An afterthought – two tests for the uncertain buyer. (1) If you like the cover, the primitivesque rendering of Sarah and Patience in formal marital embrace, you’ll like the book, because it fits. (2) Did you like Charles Portis’s “True Grit”? Some of the droll ingenuousness when Sarah speaks is like that. Better buy it – this is not so likely to be made into a movie. For one thing, there’s no part for John Wayne.
From “Stagebill,” July, 1998, regarding the world premiere of the opera Patience & Sarah at the John Jay College Theater as part of the Lincoln Center Festival ’98
Notes on the Program
I wrote the first draft of the libretto for Patience & Sarah back in 1981, at the suggestion of a soprano friend, who said that despite the wide variety of roles she sang onstage, she never got to be who she really was and sing of her love for women. “Wouldn’t Patience & Sarah make a great opera?” she asked, referring to Isabel Miller’s pioneering love story, a book that had achieved cult status in the 1970s by virtue of its refreshingly positive treatment of women in love, not to mention its nearly unprecedented happy ending. Even better, the book was inspired by a true story of two Puritan women, the painter Mary Ann Willson and her companion, Miss Brundidge, who defied the conventions of their time to follow their hearts and live their dreams. We may have more choices today, but our motivations and our yearnings are the same: to find the lives we were born for; to live, as Sarah sings, “nice and snug and free.”
Paula Kimper rescued my libretto from its drawer twelve years later and extended her experience scoring music for documentary films and theater to this new venture: a full-length chamber opera. Richard Wagner set her creative wheels in motion. Paula mustered her courage and inspiration after our week-long immersion in the Ring cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in the spring of 1993. It was a huge shift in orientation for her from writing two-minute cues and 30-second “buttons” on a synthesizer to scoring over two hours of through-composed dramatic music to be performed live by eight singers and a chamber orchestra.
Over the next year, we acquired an option on the rights to the novel. I reworked the libretto with Paula and Doug Moser [director], Paula drafted a few scenes, and we connected with American Opera Projects. Lorie Phillips, Elaine Valby, and Laure Meloy were three of the five singers in the very first reading of four scenes in November, 1994. There is no substitute for the live experience, and feedback from the participants and audiences at AOP became an invaluable part of our creative process during the next few years. Arias and duets were tested and tossed. The libretto grew to four acts one summer out of fidelity to the novel, and shrank back to three out of dramatic necessity. Isabel Miller told us in one of our first meetings that she had intended to end her book exactly where we leave our pioneering women: on the Stratford boat dock, about to set sail for their new life together.
Now Patience & Sarah, the opera, sets sail from the Lincoln Center Festival. We are deeply grateful to American Opera Projects for bringing us this far, and also to our friends and families, opera lovers, and the gay and lesbian community for such generous, ongoing support. The donor list in this program is a testament of faith.
“Who knows what the future holds?” sings Patience at the end of the opera. The spirits of Mary Ann Willson and Miss Brundidge are in our hearts, and we look forward to seeing where our pioneering “artist maid” and “farmer maid” will journey next.
– Wende Persons, librettist.
An excerpt from the libretto of Patience & Sarah: A Pioneering Love Story
Music by Paula M. Kimper
Libretto by Wende Persons
Based on the novel by Isabel Miller
ACT II, Scene III: Patience, Sarah; Parson Peel
(Patience is alone in her room. Sarah dreams of Patience.)
PATIENCE: I want to live … I want to live! I want to paint. I want to paint my life in blazing colors, And my hopes in vibrant hues, I want to paint a place where I belong.
SARAH: (Stirring in her sleep) Hmm, I think about it.
PATIENCE: Oh, Sarah, why didn't I go with you?
SARAH: Oh, Patience, Patience.
PATIENCE: What was the worst thing that could happen to me?
SARAH: (Startled by something) I keep thinking every shadow is you.
PATIENCE: Oh, what had we begun?
PATIENCE: I see your face in the glow of the coals. I feel your breath in the wind on my neck. I hold you in my dreams.
SARAH: Did I hold you too hard?
PATIENCE: I long for your kiss.
SARAH: Did I hurt you?
