THE GOVERNOR IN THE GARDEN:
May Sarton, More and More
by Michael Finley
copyright (c) 1988 by Michael Finley
She has lived a score of lives at least
-- as actress, poet, novelist, teacher,
writer of journals, scourge of critics,
confidant of so many hundreds. At 70,
sensing that the final act was being
played out, she wrote a journal named
just that, At Seventy.
Sometimes, with her vast amount of
correspondence, the pilgrimages of people
from all corners to her cottage in York,
Maine, and her passionate mastery of
detail, and of the edifices of art she
has erected to stave off the chaos of the
world, she seems almost like the governor
of an invisible state or province -- a
principality of flowers, friends and
self.
Today, at 75, May Sarton is still a
factor. Hampered late last winter by a
stroke and "imprisoned" in bed for
another nine months with a heart
condition, she has been unable, for the
first time in forty years, to begin her
biennial novel. Fan letters continue to arrive
in bales. The ability to answer each and
every one is not to be relied upon as it
once was. A year without the daily
workout in the garden, or the walk down
to the water. The wild fur-person (the
Sartonian designation for actualized cat)
Bramble has died, and been replaced by a
woolly Himalayan.
"It's a nuisance, all right," says May
Sarton. But she will go on tour in
October, reading from her forty books of
poetry (including A Grain of Mustard
seed, A Durable Fire, and Halfway to
Silence), fiction (Faithful Are the
Wounds, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids
Singing, and As We Are Now) and
nonfiction (Plant Dreaming Deep,
Recovering, and Journal of a Solitude).
She will draw giant (for poetry)
audiences, uplifting many and annoying
several, for just as she has attracted
friends so has she suffered fools with
a minimum of solicitude. And she
suffers critics hardly at all, not even
at the allegedly serene age of 75.
It was not always thus. Born in Ghent,
Belgium, of an artistic British mother
and French-Belgian father (George Sarton,
author of the massive study The History of
Science), Sarton hardly figured to spend the
bulk of her life in rural New Hampshire and
Maine as one of America's premier poets of
fixed place.
She never went to college, choosing
instead an apprenticeship in the midst of the
Depression with Eva Le Gallienne's Civic
Repertory Theatre, and tours abroad where
she acquaintanced with the greats of the
literary world, including friendship with
Virginia Woolf.
Her first book of poems, Encounter in
April (1937), and first novel, The Single
Hound (1938), were hailed critically as
the stirrings of a major new voice in
American letters, and Sarton's future as
a sleek modernist seemed assured. But
something in her swerved away from mere
stylishness, and she commenced a more
inward journey, far from the fashionable,
bestselling path through solitude,
personal revelation, and a loyalty to the
more enduring spirits -- friendship,
nature, and the perfectionist demands of a her
art.
Hear what the critics were saying even
thirty years ago:
"When Miss Sarton talks to us we feel as
though we were walking through a
cultivated landscape in the early
afternoon of a summer's day, with
twilight far in the future."
She is: "serene-seeming despite her
traumas"; "honest to the point of
bluntness"; her work is "transparently
about flowers and the seasons -- but these
are simply the backdrops for the agony of
fading love, sorrow at a friend's death,
fatigue from creating and the need to be
alone."
Her works are like those of Flemish
painters "whose bold brushstrokes make
clear the troubled humanity in a face..."
Her tastes and styles: "immaculate and
orderly, traditional, austere
with overtones of grace and charm."
Not much has changed, and yet everything
has. Her style has transmogrified,
from the profligate phraseology of youth
to the biting clarity of one who knows the
price of distraction. The critics, who
were with her at the start, long ago gave
up on her as unreformable. (They complain
that she has been too upfront about her
sexuality. That there is not enough
sexuality in the books. She is too male.
She is too female. She is too
traditional. She is too radical. She is
too intellectual. She is too emotional.
Whatever you do, do not read a book by
this vexatious person!)
She is not a girl any more -- she is, as she
puts it, old. ("I don't mind that,
though," she says.) And always, her
writing has been about the driving need to
be oneself. The book which has had
perhaps the greatest impact, Mrs. Stevens
Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965) is about
a woman poet in her seventies -- an
extrapolation of Sarton herself when she
was 50. A startlingly fresh work both in
language and structure, Mrs. Stevens
probes the memories of outrageous novelist
Hillary Stevens to learn where the
irretractable choices were made -- and
relives the episodes of pain and love
which were the seedbed of her witness.
The book was also Sarton's own tacit coming out
as a lesbian -- "I was trying to say some
radical things about sexuality in a
gentle way so that they might penetrate
without shock." For Sarton, the Muse is
not a disembodied occasional presence --
the Muse is a friend, a lover, a special
person who unlocks the cabinetry and lets
light in on what has been stored away,
unexpressed. There have been several.
She is an astonishing amalgam of
contradictions -- an intellectual
entranced by nature; a formalist whose
object is freedom; a friend to thousands
who espouses the virtues of solitude; an
exile who has grown her own roots. Not
surprisingly, she is also Unitarian.
"My parents were not connected with any
church, but when I was about ten I went
to the First Unitarian Church in
Cambridge, and I absolutely loved Mr.
Samuel McCord Carruthers, the minister
there, at that time quite a famous man, a
writer. A very wonderful preacher, and
when I joined the Sunday School, I
got a ribbon for perfect attendance! It
was all my own idea, of course."
Sarton added that Unitarianism was not
that far removed from the beliefs of her
parents. "My father and mother believed
that, though Jesus was not God, he was a
mighty leader and the spirit of Jesus,
the logos of him, is the worship of God
and the spirit of man. We Unitarians,
after all, 'unite' in the spirit of Jesus
in the worship of God and the spirit of
man.
