THIS IS A SALES PITCH. It’s also a rescue mission—of a book and a person. The book is Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait; the person is its author, Mary Meigs (1917–2002). Never heard of her? Join the crowd. Though Meigs was a gifted painter and a remarkable writer with an intriguing personal history, today she’s all but unknown—even among those immersed in lesbian history. I myself stumbled on her accidentally ten years ago in the course of researching A Saving Remnant, my dual biography of two social justice activists, David McReynolds and Barbara Deming.
Through mutual friends, Deming and Meigs first met in 1954 when both were 37. They soon became lovers and remained together for more than a decade. For half that time they lived, polyamorously, with the youthful French-Canadian novelist Marie-Claire Blaise. (Still in her twenties, Blaise had already won the praise of Edmund Wilson, the eminent literary critic; today, at 82, she continues to publish.) In A Saving Remnant, I told Mary Meigs’ story up to the point where she and Blaise broke away from the triangular relationship with Deming and settled together for several years in Brittany and then Québec. Meigs and Deming soon renewed contact and thereafter remained close friends (but not sexual lovers).
In A Saving Remnant I focused on Deming’s life story and included only that portion of Meigs’ history that crossed hers—a few paragraphs on their life together and a few lines on their later, lifelong friendship. A full biography of Mary Meigs remains to be written, and this brief essay is meant to encourage some enterprising young scholar to undertake this project. An abundance of manuscript material exists, much of it untouched, for telling Meigs’ story in the rich detail I believe warranted. Her own papers are housed at Bryn Mawr College’s Special Collections; Deming’s archive is at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library; and Marie-Claire Blaise’s papers are divided between the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Quebec and the Library and Archives Canada. An admirer of Lily Briscoe, I’ve been tempted to take on the assignment myself, but have resisted. About to turn 91, I’m still up for a lot—but not for multi-archival digging in faraway places.
What I can do here, as part of my effort to entice a biographer to take up Mary Meigs as a subject, is to expand on the minimalist portrait of her in A Saving Remnant. I’ve drawn the new material primarily from the four richly autobiographical books she eventually wrote. The first, Lily Briscoe, appeared in 1981, and is the standout, but the prose in all four is elegant and epigrammatic and the content uncommonly self-critical. I’ve never seen a reference to any of the books (nor, for that matter, to Meigs herself), though they contain a good deal of lesbian history. I have seen a few reproductions of her impressively bold and vivid paintings, but haven’t tried to track down their provenance nor locate the walls on which (hopefully) they currently hang. In fleshing out Meigs’ story—and cognizant of the limitations of space—I’ll focus on two subjects: her family background, and her self-admonishing temperament.
§
Mary Meigs was a product of upper-class Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—and at the same time a rebel against its confinements. She was brought up in inbred society of narrowly defined propriety—of rules for living (“etiquette”) that left little room for spontaneity or dissent. Among the strongest taboos was any discussion of sex. Mary would later recall that she had so little knowledge of the subject that on her brother’s wedding day she asked him at breakfast “What’s an orgasm?” (She would not experience one until age 24). Her strong-willed and traditional-minded mother and her shy, unobtrusive father combined to produce a child reluctant to assert herself, yet quietly defiant—a time bomb hidden in a rosebush. Even as a youngster, Mary was occasionally “fresh” (defined as knowing something shouldn’t be said but saying it anyway). She once even dared to refer to her mother by her first name, “Margaret”—and was immediately scolded for her “horrid” blunder.
Though Mary’s mother Margaret was devoted to “good breeding,” she was also known for her quick flashes of anger. Should Mary dare to say that she was “bored” or that so-and-so was “stupid,” her mother would swiftly reprimand her. Yet Margaret was, according to her daughter, more than a disciplinarian; she could be “a good listener,” had “natural good sense,” was “nice” (adhered to the rules), and “morally serious.” And she gave the requisite number of society luncheons and tea parties—which Mary, from an early age, abhorred—and she went to church regularly. Mary, for her part, refused communion, then refused to go to church at all. Margaret was furious, but Mary, remarkably, stood her ground.