PATIENCE: I would seek your lips again and be calm.
SARAH: Was that a feeling I felt in you?
PATIENCE/
SARAH: I want to live … I want to live! I want to paint. I want to live … I want to live! Nice and snug and free.
PATIENCE: I want to paint our lives in blazing colors, And our hopes in vibrant hues, I want to paint a place where we belong.
SARAH: I think about it. I think about it.
PATIENCE: Oh, Sarah, if only you could hear me.
SARAH: Oh, Patience, Patience.
PATIENCE: Where have you gone, my love?
SARAH: I think about it. I think about it.
SARAH: (Wakes with a start. It is early morning and Parson is strangely close beside her.) Patience?(Surprised and confused) Parson!
PARSON: (Quietly) Sam, I wish I believed you were twenty-two.
SARAH: I am. I was twenty-two on the thirty-first of July.
PARSON: Will you swear it?
SARAH: (Puzzled) Yes, I swear it.
PARSON: (To himself.) I'd like to stop sitting on my hands. I'm very tired of sitting on my hands. (Embraces her.)
SARAH: Parson!
PARSON: Sam, are you going to pretend you don't care for me?
SARAH: Not like that. Not that way. I can't.
PARSON: Can't or not, you do, and I do.
SARAH: Oh, no, Parson. (She pulls away, but he won't let go and keeps his arm around her.)
PARSON: I suppose you think men don't do this. I assure you that men have loved and embraced each other since the beginning of time. (Sarah is thoroughly shaken, sits quietly, hoping he'll stop. Parson sighs, removes his arm and says sarcastically) Ah, Sam – be nothing but a good boy. Scatter bastards all the way to Genesee… like a real American.
SARAH: (Shocked at Parson's language) Parson, don't be riled. I can't help it.
PARSON: Yes you can. You could consider that I might be telling you the truth. Men love each other, Sam.
SARAH: Stop calling me Sam. I'm Sarah.
PARSON: (Totally taken aback. Long pause. Then he laughs.) Oh, Lord! Good Lord! Didn't I know? Somehow, I must have…. It's so easy to see.
SARAH: (Embarrassed.) Maybe that's why you had … feeling?
PARSON: (Quickly) No, no.
SARAH: Maybe you won't want me 'round now.
PARSON: (Becoming formal.) Oh, my dear … girl! Do you think I feel no responsibility towards you? I've taken you miles out of your way.
SARAH: (She can hardly look him in the eye.) Well, don't you worry none. I don't regret a single moment of our long journey. It's just that we might not be easy anymore.
PARSON: I feel completely comfortable. More so than before.
SARAH: Good. (But she is clearly uncomfortable. Gets up and lifts a large box of books from the van.)
PARSON: Wait! Let me help you with that. (They both freeze and stare at each other. Long pause.)
An unpublished obituary by the poet Edward Field
Alma Routsong, November 26, 1924 – October 4, 1996
Alma Routsong, better know as Isabel Miller, the author of the now-classic lesbian novel, Patience & Sarah, died October 4, 1996, in Poughkeepsie, NY, after a long struggle with cancer.
My friend Neil and I first met her in 1963 at poet May Swenson’s apartment in Greenwich Village, with her partner Betty Deran. Alma had met
May Swenson at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, and when she and Betty moved to New York, they had looked May up.
Both Alma and Betty were voluminous, large-bottomed ladies whom we, terminally skinny as we are, were immediately drawn to. Alma, the larger of the two, was a soft, undisciplined, seemingly helpless creature who allowed Betty to solve the practical problems of her life, for Betty, dark and snapping eyed, was solid and sensible, but at the same time loony enough to contact Maynard Keynes on the Ouija board to ask him for solutions to economics problems at the financial institute where she worked. In spite of her feminism, and the gay-liberationist disapproval of “sex roles and stereotypes,” Alma continued to believe in the categories of “butch” and “femme.” With her sexual honesty, she sensed a basic difference in natures, at least in women of her generation and background.
