SOURCE: Eder, Doris L. “Woman Writer: May Sarton's Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing.” International Journal of Women's Studies 1, no. 2 (March-April 1978): 150-58.

[In the following essay, Eder explores autobiographical aspects of Sarton's Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, and calls the novel “a novel of dualities resolved into unity.”]

I

May Sarton's Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing is a masterly and haunting book. It concerns the difficulties of being a woman writer and was, the writer tells us, a difficult book to write.¹ F. Hilary Stevens is obviously close to May Sarton, a portrait of the female writer at seventy, but although the relationship of this fiction to the creator's life is intimate, elements of the life have in the novel undergone a sea change into something rich and strange.

May Sarton was born in Wondelgem, Belgium, the daughter of George Sarton, the historian of science, and of Mabel Elwes. World War I drove the Sartons first to England, then to the United States. Exile and the search for roots are abiding themes in Sarton's work. The family settled in Cambridge, where May, an only child, was educated at Shady Hill School and later at Boston High & Latin School. At eighteen, instead of attending college, she apprenticed herself to Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Company and founded her own theatrical company; this failed in 1936. Since the late thirties May Sarton has been writing assiduously, about a book a year; she has now published thirty volumes of poetry, fiction, and reminiscence. She has also taught at Harvard, Wellesley, and as Poet-in-Residence at Lindenwood College in Missouri.

Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing is a novel of dualities resolved into unity. Its structure is simple but canny. Hilary Stevens, preparing to be interviewed for a literary magazine about her life's work, reviews her life and, during the interview which is the central chapter of the novel, actually relives those crucial episodes which gave birth to her poems and novels. After a Prologue introducing us to Mrs. Stevens and to Mar, her young handyman and literary disciple, we cut from the author preparing to be interrogated to the two interviewers who are preparing to question her, then move into the interview itself. This is a skillful interweaving of stream-of-consciousness (of Mrs. Stevens' dredgings of her past, her self-dialogue) and actual dialogue with her interviewers. The Epilogue comprises a final climactic confrontation between Mrs. Stevens and Mar, during which the old woman is driven still deeper into questioning the relationship of life and love to art.

Sarton distinguishes between the writing of poetry and prose, saying that poetry is a dialogue with one's self or God, the novel a dialogue with others.²Mrs. Stevens is both. In this book the author keeps meeting herself in different guises: first as Mar, the deeply disturbed boy whom she recognizes as the young man she always wished to be. The author then interviews herself through her interviewers, Peter Selverson and Jenny Hare. Selverson is interested in the writer as writer and probes the sources of Hilary Stevens' inspiration, the Muse; Jenny Hare is preoccupied with the problems of being a woman and a writer and asks how one can be both. Mar is Hilary Stevens' buried self, and her male and female interviewers represent the two sides of her nature, the writer and the woman.

Why is it difficult to be a woman and a writer? An exchange between Peter Selverson and Jenny Hare exposes the heart of the problem. Jenny is an amateur who wants to be a professional but hopes to fulfill herself as wife and mother as well as author. Peter warns her:

A writer's life is obsessed, driven, in the hands of powers he can hardly control himself. Writing must often seem the only reality. I just don't believe you can do it with your right hand while your left hand rocks a cradle …

Jenny retorts, “But how can you be a good writer and not live?”³

Here we encounter with a vengeance the central duality in Sarton's work, the life/art split which has been a lifelong dilemma both for Hilary Stevens and May Sarton and which, for reasons we should look into, is a more insoluble and obsessive problem for women than for men writers. All serious writers, male and female, must be aware of the dilemma as Yeats expresses it in “The Choice.”

The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

If the writer devotes almost all her time, energy, and intelligence to the perfection of her work, little will be left for life. For most women, however, such a choice is impossible; for women are still reared and educated to serve others, not to fulfill projects of their own. Serious authorship is a full-time responsibility. Hence Selverson tells Jenny she will not be able to tend a child with one hand and write a novel with the other. Mrs. Stevens is even more emphatic: she declares that a woman can fulfill herself as an artist only at the expense of herself as a woman, that indeed there is something aberrant, even monstrous about “we women who have chosen to be something more and something less than women.”⁴

It is necessary to describe how May Sarton views women and their lives to clarify the ambiguity of the word “life” as she uses it in discussing the life/art dichotomy she perceives. Sarton's view of the sexes is, in some ways, too conventional and orthodox not to be a source of irritation to the Women's Movement. Mrs. Stevens, for example, sees women as destined by nature to be mothers and men as equally destined to be explorers and conquerers of reality:

