Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing by May Sarton

"Odd, isn't it?  How these quarries, blasted open by dynamite, the scene of so much violence, so much lifting and carrying too, after they are abandoned, become magic places, deep ponds."  She paused, probing the image which had been spoken before she really saw what she had been given.  "Rich and peaceful," she said.  "As far as I can see, it's not a question of fidelity, of the violent encounter with no possible future against some unimaginable lasting fatigue.  No, what is important is dept.  Hell is very deep, as well as Heaven, so we can almost never quarrel with Hell."  She looked out over the tranquil deep water, a dark green, opaque, she noticed today, under the overcast sky.  How to speak to a wound?

May Sarton's (absurdly titled) Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing tells the story of a day in the life of poet F. Hilary Stevens.  Hilary has been a novelist and a poet all her life, once to some acclaim, but it's only now in her old age that one of her new collections has become a hit.  (The fact that, in this novel, a collection of poems is a bestseller ought to tell you exactly how contemporary it is.)  The fame is unexpected, its rewards more dubious perhaps than those of the poems themselves.  But it results in two interviewers being sent to her Cape Ann home.  The interview, by stepping chronologically through her past publications, dredges up all the old memories that are the context of the poems: a dead husband, several abortive lesbian love affairs, a long stay of convalescence in the hospital.

Along the way, Mrs. Stevens explores several aspects of what it means to be a writer, and a woman writer particularly.  The metaphor of the quarries above suggests that poems are the result of an encounter with violence that produces depth.  Poetry has an alchemical power to transform life, and it enjoys a freedom that feeling unmediated never can:

Everything could now be said--this was the intoxicating discovery Hilary made.  She could go the limit with her feeling; she could come to terms with it by analyzing it through the written word.  She could praise, rage, despair, love, in peace.  No one could say her nay: even the self-imposed censor could be quelled.

For Hilary, one of the biggest questions is how to be both a woman completely and a writer completely; when her husband was alive it didn't seem possible, but we learn that his death, while tragic, opened her up to new possibilities.  The affairs she has with women underline the novel's queer themes; its bookended by visits from a young Cape Ann teen who is struggling with his own same-sex yearnings.  During all these revelations, Hilary keeps slipping out of the interview room to stare out of windows and grapple with the intensity of her memories.

There's a strange melodrama to these scenes: Did she forget about her husband's death?  The hospital?  Far from being a "descent into hell" of feeling, the interview seems largely cerebral.  It's conducted by a knowledgeable, if somewhat overbearing, man and a younger, less knowledgeable but clearly more intensely sensitive, woman.  They're meant to represent Hilary's masculine and feminine aspects, no doubt, and as a result the interview mostly feels like a single brain talking to itself.  There's not enough tension to make the torrent of feeling believable, no sense that Hilary is really being challenged from the outside at all.

But mostly--and maybe this is a harsh thing to say--the book falls flat for me because I don't really trust it to say something valuable about literary genius.  It's a well written book, with sharply observed characters, but genius isn't there, and that would be all right enough if it didn't present itself as being about genius in the first place.  This seems connected to the book's insistence on describing Hilary's poetry without ever presenting any verse at all.  Did Sarton, who must have felt some identification with her character, feel unequal to the task of writing the poems themselves?  It's not about the poems, I guess, but about Hilary's creative life, but it seems to me like a mistake to pretend the two are separable.