Neil and I soon visited them in their Bleecker Street apartment and learned their remarkable story. After military service in the navy as a WAVE during World War II, Alma, who was without a clue that she was gay, got married to another ex-GI student. The prefab student housing they were forced to live in supplied the setting for her first novel, A Gradual Joy, which her writing teacher sent to a New York agent. It was published in 1953 by Houghton Mifflin, and the New York Times called it “light, airy, talky and … top-grade for its kind.” Ironically, for someone who was to become a militant lesbian, this work was often cited as a manual for successful marriage, heterosexual, of course.
With royalties from the book, she and her veterinarian husband were able to buy a house of their own, and while having four daughters, she somehow found time to write a second novel, Round Shape (1959). But this conventional life was exploded, when in 1962 she met Betty Deran in a Unitarian Church. The woman who introduced them said, “I know you two will just love each other.” They did, and Alma soon divorced her husband and moved to Washington where Betty, an economist, found a job in a government bureau. But two women living together without boyfriends in that era of witch hunts aroused suspicion, and Betty was fired from her job as a security risk.
By 1963 the couple were living in a more tolerant Greenwich Village. In their apartment on Bleecker Street they began exploring the occult, especially astrology. Skeptical about such parlor games as I was, I couldn’t help being drawn in as the two women analyzed our charts, each adding her own insights. We also had remarkable sessions on the Ouija board, though this was more successful when it was Betty’s fingers sharing the pointer with mine. When Alma and I were on the board together, we only got cries of “Mama, mama,” from infant spirits. But with Betty, who is a true medium, we spoke with figures as diverse as Edgar Cayce, JFK (“Are you at peace?” “No, killer roams free.”), Jack London (who turned out to be my “helper,” but was irritated with me), and Katherine Mansfield (who told us, paradoxically, that gay men ought to work at developing their feminine side!).
Alma wrote late into the night in her study, and, appropriately for her mystic side, by candlelight. Harry Koutoukis, playwright and actor with The Ridiculous Theatre Company, said that when he came home from the bars he used to look up and see the candles burning in her window as he passed her building.
Alma’s ancestors had come from Baden-Baden, and when Neil and I stopped off there on a trip to Europe, I collected a stone from a stream and brought it to her, thinking it would bring her vibrations of her people. But although she and her whole family had typically large Germanic peasant bodies, Alma had no interest in her ancestry. She was devoted to all things American: hymn singing around the harmonium, painting furniture with Shaker designs, and the like. She and Betty would spend vacations driving through rural towns, photographing Fourth of July parades. She liked homespun sayings that she repeated, e.g., when she was a little girl in rural Michigan, a neighbor child said to her, soberly, “There’s a sickness in our house.” Or when she and her husband moved into a house, he said, “I can’t wait until the dirt is our dirt.” Out in the country, large ladies like Alma were, and still are, the standard.
Even before feminism told women it was all right to be junoesque, Alma enjoyed her large, soft body. She believed in a science of physical types that described her as an endomorph, in which she came off very well, for according to this theory, endomorphs were the only type made for love, capable of endless snuggling and smooching. When she was tuned into a love partner, she said, she would start vibrating merely coming into her presence, and on touching breasts both went into orgasm. And this could go on and on. It sounded to me like one of those Indian saints who sits in permanent orgasm as her disciples worship her.
Much as James Merrill used a Ouija board as a stimulus for his poetry, their own Ouija board sessions led to Alma writing her next novel. While she and Betty Deran had been on vacation, they discovered in a small museum in Greene County, New York, the primitive paintings of pioneer Mary Ann Willson. On the wall was a card that said that Willson had settled with her friend, [Miss] Brudidge, on a farm in the area in the early 19th century. A light bulb went on. Two women homesteading together in early America? Was that possible?
Alma and Betty drove out to explore the ruins of the farmhouse they had lived in, and returning to New York contacted Willson on the Ouija board. Based on the information from these “conversations” with her subject, Alma plotted A Place for Us, the story of two women in early America falling in love and daring to set out by themselves to upstate New York and restore a ruined house.