High society in Philadelphia and Washington was unwaveringly racist and anti-Semitic. Mary couldn’t recall hearing either topic being openly discussed, but late in life she came upon a cache of family letters (see her book, The Box Closet) that recounted in great detail how her parents and their friends banded together to discourage Jews from buying property in their neighborhood. As for Blacks, they were servants, never friends. Yet Margaret took pride in recounting her Quaker grandmother’s involvement with the Underground Railroad. She had, in fact, a quick sympathy in general for people in distress. Mary, who abhorred racism, felt her mother had been “rigorously kind and fair” to the family’s Black servants, paying their hospital bills and providing them with pensions.
Margaret and her husband Edward were also society renegades in their support for FDR and the Democratic Party, and Margaret later denounced Senator Joe McCarthy as “a demagogue.” (However, Mary thought in McCarthy’s case her parents were basically motivated by the conviction that he and Roy Cohn were in a homosexual relationship. She felt her mother in particular “was mortally afraid of homosexuality.”) At least once, in 1906, Margaret publicly advocated that women, given their “moral superiority,” should have the right to vote. Yet her feminism was sharply circumscribed: she saw no reason why a woman should bother going to college, as her proper sphere was the home. “Shy” Mary again stood up to her mother, who allowed her to enroll in Bryn Mawr—though Margaret scoffed at “how pointless” college was in comparison with learning how to manage a household staff.
Mary much preferred her father Edward. He was the more loving—the “weaker,” as he would put it—of her parents. He not only sympathized with Mary’s wish to go to college but encouraged her reading. He was a gentle, patient man, subject to disabling depression, content to yield to Margaret’s forceful wishes, and (according to his daughter) “suffered all his life from his belief in the honesty of others, and his subsequent disappointments.” Edward, though a bit of a prig (he disapproved of drinking because it encouraged “a false sense of cheerfulness”), was—in contrast to Margaret’s refusal to explore or explain herself—willing to probe his own opinions, “to get to the bottom of things.” He wasn’t, finally, spicy enough for the provocative Margaret; he was “too nice”—which may be the reason she’d delayed accepting his proposal to marry for nearly a decade. “It makes me perfectly nervous,” Margaret wrote to Edward a month before their wedding: “to have you talking about getting to know each other. I feel like a specimen under the microscope and I hate it.”
Mary thought her mother’s “instant bristling” at her husband’s occasional attempt to share his intimate feelings greatly saddened him, yet she felt that he loved Margaret—even if his “yearning for the truth collided with” her “hatred for delving and provoked [her]defensive tactics: ready-made answers, hurt feelings, or silence.” Her attitude depressed Mary, and she “tended to take [her]father’s side.” His fragility touched her, his preference for solitude over Society, and his inability to push himself forward centrally shaped and defined her own personality.
Mary recognized that her father’s lack of what we today call “sexism” was remarkable at a time when “manliness” was enthroned. She admired his vulnerability, his incapacity for slugging it out for “the top spot.” When her mother decided that Mary’s brother Arthur was “hanging around too much with girls” and insisted that he take up the “manly” art of boxing, Edward reluctantly bowed to her wishes. Mary chose to explain his deference to Margaret as a “magical leap of understanding”: He had been able to put himself in her place, had empathetically understood her worry about Arthur and had tried to console her.
Mary, too, was able to salvage some sympathy for a mother whose temperament was centrally at odds with her own: “The prevailing pattern of womanhood,” Mary later wrote, “fitted her like a glove … she thought she was wicked if she wanted her own way, if she played cards for money; above all, if she won (‘the worst thing I ever did’).” Her only actual “wickednesses” in Mary’s view “were those she never thought about: the snobbism and racism typical of her class, and her undue admiration for “pomps and vanities.” She also thought that Margaret “guarded her children ferociously from knowledge of this ‘wicked world.’” Her parents, Mary recognized, had been “shaped so differently that they could never mesh together in total understanding. … [T]heir minds often met in a shower of sparks or a short circuit. But they struggled with the intractable idea of marriage until death parted them.”
§
The adult Mary Meigs claimed that “love has always taken a secondary position in my life, secondary, that is, to my work as an artist.” She once wrote: “I need chunks of visible time and hours every day of total silence in which I can attempt to see and to learn.” As for her love relationships, looking back at them as an old woman in the 1980s, she detected a definite pattern: initially she would be “carried away by a genuine and selfless passion which I believed would be eternal [but]… the differences between me and my lovers became more and more pronounced as time went on.” She surprised even herself—not to mention her lovers—by her “frequently abrupt transformation from a tender and adorable friend to an irritable person who would refuse to make love … the more [Barbara] loved and needed me, the more cranky and sullen I became.” Ultimately Meigs reached a point in life where she rejected “the whole idea of the couple, with its exigencies and its absence of freedom.”