After all, admit it, a woman is meant to create children not works of art—that's what she has been engined to do, so to speak. A man with talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things …⁵

For Sarton women are inherently domestic creatures desirous of serving others; she recognizes love as a woman's deepest need. There is every reason to believe she would agree with Byron's “Man's love is of man's / life a thing apart. / ‘Tis woman's whole existence.”⁶ In Sarton's experience, however, writing demands solitude and the sacrifice of those close human ties which most women's lives are dedicated to cherishing. This being so, the woman writer is bound to feel thwarted to the very roots of her being. Accustomed to sustaining others, she must learn as a writer to be self-sustaining. Mrs. Stevens, like May Sarton, has defied the natural order of things and chosen to be a creative artist. It is a costly choice. Sarton is describing not just herself but the generic woman writer when she says: “She has made a choice that cuts her off from a lot of things most people consider life, for the sake of something else, something both chancy and intangible.”⁷

II

Here we encounter Sarton's dual definition of life. For the writer, whether male or female, “real” life is writing, distilling the essence of experience into words. But this real life is unreal, life removed from reality; real life is lived not on the page but in the flesh. And life is the raw material of art. So we come back to Jenny Hare's question: how can you be a good writer and not live? And if you are a woman writer, you must live as a woman, which normally means living for and through others. But for the woman writer who lives not in her own person but for others, many of life's experiences will remain unknown, vicarious rather than actual. The thin soil of such a half-life will nourish only an etiolated art. Thus women are in the unenviable position of having available for writing less time, energy, and experience than men.

Freedom from time-consuming domestic cares is essential for the woman who would be a writer; still, Sarton implies such liberation is as guilt-ridden as gilt-edged. Life will be much more difficult for the woman who chooses perfection of the work than it would for a man making the same choice. This is not simply due to practical difficulties. Men have mothers, sisters, and wives to look after them. In Journal of a Solitude, Sarton remarks that professional women need wives or mothers or the masculine equivalent, if such could be found.⁸ She further observes that most women authors have been either unmarried or childless; if married, they have been blessed with sheltering, protective husbands who either shared or relieved them of household drudgery.⁹ When Sarton describes the relations between the sexes or their respective roles, she is describing what these have been and continue to be in most societies, not prescribing what should be. In fact, she views American youth as currently striving towards a new love ethic based on individual capacities and needs, not on stereotyped sex roles. “Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.”¹⁰

When women achieve the kind of independence men enjoy, more urgent problems than that of being a woman writer will have been solved. Meanwhile, the woman writer has to give up close personal relationships for a life of lonely and unremitting toil, and finds it difficult to abandon the kind of life to which she was brought up. It is now more than half a century since Virginia Woolf pointed out that, if a woman would write, she must have an independent income and a room of her own. Sarton stresses the need for space of one's own and time to oneself. Both translate themselves in her work into solitude, which she defines as the wealth of being on one's own but which can easily change into loneliness, the poverty of being alone. The burden of solitude is responsible for the narrow, intense, highly subjective and self-enclosed quality of much of Sarton's work. Hilary Stevens lives alone, like May Sarton, because she needs to husband all her time and energy for writing but also because she feels she is impossible to live with. “I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines.”¹¹ In their solitary existence, both Mrs. Stevens and her creator are haunted by the life they have abjured, by the demons of depression, rage, jealousy, despair, and guilt.

III

The demon which haunts Mrs. Stevens is the voice of the world she must shut out, tormenting her with questions such as, “What will your readers think of this? How will your work be received?” Sarton knows this demon well. She is acutely sensitive to the lack of critical recognition accorded her work. For close on forty years she had to maintain faith in her own work with only scant encouragement from the literary world.

It costs the woman writer more to shut out others than it would a man, because women are taught to care for others and their opinions, and often depend on others' goodwill. Nor are women used to being on their own or having time to themselves. It is the normal woman's lot to be able to snatch for herself only moments from what another contemporary woman poet calls “the discontinuity of female life with its attention to small chores, errands, work that others constantly undo …”¹² The inexorable routines of domesticity still bedevil Mrs. Stevens in her life as a writer. She can work only in an ambience of order and beauty but must create this for herself, so a large part of her time is spent cleaning or tidying her house or gardening. Mrs. Stevens considers:

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 women's work and it consisted chiefly … in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. Each single day she fought a war to get back to her desk before her little bundle of energy had been dissipated …¹³

Discontinuity and distraction are indeed the basic conditions of woman's existence and have left their mark on her sensibility. So much so that Virginia Woolf believed a woman's literary style and genre should take their cue from her distracted life. In A Room of One's Own, she declares that “women's books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be.”¹⁴ Without acquiescing in an order of things that will keep women household slaves, can we not concede that, as a result of the lives they lead, women find it harder to concentrate than men, have a shorter attention-span, and are less single-minded than men are?

