becomes a storm trooper. This opposition of father and son is repeated in the case of Emile Poiret, a pious Catholic floral illustrator with a sense of cosmic presence in things, and his antireligious son, Pierre. The novel presents facets of the European response to the breakdown of democratic civilization in the 1920’s and 1930’s and, at a more personal level, reflects the idea that some persons must extend themselves in love if civilization is to continue.

The Birth of a Grandfather

The question of who one is, especially in the context of generations and of change, was a continuing concern of Sarton. It is presented through the dramatic, carefully staged scenes of The Birth of a Grandfather, in which the omniscient author moves among the characters, heightening the effect by the questions they ask themselves. The interior speculation is in the style of Henry James, though the consciousness attributed to a given character does not always seem consistent with his personality or inner life. This novel begins at the Maine island retreat of the wealthy and established Wyeth family. Tom Dorgan, a Boston Irish Catholic, is romantically involved with Betsy Wyeth, Frances and Sprig Wyeth’s daughter. In contrast to these young lovers, Lucy, Frances’s sister, is undergoing a divorce. It is Frances, the major character, and her husband, Sprig, from the middle-aged generation, whose painful readjustment to marriage and to age form the basis of the plot.

The older generation includes Uncle Joe, an urbane retired diplomat, Aunt Jane, a wise old woman capable of immersing herself in others, and Gran-Quan, Sprig’s father, a man consumed by dramatic self-pity over the death of his wife and constantly supported by his sister, Jane. The Wyeths’ son, Caleb, is reluctantly in the heart of family matters, biding his time until he gains independence from them. Appropriately enough, a major scene is the family’s Fourth of July celebration on a nearby island. The fireworks are, for Frances, like moments of purity amid darkness, but they also herald the sudden death of Aunt Jane and the breaking up of Gran-Quan’s private world and descent into insanity. Betsy and Caleb see their parents in new ways: Frances represents human frailty, and Sprig is seen as one sheltered from the pains of life.

The second part of the novel, “Ice Age,” set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shows the threat that tension and obligation bring to family unity. Tom and Betsy have married, and a child is on the way. This potentially joyful event threatens Sprig, who cannot accept the loss of direction in his life, which has settled into traditional philanthropy and conservation of the family wealth. By contrast, his friend Bill Waterford, who treats life with saving grace, calmly announces his impending death from cancer. Bill’s life has had a sense of purpose. Two dinner scenes set forth two perspectives: In one, Hester, Sprig’s sister, sees Sprig and Frances trying vainly to avert the emotional threat of Caleb’s demand to be allowed to go alone to Greece for a year. In another, Tom Dorgan, innocently holding forth on the coming prospect of family life, exacerbates the conflict of generations, but he also sees that the Wyeths can admit to being wrong and remain loyal to each other. Caleb puts aside his immediate demand for independence, recognizing his father’s own imprisonment in his reticence and sense of responsibility.

Coming to terms with Caleb leaves Sprig uncertain about his love for his wife, and a visit to Bill provokes the question of what real life is. Bill’s wife, Nora, warns him that one may fail to exercise one’s talents out of fear of freedom and power, a question that Sarton explored in various ways in probing the nature of the artist. Caleb’s destination, Greece, awakens other echoes in Sprig, reminding him of the Greek scholarship for which he had once wished; Sprig then realizes his potential for continued growth.

In the third part, the grandfather is reborn, both in the sheer physical sense of the new grandchild and in meeting the meaning of his own life. Sprig must surrender his friendship with Bill, and he must test his own talent, no longer relying on Bill’s support. Frances wonders whether she has not turned self-detachment into a prison; the answer comes with the realization that birth and death, the march of ongoing generations, has significance. This insight strikes her when, while visiting Bill, she encounters his nearly exhausted wife, Nora; a seemingly unsuitable marriage has worked because Bill was able to give of himself. Upon the departure of Caleb, to whom Sprig has given financial independence so that Caleb may try what he has wanted, Sprig himself turns to translating Greek plays as a self-imposed test. He acknowledges also that he has loved himself rather than Caleb in their relationship. With new honesty and willingness to assume self-defined responsibility, Sprig reconnects to the exuberance of his youth. He and Frances reaffirm their faithfulness, and love wins out as absolute value.

Sarton uses imagistic motifs, such as the current in the Charles River and the isles of Greece, to suggest important ideas in the novel. The shifting omniscient viewpoint highlights dramatic intensities, but it is used at times without strong motivation or without a careful build-up of character. It also can turn into undisguised narrative commentary. Moral implications do come through in catchwords such as “escape” and “freedom,” which reverberate through the novel. Occasionally, moral judgments become banal. The novel has shown Sprig’s life as empty of personal demands on himself and his resistance to his children as a fearful reaction to his own aging, but the moral tends to blunt the focus.

Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

Coming roughly at the middle of Sarton’s career, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing is the author’s most intense study of the female artist. Here, too, the style received mixed reviews, one critic praising the music of the prose, another objecting to the fussiness and humorlessness of the writing. What one critic found to be a well-done presentation of the mystery of the creative impulse a second found to be “an embarrassing probing of art” and “acute self-consciousness,” and a third found the novel’s characters “musechasers who believe themselves to be delicate vessels of talent.” Scholar Heilbrun, in noting that the novel deals with the poet Hilary Stevens’s escape from the passivity of a feminine destiny, sees Sarton as aware that “the real artist is not the fantasy creature imagined by women trapped in domesticity.” Art comes, as Hilary insists, at the expense of every human being, the self and the self’s ties with other people.

