SOURCE: Heilbrun, Carolyn G. “May Sarton's Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing.” In Hamlet's Mother and Other Women, pp. 148-59. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Heilbrun views Sarton as an outsider and speculates how this position has affected her work.]

May Sarton's life is a mirror image of the usual American success story. In those wildly famous lives where, Scott Fitzgerald has told us, there are no second acts, the glories and riches soon betray the writer to madness, impotence, alcohol, literary vendettas, and the ashes of despair. For Sarton, perhaps uniquely so, considering the accomplishment, there has been little organized acclaim, no academic attention,¹ indifference on the part of the critical establishment. Yet the inner life has been sustained: Neither alcohol, nor breakdown, nor the sinister satisfaction of personal cruelty has claimed her. Agonizing, in letters and conversation, over life's injustices, she has never ceased to examine with artistry her demons of anger and despair, and her consolations of solitude and love. Her success, at least until now, has been with those who read books from desire rather than compulsion. Today, still ten years younger than Mrs. Stevens, Sarton can say with her, “They haven't got me yet.” (“They” are the critics and her own demons.) She has published twenty-seven books and, widely read, is only now beginning to receive the critical attention properly due her. Success that comes late has its special flavor, particularly to a writer still productive, still capable of poetry and amazement.

May Sarton was born an outsider and has remained one. Even her closeness to the town of Nelson, New Hampshire, with which she became identified for fifteen years, had, as in friendship or a love affair, its beginning in suddenness and its end in passionless affection. Exiled many times over, from her native land, Belgium, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, the city of her youth, from any community of poets or artists, from established religion, from family life (the primal exile of the only child), she has sought salvation in exile no less fervently because it was frequently of her own choosing. But her chief place of exile, like Mrs. Stevens was not her choice: that land between the “masculine” world of the critical establishment and the “feminine” world of wife and motherhood. In this between land, she has found a voice in which to express what she calls the intensities of private life, and that voice has continued its declaration that women, and disconnected men, might be explorers. Her readers have been outsiders like herself, primed for discovery, whose bags have been secretly packed for weeks, or for a lifetime.

“Women are afraid of their demon, want to control it, make it sensible like themselves,” Mrs. Stevens says. One remembers the lines from Louise Bogan's poem “Women”

Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.

Wildernesses are not tidy and cannot be explored with elegant skills. Sarton has suffered critically because, improvidently, she has opened the wilderness within and faced it. Mrs. Stevens envies the male interviewer because “he would never be conflicted, rent in two as she was most of the time.” Sarton has long recognized and celebrated her doubleness in the wilderness: “I was broken in two / By sheer definition,” she writes in the poem “Birthday on the Acropolis.”

Between her conventional self which perhaps, like Mrs. Stevens, “would have liked to be a woman, simply and fruitful, a woman with many children, a great husband … and no talent,” (ellipses are Sarton's) and the talented, seeking self for whom the world has no preordained place, a dialogue of undiminished intensity has been carried on in Sarton's work for thirty-seven years. Its greatest daring, the source of its greatest moral energy, has been openness: to experience, pain, the perils of passion, loneliness, and truthtelling. This has inevitably been the dialogue of an isolated human being, a self-dialogue, recognizable certainly to housewives, desperate in loneliness and devoid of the solitude Sarton has created.

Sarton has not avoided the dangers inherent in such an openness and such a dialogue: the appearance of self-indulgence, self-pity. These dangers might as well be mentioned in their harshest form, together with her other sin: a certain laxity of style, a tendency to seize the first metaphor to hand, rather than search out the one, perfect phrase. In the intensity of her exploration, Sarton has not eschewed the assistance of the familiar metaphor, nor always observed the niceties of point of view. She has, like all writers, the defects of her virtues. But critics, and particularly academics, are understandably prone to admire and overvalue the carefully construed, almost puzzlelike novel, not only for its profundities, but because it provides them, in explication, with their livelihood. We have learned to be very harsh with those who, unlike Flaubert and Joyce, our models, do not endlessly bend language to its ultimate uses; in that harshness, we have often deprived ourselves of literature which, though less abstruse, is not less valuable. Perhaps with the advent of women's studies and the new approaches they make possible, perhaps in weariness at allusion hunting, we shall stop judging literature by its obstinacy in withstanding interpretation. Sarton has not escaped the fate of the readable, to be disdained by the unreadable.

However atypical, May Sarton shares one dominant characteristic with other modern writers: a concern with the life of the artist, and with the artistic rendering of life even by those who, like Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway or Conrad's Marlow, work in the medium of moments of awareness rather than of words or paint. The question of why the artist should be so unequivocally the modern hero is complex and profound. In the fictions of Henry James, for example, each of his protagonists who is not actually an artist is concerned with rendering the stuff of life into artistic form; and it is clear that for James life becomes meaningful only as it is shaped in response to growing awareness. If events are not actually altered by the artist of life—and frequently they are—the consciousness of the hero is refined to an extent where life's rewards lie as much in “awareness” (it was James' favorite word), of moral complexities as in control of them. To suffer becomes meaningful when one understands the suffering and condones its inevitability. This is almost the moral principle of modern literature, and it is most readily symbolized in the hero as artist.