IV

In Journal of a Solitude and Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, Sarton meditates on different kinds of wholeness exemplified by the two sexes. In the former work she sees wholeness, in the sense of single-mindedness, as a masculine attribute and remarks that single-mindedness may be the result of a sort of simple-mindedness which screens out irrelevancies. “We are whole or have intimations of what it means to be whole when the entire being—spirit, mind, nerves, flesh, the body itself—are [sic] concentrated toward a single end.”¹⁵ But Sarton observes that women's being is rarely so focused; instead of being centered, women's sensibilities are diffused, and they are often divided and conflicted by doubt, fear, and guilt. Indeed, women's lives are so divided between their own and others' claims and concerns that they can rarely give their undivided attention to either.

Nevertheless, we find Sarton insisting in Mrs. Stevens that women and women writers should seek wholeness above all things and implying that wholeness, in a profound sense, is peculiarly their gift. When Jenny Hare asks Mrs. Stevens what is woman's work, Mrs. Stevens muses and replies: “Never to categorize, never to separate one thing from another—intellect, the senses, the imagination … some total gathering together where the most realistic and the most mystical can be joined in a celebration of life itself. Woman's work is always toward wholeness.”¹⁶ It is not simply a question, then, of making good a deficiency, of learning to concentrate and be single-minded instead of scatterbrained, but of cultivating a natural gift, of learning to use a woman's natural feeling for interconnectedness with primary intensity. As Adrienne Rich says, “There must be ways, and we will be finding out more and more about them, in which the energy of creation and the energy of relation can be united.”¹⁷ Heretofore imaginative creation has been largely the prerogative of men, the cultivation of human relationships that of women. What is needed is a cross-fertilization.

May Sarton believes the artist must be androgynous and further observes that “it is the masculine in a woman and the feminine in a man that proves creative.”¹⁸ Carolyn Heilbrun's introduction to Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing helps explain this. Heilbrun points out that the artist is, whether man or woman, active lover, not passive beloved. Thus the woman writer must jettison the feminine domestic virtues of passivity and submission because writing requires active virtues—energy, freedom, and independence of mind.¹⁹ Virginia Woolf provides a further gloss in arguing that the strenuous cultivation by a writer of either exclusively masculine or feminine qualities destroys the unity of the mind and results in a dissociation of thought from feeling. In outlining her theory of androgyny (to which Sarton is indebted), Woolf remarks, “Renewal of creative power … is in the gift of the opposite sex only to bestow.”²⁰ A man's masculine and a woman's feminine qualities will be called on in living their respective lives; artistic creation will call forth the unexplored, compensatory, residual qualities. As Woolf makes clear, however, the imagination itself recognizes no sexual distinctions. The artist is, as Sarton says, an impersonal medium of feeling and expression. This being so, how can she or he be other than androgynous?

V

Sex is handled unexpectedly in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing and the roles of the sexes are to some extent reversed. Mrs. Stevens herself transcends categories and is bisexual, though Sarton describes her as lesbian.²¹ She is a somewhat frightening figure, fierce, sympathetic, irascible and intense, with an acerbic sense of humor. As she relives her life in reviewing her work, Hilary Stevens realizes that each of her books was inspired by a woman but that her talent has been fostered by men. Men are not naturally nurturers and have performed no necessary chores for her, but they have rescued her and nursed her through emotional crises.

These crises, spiritual nodes or growing points, have been induced in the writer by unrealizable passions for her own sex: first and last for her mother, a cool, reticent woman who withheld from her daughter the love she yearned for. Hilary then falls in love with her young governess, Phillippa, one of the many women to whom the mother relegates her daughter. Though Hilary loves her husband, Adrian, he never inspires her to poetry. After his sudden, unexpected death she falls ill; convalescing in hospital, she experiences love for both her nurse and doctor, surrogate parents plainly, but with the difference that Nurse Gillespie inspires her to write poetry once more, while Dr. Hallowell acts as a sort of earth, insulating her while she is still weak against the powerful current of her passion for the nurse. Hilary Stevens loves successively a beautiful literary hostess, Willa MacPherson; a singer, Madeleine HiRose, and a sociologist who is her antitype, Dorothea. In old age she is again inspired by a dual Muse. Staying in the house of a dead French-woman, Anne, she becomes haunted by her and shares with Luc, Anne's living lover, his love for the dead woman.