Even in the let-it-all-hang-out sixties, no publisher would touch the book, and in 1969, she and Betty published it themselves in a small edition under the imprint of Bleecker Street Press using the pseudonym Isabel Miller. Though the book was only reviewed in the pioneer lesbian magazine, The Ladder, it quickly found an enthusiastic readership, which led McGraw-Hill to publish it in 1972 under the title Patience & Sarah. The New York Times compared it to the early lesbian classic, The Well of Loneliness. “The hope and fulfillment of Patience & Sarah is a more likely message for the sisterhood today…. Patience and Sarah remain alive long after the book is closed.”
As Betty Deran became absorbed in Gurdjieff studies, Alma turned toward the new feminism and joined a gay consciousness-raising group that included Kate Millett and Sydney Abbott. But I don’t think this is what finally broke her and Betty up. I had met them when I was trying monogamy after half a lifetime of promiscuity, and they were a rare, stable couple in the gay world of that time, but by now both Alma and my friend Neil were finding monogamy stifling. Alma told me when she escaped married life for the lesbian world she thought lesbians had had to fight so hard to be themselves they must be wonderful, caring people. She gave a rueful laugh over the reality she’d discovered, that lesbians were just as cruel and selfish as everyone else. But now she herself wanted to be out in that cruel world. In Alma’s case, actually it was her drinking as much as the constricting domestic bonds that ended the relationship with Betty. When she drank, the only way you could tell was that her talking became a monologue rather than a conversation.
Upon her separation with Betty, she got a job at Columbia University Press and moved into a ramshackle floor-through apartment in an old 19th century house on 19th Street that was always full of her lesbian/ feminist tribe. That is where her oldest daughter Natalie came to stay with her. It was extraordinary that her four daughters, whom she had deserted, like the heroine of Ibsen’s The Doll’s House, had been raised by their father and stepmother with no rancor against her for leaving them. As the daughters grew up, each sought her out in New York. Remarkably, they had come to understand her and her need to find her own way. I also stayed in the 19th Street apartment for a time, after Neil and I broke up, before going off to nurse my broken heart in Afghanistan.
This was after the Stonewall riot, and while I was away, I was especially pleased to hear that she carried a sign during a Gay Pride parade that read, “Stand Up, Friend, With Me,” the title of my first book. But her tastes in poetry were broad. Besides liking the poetry of M
ay Swenson, she also could quote reams of poetry by May’s bête noire, May Sarton.
Early on in her new freedom, Alma tried another live-in lover, but it didn’t work. One of Alma’s complaints was that she lay in the bathtub with the hot water running, and Alma, with her depression childhood, kept worrying over the fuel being burned to produce the hot water. She had grown up in a big dirt-poor family in Traverse City, Michigan, with a policeman father and a mother who was a nurse and a Seventh Day Adventist.
Later, she moved into Westbeth, the artists’ housing project in the West Village, where I had also landed a studio, but Alma was too down-to-earth to live in a building of just “artists.” Even when she switched to a building on Perry Street, which was more congenial, being full of odd village types, she was never happy in an apartment. Her vision of life, instilled from her childhood in the Midwest, meant living in a house with rocking chairs and Afghan lap robes and copies of Yankee Magazine in the magazine rack. So when she got a well-paying job at Time Magazine, she bought an old wooden house with a porch in Poughkeepsie and settled in with a new partner, Julie Weber, with whom she spent the rest of her life. As it turned out, her old mate, Betty Deran, also moved to Poughkeepsie, so that bond continued as strongly as ever. By this time, Alma had joined AA and given up drinking, but needed Betty’s butchy encouragement, even discipline, to get on with her writing.
When, in 1993, Alma developed cancer and had a colostomy, she hated it. She had always been proud of her perfect bowel movements, and one of the joys of having a mate, she said, was to be able to call them into the bathroom and show them. The indignities of living with a colostomy bag forced her into unnatural isolation until she succeeded in getting the doctor to reverse the colostomy. But that victory did not last long and the cancer spread. She now refused to see anyone or submit to any further medical treatment. When she collapsed and the doctors held out no hope for recovery, she spent her last days at home under hospice care, surrounded by friends and her four daughters. On her deathbed, in and out of consciousness, she was in love with all her former lovers. Betty Deran she called “the light of my life.” And when another old lover flew in from San Francisco and took her hand, Alma came to and murmured, “Sweet cunt.”
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