Her decade-long, intense relationship with Barbara Deming, the deepest of Meigs’ life, is the primary case in point. In A Saving Remnant I describe the course of that relationship in some detail, which I’ll avoid repeating here. Suffice it to say that Meigs herself, writing in the mid-1980s, entirely absolved Deming for the breakup of the triangular relationship with Marie-Claire Blaise (who, Meigs felt, made a contribution of her own to its failure, thanks to her tendency to “exaggerate her own guilelessness”). But finally, Meigs insisted, it was her own personality, with openness and unavailability abruptly alternating, that ultimately pushed Deming away. Deming, Meigs felt, “suffered most in the triangle,” yet was herself “never cruel, never petty, never dishonest.” Meigs’ assessment coincides with my own. As most of those who worked alongside Deming in various social justice movements agreed, she was something of a secular saint.
Then too, like her father, Meigs had a strong propensity for exaggerating her own character defects. They were real enough, but she seems to have over-emphasized them, as if covetous of claiming singular blame—which, after all, can be a form of vanity. Her insistence on prime responsibility for the twists and turns of a relationship may well have derived, at least in part, from an early awareness that she was wealthy. What followed was the sense that her wealth protected her from falling under the sway of anyone else—or even suffering (to quote Shakespeare) “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” The downside of omniscience, if one has a conscience, is to feel responsible when things go wrong. It was all very well for Meigs to feel that she was in the driver’s seat, but that meant becoming answerable for every unexpected bump in the road.
And Meigs was far faster than most of those born into privilege to itemize—and reiterate—her temperamental shortcomings or lapses in judgment. At one low point in her life, she drew back from “suicidal thoughts” by reminding herself “that I live an ideal life, in ideal surroundings, free from the concerns of most people”—and could acknowledge that without starting up “the machinery of guilt and self-hate.” But more typically, and repeatedly in her books, Meigs indicts herself for personality traits that were real enough but (as we know from the testimony of others) not as pronounced or disabling as she keeps insisting.
She blamed herself for having a sharp tongue, for finding cooking and housekeeping “odious,” for being “stingy,” “snappish,” and “intractable” when she should have been “pliable,” for feeling “slow and stupid,” “literal-minded and verging on stupidity.” She even blamed herself for her instinctive retreat “from every kind of excess, squeamishness about any display of extravagance, greed, sensuality or drunkenness … horror of uncontrollable or voracious states of being and their physical signs.” She located the origin of her reticence in her parents’ inability to “let themselves go in any sense of the word. … [They were] unfit for combat with people who will use any means to get what they want, people for whom lying is the most important weapon in their arsenal. Our weapons are silence and inaction, both of which can be forms of cowardice.”
She referred to herself as “pathologically shy,” yet her penchant for solitude may well have been (as it often is in creative people) essential, an inescapable prerequisite for getting any painting or writing done. She illustrated the peril of “incautious love” by summoning up the sad case of her childhood governess, a Miss Balfour, who “gave too much of herself away,” lost “too much of herself by attrition.”
Meigs described her own heart as “slippery and elusive … total love is unknown to me.” She added that “real” love, “confident and relaxed,” was inimical to her temperament. She even doubted the validity of lesbian love: “when two women try to fit together, they merge one with the other with the illusion that they are interchangeable. But one does not necessarily fall in love because of a sense of identity; at times it is more like a sickness that comes from outside, takes possession, makes havoc of our rational selves, and this kind of falling in love is an aberration which has little to do with real love.” She failed to consider—or failed to notice—that the sort of obsessive, romantic love she is describing is also experienced by heterosexuals, though not by all lesbians. What she does acknowledge later in life is that she herself “functions best as a more or less independent entity and that I don’t do well anymore as part of a couple.”
With regard to sex, Meigs experienced it relatively late in life when, at age 24, she joined the waves during World War II and had a lover for the first time. Up until then, as she put it: “I had no idea that there were parts of my body that could be ‘aroused,’ either by myself or by someone else. I had never touched or explored my body or, by accident, discovered the pleasure of masturbation.” Barbara Deming, on the other hand, had been sexually active since her teens, was comfortable with her body, and not at all self-conscious in her enjoyment of sex.
Deming was also enormously kind and patient. And once she fell in love, she stayed in love. Not so Mary Meigs. After the first few years of living together, she concluded that their “two bodies were out of tune with each other, each making life difficult for the other.” In fact, Meigs seems never to have been particularly interested in sex, nor entirely comfortable in her body. In her books she portrays herself as an unworldly “puritan” regarding sex and laments her inability “to melt my petrified sensuality.” She even deplored her physical presentation: “my home-cut hair, my flat-heeled shoes, and the impertinent pallor of my toenails.” Looking back later in life, she concluded that “every one of my relationships has been poisoned by my guilty sense of not having given enough”—in the case of Deming, for not having given “enough passion and fidelity.”
The two women, in fact, shared much: the preference for an austere life close to nature, the importance of “speaking truth to power,” political involvement based on the principle of nonviolence (though in politics, too, Meigs ultimately decided she was ill-suited temperamentally, and backed off). They even looked alike: both were tall, flat-chested, and unadorned. Yet their differences were also pronounced. Deming’s stubborn, unflagging conviction was driven by a profoundly searching conscience, and she became a major figure in nonviolent struggles against social injustice that ranged from anti-war protest to Black civil rights to feminism. Meigs shared those views, but sustained public witness in behalf of her values fell outside her comfort zone. She tried. She went again and again to marches and meetings, not just to please Deming but to give voice to their shared concerns. But “too much” strenuous conviction finally went against her grain. After a time, her political participation became occasional and reluctant—and was, she became convinced, antithetical to her own need for solitude. As she wrote in Lily Briscoe: “I had begun almost immediately to doubt in the depths of my being what these wonderful people told me: that the more one acts, protests, the braver one becomes. I was becoming less brave; I had a mortal fear of going to jail.” Meanwhile, Deming was risking her neck more and more—and almost getting killed in the process. Meigs decided that she, unlike Deming, was by temperament “a mere spectator.”
§
With respect to her own work, Meigs had mixed success, with only a few showings of her paintings here and there, few sales, and no gallery willing to provide sustained support. (One highlight was a laudatory note from the highly regarded painter Alex Katz telling Meigs that her work reminded him of Edvard Munch.) For a time she turned to drawing and sculpture, but with no greater success. Quick as always to blame herself, she decided that her work suffered from being the product of a “too rational” brain. Increasingly she turned to writing and became friendly with a few other writers, most notably the poet Marianne Moore, who was described by Meigs as like “an intricate illuminated manuscript with birds and animals surrounded by the fine tendrils of flowering vines; in short, she was exactly like one of her poems about which she was so modest.”
For many years Meigs continued to spend time in Montréal with Marie-Clare Blaise. And she remained devotedly close to Deming: “My friendship with Barbara,” Meigs wrote, is “permanent and unshakeable.” They would take long walks in the woods, “bound together by the things that make us alike: the sense of ferns and ground pine seeming to grow in our own veins; the sense of birds as creatures of our inner kingdom.” Deming, for her part, would periodically try to moderate Meigs’ bursts of self-deprecation, begging her not to become prey to her guilty conscience, insisting that she could provide “five hundred reasons why her own life wasn’t any less selfish” than Meigs’, nor, Deming claimed, less egocentric: “I do what I do because I like it.”
In the late 1970s, with Deming’s encouragement, Meigs published two books—Lily Briscoe and The Medusa Head—and would later publish two more. One of them charmingly recounts her experience as one of the eight older women who portray themselves in the semi-documentary film The Company of Strangers—and it’s filled with her familiar insistence that her “instinct” was always “to make a distance, sooner or later, between myself and every being who is close to me.” At the 1991 Genie Awards (a festival that honors Canadian films), The Company of Strangers won several prizes. Meigs even became something of a spokesperson—despite all her earlier hesitations—for lesbian liberation (though the details of her involvement have up to now been unexplored). After a series of strokes, she died in Montreal in 2002, age 85.
§
An intriguing figure, no? Have I made my case? Mary Meigs needs and deserves a full-scale biography. Any takers?
Martin Duberman’s recent books include Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary and Has the Gay Movement Failed?