Hilary Stevens' loves have in common their impossibility. Because her passion cannot be consummated, it is sublimated into the motive force of her poetry and fiction. Readers will wish to ask Sarton, as Peter Selversen asks Mrs. Stevens, whether her Muse is incarnate or only a metaphor. Hilary Stevens says that for the poet, who deals in the concrete, the Muse is incarnate.²² However, Sarton speaks elsewhere of the necessity for mythologizing our lives; in mythologizing existence, “we come to understand the metaphor that reality always holds in it.”²³ We may conclude that the Muse is a rewarding metaphor for this writer and that the love of the Muse is something deeply and actively (though not necessarily actually or literally) experienced.

VI

In Mrs. Stevens May Sarton has drawn with considerable skill the portrait of an artist deprived of mother love and thereby compelled to lifelong pursuit of a maternal Muse. We should remind ourselves, however, that Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing is fiction, not autobiography; it would be simple-minded to deduce from Sarton's novel that she too is a victim of the same privation and pursuit as Hilary Stevens. (Sarton's mother, as her daughter depicts her in I Knew a Phoenix, Plant Dreaming Deep, and Journal of a Solitude, is a more loving and vital woman than Hilary's mother.) Many events, persons, and places recognizable from Sarton's memoirs have contributed to her fiction, but these have been transformed for the purposes of art. Thus, Hilary Stevens' house on the Maine coast differs from, yet in many ways resembles the landlocked house in Nelson, New hampshire which May Sarton celebrates in Plant Dreaming Deep. Mrs. Stevens, like her creator, cherishes her home as the dear rooted spot where she has integrated past and present. Hilary's house is full of light, air, and space, but with a somewhat glaucous atmosphere, as of undersea. When Sarton was writing this novel, New Hampshire was in the grip of a severe drought; men were drilling a well in Sarton's garden, searching for water. Sarton seems to have imaginatively overcompensated in her fiction for this lack of water by placing Mrs. Stevens' house by the sea and making the ocean a central metaphor for the book. Consider her title. The allusion to Prufrock's sirens serves to underline a woman writer's internal voyaging, her dredging of the deeps of her inner Sargasso for its harvest of buried treasure.

Hilary Stevens tells her interviewers in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing that the artist's private life is only a matrix and ultimately irrelevant in the judgment of her work. “Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best—out of it we try to fashion the crystal, the clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is … relevant; that is what matters.”²⁴ What matters is that in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing May. Sarton has wedded austerely classic form with dynamic, even demonic subject matter. Her novel shows that women carry over into art the conception of life as an education in loving. Mrs. Stevens is a searching study of the difficulties of being a woman and a writer which triumphs over those difficulties in expressing them, and is itself the vindication of such a life.

Notes

1. See May Sarton's Plant Dreaming Deep (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1968), p. 145; Journal of a Solitude (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1973), pp. 90-91; and A World of Light (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1976), p. 22. Hereafter referred to as PDD, JAS, and WL.

2. JAS, p. 41.

3. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1965), p. 81. Hereafter referred to as MSHMS.

4. Ibid., pp. 155-156, 190-191.

5. Ibid., p. 190.

6. Don Juan, I. cxciv. 1-2.

7. PPD, p. 91.

8. JAS, p. 180.

9. Ibid., p. 122.

10. Ibid., pp. 57, 122.

11. Ibid., p. 12.

12. Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken” repr. from College English, 24 (Oct., 1972) in Adrienne Rich's Poetry, sel. and ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, Norton Critical Ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1975), p. 95.

13. MSHMS, p. 18.

14. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1957), p. 81.

15. JAS, p. 55.

16. MSHMS, p. 172.

17. “When We Dead Awaken,” Adrienne Rich's Poetry, p. 96.

18. JAS, p. 141. Sarton remarks in A World of Light that she early felt the conflict between her father's example of singelminded scholarship and her mother's warm protean humanity. Her father told her mother on marrying her, “I shall always put my work before you or any child we may have”—and was as good as his word. WL, pp. 21, 52.

19. Introduction to MSHMS, p. xiv.

20. A Room of One's Own, pp. 90, 105.

21. JAS, p. 91.

22. MSHMS, p. 129.

23. PDD, p. 151.

24. MSHMS, p. 125.