are the outsiders of our society: Jews, like Leopold Bloom and his numerous American progeny; Blacks; the poor. But though Sarton has always been sympathetically drawn to the persecuted and excluded, she has not made them the embodiment of her own sense of exile, but has kept that where she has lived it, in the woman artist, alone in a house, eschewing social life, in a town of which, when she moved there, she knew nothing.

“We have to make myths of our lives,” she wrote in
Plant Dreaming Deep
. “It is the only way to live without despair.” This was an extraordinary gift to the women who read her: the idea that their lives, which they had formerly conceived only as an aspect of failure, might be mythologized into achievement. There was a fallacy here: Her readers were rarely artists, and the order she had created of her life seemed, though she had not intended this, more easy of achievement than it was.
The Journal of a Solitude
, published last year, was written in an attempt to let people know of the rages, the assaults from the critics, the despairs. Yet for all that,
Plant Dreaming Deep
did give us for the first time a new myth, that of the single person, and a woman, recovering her identity through work and discipline. Unique as a memoir in American letters, it brought her, not critical notice, but an adoring public given to writing endless letters and turning up on the village green at dawn to survey her house through field glasses.

The two books published in 1973,
The Journal of a Solitude
and
As We Are Now
, although the first was mutilated by enforced excisions and other difficulties, mark a new courage in her work, and a new, more forthright assault upon the barriers between people. Once more she has celebrated that openness which many people now are learning as the necessary prelude to the discovery of identity. To those barriers she has always kicked against has been added now the barrier of age. In
The Small Room
Sarton quoted from an essay by Simone Weil: “Two prisoners in contingent cells, who communicate by blows struck on the wall. The wall is what separates them, but also what permits them to communicate. So it is with us and God. Every separation is a bond.”
As We Are Now
is the story of old age confined to the cell where our society relegates the old, separated from life, a cell on whose walls no one knocks. If Sarton has not been a revolutionary against the ingrained ideas of women’s destiny and place in marriage, she has recognized the barriers between the sexes and the generations for what they are: walls which, will we but strike them, can carry our communication.

“Is there no compassion?” a friend asked me./ “Does it exist in another country?” This question, from the poem “A Hard Death,” is not the least of this century’s questions; it is one which Sarton has never ceased to ask. Compassion is usually conceived as a malady from which we struggle to recover. It has never been so for her. Her own personal suffering and rage, her own quarrels with the world, have never been muted as her compassion has never been muted. Louise Bogan, in a letter to Ruth Limmer, calls some poems of Sarton’s “sentimental,”
⁵
an easy charge, a palpable danger to any writer not barricaded against revelation. But what appears sentimental to the society Mrs. Stevens envisioned as composed of male critics is an inevitable aspect of the compassion which, in Sarton, has never cowered behind the usual defenses. As a result, life is never absent from her work as it is from, to name a master, the work of Flaubert. And even Bogan must have understood something of this. Writing of Elizabeth Bowen’s crystalline and pristine prose, never for a moment lax or sentimental, Bogan observed, “
The Death of the Heart
is too packed, too brilliant, for its own good. What Miss Bowen lacks is a kind of humility.”
⁶

Sarton has another too little celebrated virtue: She gives pleasure. “Though large sales are not necessarily a proof of aesthetic value,” Auden has written, “they are evidence that a book has given pleasure to many readers, and every author, however difficult, would like to give pleasure.”
⁷
Sarton gives pleasure and (notice this in
Mrs. Stevens
, a book in which “nothing happens,”) the reader is carried along on a current rather than, as in many more celebrated books, swimming his way upstream like a spawning salmon because it is his duty to do so. E. M. Forster has remarked that one always tends to overpraise a long book because one has got through it, and one wonders if, in the academic world, the same does not also apply to books that make hard reading.