The plot interweaves Hilary’s initiation of Mar Hemmer, a potential poet recovering from an intense relationship with a man, with her reveries as she is being interviewed about her own poetic development. Mar, despite his lack of emotional proportion, helps her to see her own life in perspective. Married to an unstable war veteran in England, Hilary began to write poetry after his sudden death. An intellectual friend, Willa MacPherson, encourages her to continue writing poetry and provides one night of passionate sexual exploration. Another friend, however, creates self-doubt, which Hilary identifies with the masculine force in herself. She knows that she can preserve her artistry only by caring about life, which does not necessarily mean sparing others from pain. As Hilary later points out to Mar, poetry and feeling are connected only if the poet understands that “true feeling justifies whatever it may cost.” One cannot be anesthetized against the pain of life.

Philippa Munn, Hilary’s proper girlhood governess with whom she is infatuated, plays the role that Sarton’s own teachers did in her youth. Poetry diffuses sensuality, Hilary learns; it creates a moment of revelation, not simply of indulgence. As Hilary’s wise physician tells her as she lies in the hospital recovering from a breakdown over her husband’s death, she must write poems about objects and about a person to whom she can fasten herself deeply, but she should not confuse love for someone with poetry. Poetry can become “passionate decorum” in which love is presented as a mystique; what gives strength to poems is form.

Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing mixes the Platonic tradition of poet as maker whose creations surpass his or her own conscious understanding with an Aristotelian stress on the formal artifact that has its own laws of being and is autonomous. The notion of the poet as rapt by emotional experience lies also within the Platonic tradition of poetry as ecstasy. The events making up the life of Hilary Stevens have parallels with Sarton’s own life, and the novel is a justification of that life. The presentation of the poet as a solitary individual misunderstood by the world also reflects Sarton’s romanticism.

A Reckoning

As the heroine of A Reckoning, Laura Spelman, resident of an upper-middle-class Boston suburb, faces terminal cancer, she interprets her growing “death-wish” as a return to the Jungian “house of gathering.” It is a world of timeless personages; Sarton had been reading Jung before writing the book. She had also become more concerned with feminism and more open about lesbian sexuality. As Laura is alienated from her own body, she works to resolve her unexamined passions by assessing her life. She comes, according to one critic, to an “understanding of life as an amalgam of human relationships, culture, and the natural world.”

The novel also shows Harriet Moors, a budding novelist and lesbian, trying to put her life into art, an issue complicated by the opposition of her lover to any fiction that might hint at the truth of their liaison. It seems that not only marriage but also a binding lesbian attachment is fatal to art: Harriet Moors will have to suffer the loss of her lover as the price of continuing with her art.

Laura has to sort out her feelings for her mother, Sybille, a woman of dazzling power whose beauty and charm have oppressed her daughters. Jo, Laura’s sister, after her mother had interrupted Jo’s passion for a woman, had fled into the sterile intellectuality of academic life. Daphne, Laura’s other sister, has become insecure and emotionally dependent. Laura has found escape in marriage. The destructive Sybille is a less flattering version of Céline Limbosch, of whom Sarton has said that she forced friends into decisions they did not wish to make and attacked their authentic being. Even in her senility in a nursing home, Sybille is someone about whom her daughter treads warily. Earlier in her life, Laura had had an intense friendship with Ella; the reader may strain, in fact, to realize it was a lesbian relationship. Harriet Moors’s visits for advice on her novel rekindles in Laura her memories of Ella. She comes to realize that if love is painful, then art is mutilating. Yet in dying, Laura finds positive answers in music and in poetry.

The final reckoning is instigated by Laura’s warm and helpful Aunt Minna, whose reading aloud to Laura forces her to consider that “journey into being a woman” and what women are meant to be. Women are locked away from one another in a man’s world, she decides. Marriage may be normal destiny, but for those living intensely, a mystical friendship is the hope—of women for women, of men for men. Sybille, according to Ella, feared “the tenderness of communion.”

Laura’s loss of lonely autonomy is convincingly presented, but the master image, that of weaving a pattern, is imposed rather than dramatized. Ella’s appearance at the end does not really complete the final weaving of the pattern by mystical friendship; the scene reminds the reader of sentimental fiction often found in women’s magazines. Clearly, too many issues have come within the compass of the heroine’s last months. Death may force its victims to focus their lives and aspirations, but the last days of Laura Spelman are not deeply and plausibly linked to her life as a married woman and parent or even to her efforts to approach art. As in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, reminiscence plays a key role. Whole scenes are recalled in dramatic form, but the very selectivity of memory and its often self-serving quality may raise questions about the honesty and sheer structural relationship between what Laura recalls and what she really was—a Boston upper-middle-class housewife with delusions of creativity, the kind of thing against which Sarton herself warned. A Reckoning lacks the strengths of Sarton’s best work: thematic depth, balanced characters, organic use of imagery, adequate plot development, and motivated action.