by May Sarton
“But you haven’t answered! You don’t want to!”
He gave her his serious smile, “You’ve got me in a corner. What makes you think I know?”
“I think maybe you like women,” she said. It was her opinion that Geroge really did not like them. He was trying to fall in love, to catch it from her, but the Hell was that she knew and he knew that so far the operation had not been successful.
“Yes,” Peter said. “I do. I should have thought that a rather common masculine characteristic, like having to shave.” He chuckled.
“I think, for a lot of men, women loom,” she said sadly.
“Gods who have to be propitiated with human sacrifice?” He waited for her laugh and then saw that she was not laughing.
“I meant that as a joke, Jenny, let’s not be so serious,” he squeezed her hand fraternally.
“I have to be serious about this. I can’t help it. It’s my life after all.” She pulled her hand away. “I want to marry, Peter, and have children, and a house, and a dog, and several cats. I want to be treated like a human being and to be a human being, don’t you see?”
Peter accelerated and passed two huge trucks. The spurt of speed suggested impatience, and Jenny watched him out of the corner of her eye, in a sort of desperation.
“It’s all right for a man to have work and to be married, but when a woman does, it’s a threat.”
“Maybe a man wants a woman to be his woman, and not some art’s woman … maybe it makes him feel insecure,” he hazarded.
“What about F. Hilary Stevens then?” she asked aggressively. “She got married.”
“Her husband died young—we can’t know.”
“Colette had three husbands!”
“Exactly!” For the first time Peter felt needled and cross. “It wasn’t the sort of life you have just described so nostalgically, was it? A writer’s life is obsessed, driven, in the hands of powers he can hardly control himself. Writing must seem often the only reality. I just don’t believe you can do it with your right hand while your left hand rocks a cradle, Jenny!”
“But how can you be a good writer and not live? How do you ever know?”
“How did we ever get into this?” he asked the air, for Jenny’s head was turned toward the woods. “I have an idea your questions had better wait for the horse’s mouth. We should be there soon.”
“How soon?”
“Don’t panic. Just ferret about in my briefcase and find that yellow sheet with all the directions and tell me what it says. We must be close to Gloucester now.”
Jenny found the crumpled piece of paper, was amused to discover that F. Hilary Stevens’ typing was as erratic as her own. “It says, keep going past Gloucester and Rockport around Cape Ann, until you come to Folly Cove. At Folly Cove turn left on a rough unpaved road and keep going past two abandoned quarries to the end! …. Folly Cove? Abandoned quarries? How symbolic can you get? She’s fooling.” Jenny felt laughter rising in her, instead of the tears she had so feared would overcome her. And this bubble of laughter grew and grew and became irresistible. Peter chortled beside her, occasionally gasping “Folly Cove” and “quarries,” as relieved as Jenny was to be out of the dangerous passage. The furies had gone away.
Now they drove through delicious waves of salt air; it came and went, tantalizing, and after they had turned away from the classic prettiness of Rockport, there were occasional glimpses of the ocean, around a bend, or back of a house. It lay there, stretched silk on this windless day, perfectly serene, silencing the city-bred, opulent background to the tight white houses.
“Oh Peter, do stop! I want to look.…”
He turned off the road by an old stone pier, beside a lobster joint still boarded up for the winter. They got out and walked down to the end of the pier, taking deep breaths of the air, relieved to break for the moment the inexorable momentum of the drive.
“Imagine living here!” Jenny said lifting her face to the air as if to drink it.
“Rock, kelp, waves, light.…”
“Too much light. Too open. I could never utter a word! What could one say in front of this?” But Peter had bent his head and was not really listening. He walked off by himself then, and when he came back, said, concluding a train of thought, “Listen, Jenny, let’s be clear about one thing. I want you to keep in mind that as I see it, the crux of this interview has to do with the whole creative thing for a woman poet.”
“Why not just a poet? Why haul in the woman part?”
“Listen, porcupine, keep those quills down for a second, will you? You said a while ago that it was harder to be a woman writer.”
“You said it!”
“O.K., I said it. That’s not what I’m talking about anyway. What seems to me valid and interesting is the question posited at such huge length by Robert Graves in The White Goddess—who and what is the Muse? Here we have a poet who has gone on writing poems long after the Muse, at least in a personal incarnation, has become irrelevant. What sustains the intensity? Is there a White God?” he asked and immediately felt how funny it sounded. They both laughed.
“Of course not!”
“Well then.…”
Jenny looked out to sea. “Maybe Aphrodite rises from the waves now and then.…”
Peter looked at his watch. “Come on!” he called back, running to the car. “Well be late.”
They were, actually, close to the cove, though they could not see it, around the next point. It lay there, bounded on both sides by monumental rocks, shining and still. But in hot pursuit of the gods, they hardly looked. Besides, it was necessary almost at once to turn up the “rough” road on the left. Rough it was; it looked as if it had been created by a giant throwing rocks down a dry brook-bed, and Peter and Jenny were fiercely jolted. On the left they recognized one of the quarries, now a dark green pool at the foot of a steep cliff; clumps of iris around the lower edge gave it the look of a Japanese garden. They passed a shuttered clapboard house, still sealed up for winter. A bone-shaking crack brought “Damn!” to Peter’s lips.
“What was that?”
“A rock. I just hope it didn’t crack the axle.”
The car shuddered, but managed to grip the uneven surface again, and plunged upwards past some unattractive scrub, black birch, and locusts, past an overgrown apple orchard, and finally past a much larger quarry on the right, it too filled with water.
The quarries gave a classic air to the otherwise untamed landscape; the combination, it occurred to Jenny, did seem to have some relation to the poems. But it was impossible to speak at the moment because of the jolts.
“Look, there it is!” and Peter swung in through a narrow drive between two giant clumps of lilac and out into a circle in front of the house. Groups of daffodil and narcissus were in flower below a broken down stone wall. The house itself, not clapboard as they had somehow expected, but gray fieldstone, with white trim at the windows and a bright blue door, was more of an “estate” than Jenny at least had imagined it would be. She felt extremely nervous, as Peter stopped the car. In silence they gathered up notebooks and handbags, gently closed the car doors, performing these actions as if on tiptoe, very much aware of the possibility that they were being observed. They walked up to the blue door and Peter pulled the old-fashioned door bell. Inside they could hear a faint tinkle, so faint, and without reverberation, that it seemed as if the house might be empty.
“What if …,” Jenny whispered.
Part II: the interview
Before Jenny could finish her sentence, the door opened in their faces. They towered there like awkward giants looking down at the small stooped personage looking up at them, head a little on one side, who said in a surprisingly resonant voice to come from so frail a vessel.
“So it’s you! Do come in. You must be tired after your long journey. Planes are exhausting, I always feel; one can’t settle in somehow.”
F. Hilary Stevens did not look as Jenny expected her to look and was far less formidable t
han she had imagined. The fine childlike hair, cut short to cover the head as closely as a bird’s feathers, was disarming; disarming, too, one lock allowed to fall over the narrow forehead at a slightly rakish angle. Below this cap, the eyebrows, pale and tufted, the sharply boned nose, the penetrating light-gray eyes, half-hooded under sensitized drooping lids, gave her an owlish look. But no one could have called this extraordinary face a mask, even an owl-mask, it was far too mobile.
“You are Miss Hare, I presume? And this is Mr. Silver-stone.”
“Selversen.”
They shook hands. It was apparent that whatever went on inside F. Hilary Stevens she would have to be called a lady.
“Selversen, is it? Swedish or Danish. I sometimes think that people should always be named for animals. Then one might remember—Hare, for instance, is not forgettable. Perfect name for a writer, I should imagine, those wild eyes, and not to be tamed. Still, you look quite calm, Miss Hare. Would you like to wash?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Up one flight, and to your left. You may use the downstairs facilities, if you will,” and she waved Peter toward a door under the stairs. “You will find me in the big room,” she called to the disappearing two.
Each was glad of the moment in which to register the complete sensation, the first—always so significant—impact, and to do it alone. Peter had caught at once an impression of a person advancing and retreating at the same instant, both transparent and secret, like her face, a person in continuous dialogue with herself. In the bathroom he hummed with excitement.
Jenny had no time to define what she had seen, for when she opened her bathroom door she was faced by a wall of photographs and pencil sketches, and scanned them rapidly, thinking, I must manage to come back here again before we leave. There was a faded brown photograph of a British officer, a riding crop in one hand. Captain Stevens, no doubt. There was an old man in a beret with a thick moustache like Joffre’s, in workmen’s corduroys, standing against an old stone wall. Beside him, in an oval gold frame, a pastel sketch of a woman in a huge Edwardian plumed hat, leaning on a closed parasol, her face bent toward a rose bush, so one caught only a tantalizing glimpse. There was a charming photograph of Elinor Wylie standing in a doorway, smiling; one of Mary Garden lying on a chaise longue, and beside it several other actresses or singers whom Jenny failed to recognize. No one on that wall can be under eighty now, and most of them must be dead, she thought. And it gave her a queer sensation; the woman waiting downstairs was so alive, so much in command, yet what a complex past a human being drags behind him by the time he is in his seventies … all those faces, all those lives, all one’s life, so much of it still undigested, so many doors closed on things one might rather not look back on, so much still troubling (but I am reading myself into this, and none of it may be true). Did F. Hilary Stevens suffer guilt? Did she weep in the night? Or did her generation itself provide her with a kind of immunity, moulded as she had been before World War I, and before Freud? But, after all, photographs freeze the current of life. It was there waiting downstairs, the electric current.
When Jenny walked into the big room, Peter was standing with his back to the open fire, looking very much at home.
“I couldn’t tear myself away from all those people,” she said.
“What a crew! Antediluvian!” Hilary Stevens gave a light apologetic laugh. “Never look at ’em, don’t you know?” Then, as if to herself, “Know them by heart. It’s a mistake to put up photographs. They go dead on you.”
“What have I missed?” Peter asked.
“Oh, people … photographs … all the people!” F. Hilary Stevens waved them away like so many ghosts whose presence she took for granted, who, perhaps, did not interest her. “I put them up when I first moved in, ten years ago, staking my claim, as it were, but since that day I’ve hardly looked at them.” Mrs. Stevens was sitting in the wing chair by the fireplace. The strong afternoon light sharpened the planes of her face; she looked her age. “How do you take your tea, Miss Hare?”
“Strong, with sugar and milk, please.”
“Americans like lemon. I have a lemon, just in case, but of course good English tea requires milk. Miss Hare is a sensible person,” she announced to Peter, with evident satisfaction.
“Very sensible,” said Peter, giving Jenny an amused look, “very sensible indeed.”
F. Hilary Stevens caught the glance, and pounced, “No irony, please. There is nothing so irritating—so fashionable too. I am so tired of irony.” She deftly poured the tea as she spoke, giving Peter a mischievous smile as she handed him the cup to pass to Jenny, “Or is it that I am afraid of it?” she asked the air, resuming the dialogue with herself. “It kills poetry perhaps.”
“Perhaps …,” Peter ventured as a question.
“You’re not sure?” She laughed again. “Neither am I! The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.” The withdrawal was complete. She was not to be drawn so soon. “And your tea, Mr.… Selversen?”
“Milk, please. Who would dare say lemon?”
“Why not? You’re not sensible, are you? Men don’t have to be.”
“Do women?” Jenny asked.
“Of course, naturally. Women have to deal with the things men in their wildness and genius have invented. It’s clear as daylight.” The eyes hooded themselves while F. Hilary Stevens poured her own cup, by now strong, and added a lashing of milk. “Pass the sandwiches, if you would be so good,” she said to Peter, and to Jenny, or to herself, murmured, “Anchovy. I spent hours slicing through thick slices of bread to achieve a reasonable facsimile of a sandwich. You can have no idea,” she turned to Peter with her most charming smile, “how sensible women have to learn to be.”
