Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (24 page)

“Sit down beside me, will you? It makes me nervous having you stand there like a father-figure looming over me.”

Obediently Mar sat down, cross-legged, beside her. “You flatter me,” he said.

“I don’t flatter. I saw the father-figure the first day you appeared out of the blue, asked for my dock, and said that since I had no one to help me, you guessed you would have to carry in wood and do the odd jobs. I’m afraid, dear Mar, that it was the fatherliness which touched my iron heart.”

“I don’t know about the boy in you,” Mar said. “I only know about the woman.” Then he added with an ironic smile, “As for myself, I don’t know about the father. I only know about the boy.” Then he added, serious, “But you haven’t answered my question about your poems.”

“Very well. I’ll answer it. They are not immature. But they have been too costly. By that I mean that they might have been warmer and richer if I had not chosen the path I did choose, the path of transcendence, the path of the impossible transcended. Mar, I have asked a great deal of myself, I wonder whether it was necessary. I’m at the end of a long life of beating my head against the wall of myself. You are at the beginning. It seems absurd to consider that you have been deeply in love, just once, just
once
,” she said fiercely.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. It’s bitten you like a talent. Ah,” she added, catching his look, “it is the talent for poetry, this talent for love, and no true poetry without it. Why? Because it’s the talent for going naked. When you told me about Rufus, you had no skin. You were an orphan. I saw poetry as the way of helping you grow a skin. Give me a light!” she commanded.

“Are you trying to tell me that you were lying?” She saw that his hand was trembling as he lit her cigarette. “You mean I have no talent? The poems you got me to write were just some kind of poultice on a wound? Is that what you have to say?”

“No, you fool!” She was exasperated by the misunderstanding, so radical and so unexpected. “It’s just because I feel your talent, real and gritty and uncompromising, a
masculine
talent, that I came to see just now that I could do you harm, not good, that I could be the short-circuit for you in the long run. Everything I said about you and Rufus, I meant. If this thing about Rufus broke through into the place of poetry for you, so much the better. If this was your path inwards, so much the better. If one unhappy homosexual experience taught you what you might become, all to the good. But if one dirty night with a sailor who stole your wallet makes you think this is your real life, Mar, you’re going to be in the fruitless Hell. You have to go on as a man, not a boy, don’t you see?”

“You see me, do you, as a husband and a father?”

For a second they confronted each other, the bold blue eyes of Mar and the hooded gray eyes of Hilary. Then at the same instant, each reached for a pebble and threw it down. The two pebbles struck the water about two feet apart, and they watched avidly as the two great widening ripples intersected. In the stillness of the quarry water, it was amazing what a dramatic effect it had.

“Somehow,” Hilary murmured, “I see your collisions as fruitful outside the poems. I would wish you happiness.” Rather clumsily she lifted herself to her feet. “For you it does not seem to me an impossible wish.”

“Mmmm.” Mar sat there, hugging his knees. “You mean,” and he looked up at her quizzically, “you would have liked to be a husband and father, so I’ve got to be?”

For a second they balanced there on the brink of laughter. But Hilary was serious when she answered, “No, I think I would have liked to be a woman, simple and fruitful, a woman with many children, a great husband, … and no talent!”

“You see,” he frowned, “the talent always comes in, like a red herring. There is no escaping
it!
”

And he was on his feet.

“Life and a talent, … I wonder.” She leaned one hand on his shoulder, and they walked away from the quarry together. In the distance at the end of the road, she could see the house, the blue door caught in the sunlight. Peace and order, she thought. Peace, order, and poetry, to be won over and over again, and never for good, out of the raw, chaotic material. Nothing really mattered now except to get back to her study, to slip a white sheet of paper into the typewriter, to begin again from here.

“All I meant to say, Mar, is that every end is a beginning.”

A Biography of May Sarton

May Sarton (1912–1995) was born Eleanore Marie Sarton on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, the only child of the science historian George Sarton and the English artist Mabel Eleanor Elwes. Barely two years later, Sarton’s European childhood was interrupted by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the onset of the First World War.

Fleeing the advancing Germans, the family moved briefly to Ipswich, England, and then in 1915 to Boston, Massachusetts, where her father had accepted a position at Harvard University. Sarton’s love for poetry was first kindled at the progressive Shady Hill School, a period she wrote about extensively in
I Knew a Phoenix
, published in 1959.

At the age of twelve, Sarton traveled to Belgium for a year to live with friends of the family and study at the Institut Belge de Culture Française. There, she met the school’s founder, Marie Closset, who grew to be Sarton’s close friend and mentor, and who was the inspiration for her first novel,
The Single Hound
(1938).

On returning to the States, Sarton graduated from Cambridge High and Latin School in 1929. Although she was awarded a scholarship to Vassar College, Sarton joined actress Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in New York instead, much to the dismay of her father. However, while learning the basics of theater, Sarton continued to develop her poems, and in 1930, when she was just eighteen, a series of her sonnets was published in
Poetry
magazine.

In 1931, Sarton returned to Europe and lived in Paris for a year while her parents were in Lebanon. In large part, Europe provided the backdrop for her encounters with the great thinkers of the age, including the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, the famed biologist Julian Huxley, and of course, Virginia Woolf. After Sarton’s own theater company failed during the Great Depression, she turned her full attention to writing and published her first poetry collection, entitled
Encounter in April
, in 1937.

For the next decade, Sarton continued to write and publish novels and poetry. In 1945, she met Judy Matlack in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the two became partners for the next thirteen years, during which she would suffer the deaths of several loved ones: her mother in 1950, Marie Closset in 1952, and her father in 1956. Following this last loss, Sarton’s relationship fell apart, and she moved to New Hampshire to start over. She was, however, to remain attached to Matlack for the rest of her life, and Matlack’s death in 1983 affected her keenly.
Honey in the Hive
, published in 1988, is about their relationship.

While the 1950s were a time of great personal upheaval for Sarton, they were a time of success in equal measure. In 1956, her novel
Faithful Are the Wounds
was nominated for a National Book Award, followed by nominations in 1958 for
The Birth of a Grandfather
and a volume of poetry,
In Time Like Air
; some consider the latter to be one of Sarton’s best books of poetry. In 1965, she published
Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing
, which is frequently referred to as her coming-out novel. From then on, her work became a key point of reference in the fields of feminist and LGBT literature. Strongly opposed to being categorized as a lesbian writer, Sarton constantly strove to ensure that her portraits of humanity were relatable to a universal audience, regardless of readers’ sexual identities.

In 1974, Sarton published her first children’s book,
Punch’s Secret
, followed by
A Walk Through the Woods
in 1976. During the seventies, Sarton was diagnosed with breast cancer—the beginning of a long and arduous illness. However, she continued to work during this difficult period and received a spate of critical acclaim for her literary contributions.

In 1990, she suffered a severe stroke that reduced her concentration span and her ability to write, although she did continue to dictate her journals when she could. Sarton died of breast cancer on July 16, 1995. She is buried in Nelson, New Hampshire.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1965 by May Sarton

Introduction Copyright © 1974 by Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Cover design by Mimi Bark

ISBN: 978-1-4976-4627-8

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com

EBOOKS BY MAY SARTON

FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA