by Lynn Martin

Dear May Sarton:

      Please accept my heartfelt apologies. What made me aware I was a lesbian? A sudden revelation I was a woman who had, for fifty years, married or not, children or not, been surrounded since birth by women: mother, sisters, aunts, next door neighbors, schoolmates, friends?
      Why did it take fifty years for me to finally recognize myself in the mirror? And what provided the final push? Cris Williamson’s voice promising to be my sister forever? Or Mrs. Stevens who heard the mermaids sing? I read May Sarton’s Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing in 1976.
      Twenty-nine years ago! Can so much have changed in myself and the world in such a short time? May Sarton never says the word lesbian. That was one of my main criticisms of the book.
      Well, duh! Mrs. Stevens (Hilary) isn’t a lesbian. At least according to her own definition of herself, and twenty-nine years later I finally get it. It wasn’t words we were groping for in the ‘70s, but the ability to define ourselves.
      And yes, May did. Both May and Hilary Stevens, the main character in her book, were bisexuals, something few people were even close to defining in 1976.
      Mrs. Stevens was cuttingedge writing, because May Sarton talked about women who loved woman as natural. And even more earth shaking, she identified women as “other.”
      As Carolyn Heilbrun says, “Her readers have been outsiders, like herself, primed for discovery, where bags have been secretly packed for weeks, or for a lifetime.”
     Today, so many years later, I can see May Sarton forever fused the independent, solitary woman-loving woman with the poet in me. It took a few more years for me to define myself as lesbian, as poet, and grab those waiting, packed bags, to brave life on my own.
     For May, for Hilary, and for me there has been the continual attempt to find a definition for the Muse. When May wrote this book, the Muse was definitely a woman, but the poet, except for a few exceptions, was a male. It was so hard to hear Hilary say, at the end of the book, “No, I think I would have liked to be a woman, simple and fruitful, a woman with many children, a great husband ... and no talent!”
      I, who was about to leave married life behind, didn’t want to hear that. Today, I understand. What we don’t know always looks more inviting, easier, than the troubles we do know.
     Having done both now; a dependent, married woman and a solitary, support yourself and write poems one, I know they both hold heaven and hell within them. Because life does. What May Sarton did insist on, with that peculiar now you see me, now you don’t, ability of hers, was the Muse for Hilary was a woman. So it has been for me.
      Or was the Muse simply being in love, and it didn’t matter what gender at all? May didn’t really answer that question. I haven’t been able to answer it, either. Probably because you never can pin the Muse down. He or she will forever remain elusive.
     “What I really want is to write poems,” says Hilary. What I didn’t hear above the mermaid’s song, was how difficult that was.
      Or that Hilary, like May, did have a room of her own. I didn’t, and it would take years to find one, and by that time I would be as old as Hilary Stevens, and wondering if, as a poet, I’d be “discovered” in my old age like Mrs. Stevens, like May Sarton, or like Emily Dickinson.
      Will I, too, leave everything in the dark of a bureau drawer?
     I do apologize May. You did say the solitary life, the life lived hearing the mermaids, is very, very difficult. “For it hurts to be alive, and that’s a fact.” “Life at best is terrifying, don’t you agree? One either keeps on growing and changing (and that is painful) or one begins to fossilize, take your choice!”
     All these years, I’ve had this low-grade resentment against May for luring me out the door.
     Oh yes, I’d mutter, you never told me about the need for a private income. But you did May. I just wasn’t listening. I apologize May Sarton, because I didn’t know then, that with or without money, wrestling with one’s demons (or daemons as you spelled it) is what poetry is all about. Your daemons were not my demons, but the wrestling is the same. And I can see now, we share the same insecurities of the minor poet.
     You did, finally, thanks to the women’s movement, become known, though more as a novelist than a poet. I am, however, still writing. I write in many genres, but like you, I think of myself primarily as a poet. I’m still writing because I read Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaid Singing. If you were alive today May, this would be a letter, and you loved/hated receiving letters.
     You always felt you had to answer them, and then resented the time it took away from your writing.
     You don’t have to answer this one May, you already did.

Lynn Martin lives in Brattleboro.