“And if they are wild and genius-y, what then?” Peter asked as he offered the plate—gold-edged, wreathed in roses, and piled high with elegant little sandwiches—to Jenny.
“Then.…” The pause was held as by a rather fine actress. But in mid-air, she changed her mind. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.” She stuffed half a sandwich in her mouth. When she had swallowed it, she asked, “Will you tell me when the interview begins? I feel rather nervous. I was not able to work very well this morning, so many questions, probable or improbable, hovered in the air. I am not good at answering other people’s questions,” she dared them. “So often they seem irrelevant.”
“Yes, I know.” Peter sat down and crossed his legs, deliberately unhurried. “We’ll try to be relevant, as relevant as we can. But if you like, you could both ask the questions and give the answers; we have no rules. In fact, what a good idea! That would relieve us of all responsibility!”
“Oh, I am not responsible—God forbid!” Then she added, obviously enjoying herself, “It was just contemplating your responsibility that made me nervous this morning.”
“We were dreadfully nervous,” Jenny said.
“Really?” The gray eyes narrowed. “But it’s your job, after all; you are used to it, aren’t you?”
“You don’t get ‘used to’ genius,” Peter said gently. “No interview in my experience has been in any way like any other.”
“Mmmm,” Mrs. Stevens tasted this remark with evident pleasure and then set the pleasure aside with a shake of her head, “Let me say at once that I have no illusions about my ‘genius.’ ” She gazed out at the sea and half closed her eyes. “A small, accurate talent, exploited to the limit, let us be quite clear about that!” Then she added, perhaps unaware that she had spoken aloud, “Damn it!” Opened her eyes wide, and turned back to the tray before her. “Have some more tea. When does the interview begin?”
“Whenever you choose, looking back, to have had it begin,” Peter said, passing his cup.
“I am to be my own censor?”
“Would you dislike that?”
“Poetry writing, I sometimes think, is nothing but self-censorship. I spend my life disciplining the impulse, when the impulse is there. But I sometimes wonder whe
ther if I had quelled the censor, I might not have done better. Women are afraid of their daemon, want to control it, make it sensible like themselves.” She turned to Jenny who was grateful to be included. She had felt as if she were watching a fast ping-pong game and, as a player, was hardly in the league. “Do you agree, Miss Hare?”
“Oh yes! I suppose I’m a fool to think it should get easier as one gets older.”
“Nothing gets easier as one gets older. Everything is harder, even buttoning one’s slipper!” Jenny instinctively looked down to note the elegant slippers, bronze, with one button. And Miss Stevens followed her eyes. “It’s the stooping,” she explained. “The trouble is that one becomes a kind of donkey.” And she laughed. “Yet …,” the dialogue set itself up again, “I suppose the donkey teaches one a few things, to handle oneself with less waste of energy, for instance. There is less energy to waste, don’t you know? Writing poems is always easy and always very hard at the same time—at any age.”
“In what way easy, Mrs. Stevens?” Peter placed his cup and saucer down with a click on the tray. The click did something to the atmosphere—he had meant it to.
“The interview begins here,” said F. Hilary Stevens, settling back into her chair, and almost entirely closing her eyes. “Easy … hard …,” she murmured. “Easy because one can’t do it at all unless one is propelled. Set in motion, as it were. Until there is momentum. Elusive,” she opened her eyes and smiled. “I have sometimes raced the motor for hours and found I was standing still. Something went agley. The darn thing didn’t start.”
“You weren’t in gear,” Peter suggested.
“Precisely. How does one get in gear? What does it?”
“Possibly that is the question we had most in mind to ask,” Peter exchanged a glance with Jenny, a glance of delight and of triumph, then added soberly. “But just because it is the question, I suggest we leave it for a moment and come back to it through the logical sequence of your work.” He took out a pad and laid it on his knee. F. Hilary Stevens watched him with a slightly mocking, slightly nervous look which he caught as he lifted his head. “Is that agreeable to you, Mrs. Stevens?”