Lily Briscoe
A Self-Portrait
an autobiography by
Mary Meigs
Talonbooks • Vancouver • 1981
to Barbara Denting and Marie-Claire Blais
Contents
Part Two: Dolly Lamb and Lily Briscoe
Except thyself may be Thine enemy. Captivity is consciousness; So’s liberty.
Emily Dickinson
Part One Beginnings
Chapter One
Does every life deserve an autobiography? Does mine? I belong to an endangered species which in the eyes of many deserves to be extinct: the gently born, the monied, the sheltered, many of us squeamish about the things that make up the substance of life, its dark truth composed of everything we deny or refuse to think about. If we are lucky, as I have been, we have made friends of the witnesses of life, and have been humbled by them. I, who have never suffered from want, have known only the exigence of my own character, which has demanded that I rebel against my respectable and conservative family genes, though one scarcely knows for what reasons one branches off from the path that seems ordained by one’s inheritance. I carried the baggage of that inheritance for a long time, though I gradually made decisions that made it imperative to get rid of it—decisions not to marry, to be an artist, to listen to my own voices. It was easy for me not to marry, for I was never seriously tempted; to be an artist was harder, for how could I know how much painful ground there was to cover between the wish and the becoming? I remember after World War II, when I had decided once and for all to become a painter, a friend of mine looked at some of my paintings and said, “Don’t you want to marry and have babies?” I said that my paintings were my babies, a reply which made him look extremely dubious. “Babies are more important than pictures,” he said. But, protected as I was by a beginner’s blindness, a beginner’s ignorance, I stubbornly continued to think that paintings were more important. What had taken place in me was a coalescing of this stubbornness and a kind of pride like vanity, but stronger than humiliation, united with the conviction that there was something there in my depths. (I thought I had depths.) The fact that this something was invisible to others was a goad which, again and again, produced the defiant thought, “I’ll show you!” It required years of false starts, of failures, of periods of doubt and despair, for me to show anyone anything, or even to understand that one is not necessarily an artist by wanting to be one. In the course of those years, it was my good fortune, gradually, to acquire friends whose lives were wholly dedicated to their work as painters or writers or poets. They were, or are, the “witnesses of life,” in a sense that I had never been. I had to learn, even if it was chiefly through these friends, that an artist must above all see, not a sterilized fragment of life, but its ugly paradoxes and “terrible beauty.” I had to learn to get over some of my squeamishness about sex, for part of my inheritance was a belief in the life of the mind and the Christian soul at the expense of the life of the body. In my family, the body was unmentionable and sex was a secret subject, taboo, along with its vocabulary, including innocent words that might suggest it. Much great art has come from the sublimation of sex; I think not only of women writers like the Brontës or Emily Dickinson, whose passion was distilled in their art, but also of men such as Hopkins or George Herbert. Two of my friends, Hortense Flexner and Marianne Moore, were poets who belonged to this race. In my case, my upbringing prevented me from accepting my sexual nature by making me ashamed of it, doubly ashamed, because I belong to a despised sexual minority. The two chief tasks of my life have been to become an artist and to overcome my shame, and, at the age of sixty-one, I am only just beginning to feel that I have accomplished them.
We are formed, I suppose, by everybody we meet, out of resistance or emulation, but our choice of friends often seems to come from the pressure of whatever in us wants to grow, or refuses to grow. My meetings with Barbara Deming and Marie-Claire Blais came about because I recognized in their work a beauty which I wished for in my own work, but felt I hadn’t attained, because they were beings somewhat like myself, but further advanced on their paths as artists. I was introduced to Marie-Claire by Edmund Wilson, but my meeting with him was pure chance (though I believe that chance is destined), which grew from a parent chance—that I had bought a house in Wellfleet and lived there with Barbara. Edmund’s first paralyzing question to me had been, “Are you related to the Meigs of the Hill School?” a question I was unable to answer, except to mumble that all Meigses are, willy-nilly, related, there being so few of us. Later, he had become our friend and reigned over our winter life in Wellfleet, in which good friends were scarce and life so austere that many Wellfleetians took to drink or escaped in other ways. I have found a birthday sonnet (imitation Wordsworth) that I wrote from Pamet Point Road (where Barbara and I lived) on May 8, 1966, which gives an idea of our humourous and humble relation to Edmund:
EDMUND! Thank heaven thou livest at this hour!
Pamet hath need of thee; she is a fen
Of turbid waters: paintbrush, pencil, fren-
Etically struggle to preserve our dower
Of peace of mind and hope beyond our ken.
Oh! Cheer us up and read Verlaine again
To us, who tremble in our ivory tower.
Your soul is like the Sun and dwells on high,
You have a voice whose sound is like the ocean.
When in a happy mood, you set in motion
Our satellite thoughts that orbit all you say.
O indefatigable planet, I