For women, this fascination with the role of artist has, however, held great danger. Virginia Woolf, unlike her readers, was never confused about this. She did not suggest, though for years it was supposed she had, that Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse was as satisfactory an artist as Lily Briscoe. James' heroes might be artists of life, but women with babies in their arms and dinner for twenty to be arranged were not. Mrs. Ramsay has been mistakenly celebrated as an artist of life because it satisfied both men and women to think of the wife-mother, whether as servant or earth-goddess, as fulfilling a role equally important to that of the true artist. But Woolf knew that to be truly an artist is to retain control of one's own destiny (one may use that “control” for self-destruction, but that does not contradict the point) and that the women struggling their way to a sense of identity through the encircling meshes of domesticity were not artists, but victims.

Women have not perceived this and, perhaps, have moved too easily into the fantasy of being an artist. No doubt they have been influenced by the apparent autonomy of the artist, the apparent ease with which art can be fitted in with the domestic life. In fact, however, in seeing the artist as their own ideal, women have to a large extent betrayed themselves. They do not understand that unless they are ready to sacrifice all the “feminine” virtues to their art, they have not changed their relation to their own destiny, which is one of powerlessness and passivity. Art cannot be achieved by those for whom anything else matters more. Art, like passion, is not a part-time occupation.

May Sarton has not only been an artist—poet, novelist, memoirist—but, like other modern writers, she has seen her life as interacting with her art. Experience becomes meaningful, reveals itself, when it has been transformed into art. She has, furthermore, put artists at the center of many of her novels or, if not artists, teachers or craftsmen. But she has not failed to make explicit the division between Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe: Mrs. Ramsay, who would have liked always to have a baby in her arms, and Lily Briscoe, who thought about her painting and realized with relief that she would not have to marry anyone. Hilary Stevens, with her chance at marriage and the passivity of a “feminine” destiny, realizes after the death of her husband that she never wrote a poem to him. For poems are written to, or inspired by muses, and muses, Hilary tells us, are women. This is a very intricate concept which must be looked at more closely, but it is well at the start to realize that if Sarton seems to bow too low to the convention of the proper wifely functions, she does know that the real artist is not the fantasy creature imagined by women trapped in domesticity. The real artist is engaged in a full-time struggle, which is harder for women, among other reasons, because they do not have wives.

At first glance, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing seems conventional in its acceptance of male and female roles. Hilary is responsible for the following: “She had no idea what these two [men] would be like together alone, in their world, the impenetrable masculine world.” “The women who have tried to be men have always lacked something.” “Women do not thrive in cities.” And so on. Yet the novel in its searching dialogue reveals in the end the misconceptions of women who, like Jenny, want to be “whole.” “I want to believe that a woman writer must be a whole woman,” Jenny says, wanting to marry, have children, the whole bag. But women cannot have the whole bag, and Mrs. Stevens is one of the few novels whose attention is centered on this theme. The theme is never made explicit, nor does Sarton allow herself to suggest that Mary's work is holier than Martha's. She does, however, refuse to the woman with a spare hour stolen from the kitchen or nursery the deluding daydream of being an artist. In marriages, at least as we know them at the time of the novel, the woman's role is to be loved, to lie protected in a man's arms, and the artist cannot be the loved one. The artist must be the loving one which is, as Hilary points out, more convenient if someone else is cooking the stew and arranging the flowers. We remind ourselves that of the great women writers, most have been unmarried, and those who have written in the state of wedlock have done so in peaceful kingdoms guarded by devoted husbands. Few have had children. The dream of the girl interviewer, Jenny, is a silly dream though Hilary is too kind to say so. Yet with singularity, Sarton has allowed Martha into the dialogue. Jesus had said that Mary's was the better part, and the world has almost unanimously exalted Martha. Sarton alone has allowed them to converse with one another.

Hilary, like Sarton, knows that poems begin in passion, an emotion hard to retain for him who wears the socks one darns. In any case, passion of this sort does not belong to marriage, which is quite a different state, however fervent its sexual life. Muses are never husbands, and rarely wives.

For Hilary then, as for Sarton, the muses have been women. Must they inevitably be women, even for women writers? The question is premature at this stage of our knowledge. Edna St. Vincent Millay appears to have had male muses, but we know little about her. Emily Dickinson's muse was apparently male, but we know even less about her. For Hilary, in any case, it was women who inspired her to poetry, and that fact must be considered in two ways.

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 compansionship 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.

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.”

Notes

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. 243-250. Agnes Sibley, May Sarton (New York: Twayne, 1972), is useful for chronology and biography.

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

3. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis. Quoted in the Introduction by Jacques Barzun (New York: Vintage, 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 Pickthorne and Mr. Hare.

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

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

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