Mrs Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing is re-published by Open Road Media in 2014, with an introduction by Carolyn G Heilbrun. It first appeared in 1965, and was her first openly gay or lesbian novel. Sarton, the poet, diarist and novelist, tried to reject the label “lesbian writer”, preferring to consider herself a writer who plumbed the depths of emotions and relationships, whatever the nature of the relationships being described.Reading the novel 50 years after initial publication certainly reveals that some books are of their time: what might have been frank and almost shocking back then reads tamely now. The “lesbian” parts of the novel are meek indeed – blink, you feel, and you’d almost miss them. The story centres around the poet and one-time novelist Hilary Stevens, now in her 70s, who had success with a novel when she was in her twenties, but has since turned to poetry. The novel takes place within a day of her life as she waits for interviewers from a literary magazine who are coming to talk to her that afternoon about her life and work. Within this framework, Hilary returns to episodes in her life. Memory forms a counterpoint and backbone to the almost quotidian story of a writer waiting for interviewers, pushed to re-live her life through the past while anticipating their questions. The book reads as a mediation through a writer’s mind – the story weaving and meandering through her past, as she wakes, talks with a young man, Mar, who helps her with her garden, and goes through the hours until the interviewers come. We learn of Hilary’s young marriage, her novelistic success as a young woman in England at the time and her subsequent widowhood. “Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one’s own secret, and often terrible and frightening self,” she tells the young, questing Mar, searching in his own way through his own burgeoning alternative sexuality. The interviewers, Jenny and Peter, are young, polite, conscientious readers of her work, bringing a respect to the proceedings that Hilary has always craved. They also open the door on another pre-occupation that seems quaint to debate now: whether women can truly be artists given the demands on them to wives and mothers, and the debate runs right through the past, through Hilary’s reminisces into the present day interview. Says Jenny to Peter while they drive down to Hilary: “I guess women pay a pretty high price for whatever talents they have. I guess it’s harder for them than it is for a man, always.” Peter counters with his belief that, “A writer’s life is obsessed, driven ... I just don’t believe you can do it with your right hand while your left hand rocks a cradle, Jenny!” The debate will come up again, and seem antique reading them from a distance that includes the feminist movement of the 1970s when so many barriers holding women back in the western world have tumbled, and being a woman writer or a woman anything is not quite the struggle it was back in the mid 1960s.Antique too, in its way, is Hilary’s assertion that she loved both men and women – as did Sarton herself. There are no tell-all passages in her reminisces or her comments in the interview with Peter and Jenny – the comments are almost an aside, even, barely there. Yes, they might have been more shocking back in that less frank and more straight-laced era. But reading them against a background of the 21st century means you start wondering what the fuss was about. But that’s the thing with reading this novel – you have to peel away the layers and read it rather differently than a contemporary novel. The revelation of homosexual love was almost scandalous, shocking and Sarton’s publisher advised her against publishing it. That she did was an act of bravery, and meant she was forever after “outed” as a lesbian writer – which, as I mentioned, caused its own discomfort. I was curious to read this classic – having recently come to Sarton via her melodious, almost dream- like published journals. I found it somewhat meandering, with ironically, the past reminisces holding more interest, and containing more meat than the present day narrative. The older Mrs Stevens comes across as somewhat pernickety, too cautious – a contrast to the younger, more daring woman who went on to choose writing as her life’s work. Perhaps that’s a consequence, so to speak, of age – the slowing down. When Mar complains of feeling so tired, at his young age, Hilary exclaims, “Good God, boy, you’ve only just begun!” And yet, in many ways, this is a rich novel, a story that takes in the vicissitudes of time, what it means to be a writer, and one who lives alone, what it means to love, to survive, to live and question both the times you find yourself in, as well as to attempt to break out of those strictures, as the fictional Hilary Stevens attempted, and as Sarton herself so often achieved. Reading this novel against the biographical elements of Sarton’s life you can’t help comparing the fictional with the real life writer – there seems so much of Sarton transmogrified into the ageing Stevens, finally finding herself in her late, but welcome fame.
Upon its publication in the early 1960s, May Sarton worried that Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing would result in her forever being classified as a lesbian writer. That she was a lesbian was no secret since she had lived on openly homosexual life with relationships with notables such as Elizabeth Bowen. Her concern was that readers would focus on the characters bisexuality and miss what she had to say about love which to her was the same whether it was shared as part of a gay or straight relationship. Early in Mrs. Stevens... she tells a young protegee, "Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see..." and then counsels that it doesn't matter whom one loves as long as one does. Love to Sarton is a journey of discovery, with self discovery being perhaps the greatest end to the quest. The plot of the novel details a day in the life of the now elderly Mrs. Hilary Stevens, upper middle class American, raised in genteel remoteness but stylish parents in Boston and abroad. In early adulthood she finds herself the author of a controversial novel which she thinks is a fake and then soon after as the wife of a seemingly robust Englishman who had been ruined by the war. Later she becomes a poet of some renowned, and then a forgotten poet buried in anthologies. At the point where the novel begins, Hilary's secluded life on Cape Cod has been interrupted by a late wave of fame. Her newest volume of poems has raised interest in her again, hence on the day of the story she is to be interviewed by a pair of reporters. Her preparations for the interview have caused her to rethink her life and work, and especially the influences of some of the Muses to her art. In relief to this, she has become a mentor to a young man who is suffering from the failure of a love affair between himself and an older man. Readers who like a pensive book about love, life and art which is long on soul though light on action are likely to enjoy this novel. As always Sarton's prose has a womanly sturdiness to it, nearly as fragrant and vivid as Colette's, an author summoned several times by Mrs. Stevens. One thing that Mrs. Stevens insists on is that woman writers must retain their femininity. I found Mrs. Stevens oddly similar to John Updike's Seek My Face. The similarity was so striking that midway through I sought out my volumes of Updike's reviews and essays to see if at any point he mentioned Ms. Sarton's novel. I found little mention of Sarton at all. Odd since they have a great deal in common.
What do You think about Mrs. Stevens Hears The Mermaids Singing (1975)?
I really didn't like this book. I got it for free during my trial Kindle Prime subscription and even though I read most of it, I couldn't motivate myself to finish it before my trial subscription ended. I've read and enjoyed a couple of May Sarton's journals and I had just finished her novel, The Way We Live Now, so I thought I would check this one out since it's so highly esteemed as a lesbian novel that doesn't portray lesbianism in a negative or depressing light. Maybe it was unique at the time, but it was trapped in the pre-feminist thinking of the time, assuming that women must choose between family/relationships and art. I think it also assumed that men would never change, that the pre-feminist selfishness of men was somehow innate, and that men had nothing to gain from women having their own lives instead of catering only to them. It was interesting in how it looked at what it means for women to have muses. But it was too abstract and unemotional to ultimately capture my interest.
—Kathy Skaggs
While reading, I accidentally referred to this book as Mrs. Sarton Hears the Mermaids Singing more than once. And that's really not an inappropriate title. This is my third Sarton novel, and I don't know why it took me so long to realize that each of her main characters are poorly disguised versions of herself. A reclusive little old lady writer who is bisexual/a lesbian and has anger issues and loves flowers - that describes both Mrs. Stevens and Ms. Sarton.Also, nothing much happens in Sarton's novels. The main character thinks about things and has conversations about them and has epiphanies about them, the end.So, her novels aren't particularly good, I have just realized.But on an emotional level, I still really love Sarton's work. Maybe just because she was an elderly lesbian, writing her novels in a cottage not far from my hometown, decades before I was born.
—Steph
Perhaps this is an autobiographical novel of a different sort – there are so many parallels between Hilary Stevens and May Sarton’s life and especially their muse, the source of their inspiration, that this novel is a kind of laying bare one poet’s aesthetic, one poet’s lifelong endeavor to bind love, deeply emotional attachment to another, with the prime spark that lights her art, her poetry.Thus MRS STEVENS becomes a revelation of one poet’s artistic process – the act of creation – something so rare that I know of few examples – Trauffaut’s interviews with Hitchcock, perhaps, or Thomas Hoving’s two interview volumes with Andrew Wyeth.MRS STEVENS is a rich, true and important novel, disguised in an elderly poet looking back on her life as she prepares for an interview and then the interview itself that is in a large part a source of self discovery for her and a tantalizing series of insights for us.
—Bill