"I'm awfully proud to be Unitarian. I
think the Unitarian Service Committee is
marvelous. We're humanists, you see --
the extreme right considers us devils, and
that's something else in our favor."
Though there is no Unitarian Universalist
church within driving distance of York --
the closest is in Portsmouth, NH twenty
miles away, an hejira to downeasters --
Sarton worships in her own way, with her
own skills, writing letters to the very
old and very sick on Sunday mornings.
There are some who say that, despite the
lack of tacitly theological matter in her
books, Sarton's thrust in fact is a
religious one. A group of Methodist
pastors asked her recently to be one of three
spiritual advisors at a recent retreat.
Last year Sarton delivered the Ware [sp?]
Lecture for Unitarian Universalists. She
has taught at Thomas Starr King School of
Religious Leadership in Berkeley. And
when she travels to Indianapolis these
days, she stays at the Carmelite monastery
there -- "they are great admirers of
Journal of a Solitude."
Nevertheless, she says, she is less
interested in religion than in something
she sees as broader, or at least vaguer.
Spirit? "Yes, or perhaps just humanity,"
she says.
Sometimes surface objects in her
journals, such as fritillaria or
dragonfly nymphs, are exactly that; other
times they are something very different,
a key to another level of being, a way of
talking about things which otherwise are
undiscussable. "For instance, flowers --
I think very few people really look at
Nature. I think I do, and I got that
from my mother, a most remarkable woman.
"My last book, by the way, is not mine but
hers -- letters to me, called Letters to
May, published by Puckerbrush Press here
in Maine.
It was the Unitarian Universalists who,
somehow or other, got Sarton "over the
hump" from respectable small poetry
audiences to the kinds of mass
engagements she holds sway over today.
"The first one I remember was at Roy
Phillips' Unity Church in St. Paul -- a
huge audience, the poor church was full
to bursting. I heard it had never been
filled before for any occasion. I really
do not know why it happened as it did,
when it did. But I have taken note."
Perhaps it is the sense of the individual
as shrine that Sarton addresses,
especially in her nonfiction, and
particularly in her breakthrough book A
Journal of Solitude. From her earlier
sense that an artist's art is the reason
for her existing (perhaps even for the
rest of us existing, too), Sarton suggests
a less exclusive explanation -- that the
window to eternity is this moment, lived
and felt honestly and with intensity.
"I try to live as if every day might be
my last and yet, is eternal. You can
only do this well in solitude," she
writes. "Solitude is the salt of
personality.... I could live alone
indefinitely and feel no need for
company.... Solitude can be very
exciting."
Or perhaps it is the heroic combat she
has maintained for so many decades
against the chaos around her -- in the
turbulence of her own life and the lives
of friends, the violence of world
wars, the friction of cold wars, the
grimace of political and sexual
oppression, the growing sense of a mass
culture seeking to obviate the inner
quiet in the individual heart.
"My parents were both innocent and so am
I, and this has perhaps been my undoing
with the critics. I'm not a worldly
person. I happen to be making a lot of
money, for me, these days. But for
years, until I was 65, I never did.
That means that nature and animals and
deep friendship are all extremely
precious to me -- being asked out to
cocktail parties is not."
Sarton suspects that this innocence, and
her disdain for the desiderata of the
marketplace, may have contributed to her
inattention at the hands of the front
line of critics (read, the New York
Times).
"It's true, I cut my own throat," she
says. "I haven't been able by nature to
use others, I've never asked any of my
high-powered friends for help, for
blurbs."
The result has been a perceived snubbing
from the critics. Not the trade reviews
or the secondary outlets, where her
reputation has been solid through the years,
but at the holy mountaintop -- the New York
Times. "After Faithful Are the Wounds
(1955), I never got another positive
review from them," she says. "And lately
they've ceased reviewing my poetry
altogether. I can't help feeling very
bitterly about it."
One wonders about the bitterness of a
woman in her seventies as honored as
Sarton. Surely the books section of the
Times is not one of those windows into
eternity?
"No, it's not that," she insists of the
war between York and New York. "It's
bigger than pride. It's the fact that
they have stood between me and the
audience I have so wanted for my writing.
And not for me, either -- my design has
been that each of my books be usable in
some way or other, usable truths that
readers might apply to their way of seeing
the world."
Sarton, while decrying her malfeasance,
misfeasance, and nonfeasance at the hands
of her critics, is still amazed at the
audience she has managed to assemble,
seemingly despite the sages of West
43rd Street. In addition to having sold
at least a couple million books over the
years, many of them read over and over
again, she is at the point where today
three of her novels are entertaining film
options, one of them in Great Britain.
She has not been the dominant mailing
address in York by hiding her lamp under
the bushel basket, or by being ignored by
the reading public.
"It's true, I have what many regard as a
fairly large audience, gathered over
many years and mainly through word of
mouth. And they are an enviable lot --
every day I get letters, sometimes from
people who say I saved their lives. That
I cherish.
"But then I ask myself what might that
audience had I gotten the kinds of reviews
Anne Tyler (whom I admire) has had? It's
a maddening question, and I wish I could
spare myself from asking it."
Bitterness may be a luxury that she
cannot afford in the months ahead of
her. Having suffered through a stroke in
February, which she claims was "not so
serious," it is a fibrillating heart, and
the medicine she takes for that, which have
laid her as low as she can remember being
in her whole life -- worse than her
breast cancer of six years ago, which she
described in her journal Recovering.
"Eight days after the mastectomy I was
driving again," she says. "This time I
was unable to do anything for nine
months. It was prison for me, and even
though I'm 'better' now, the medicine
still makes me ill. It's a difficult
life, with no notion of making
'progress.' Still, I'm determined to make it
like my real life."
This current recovery has been so slow
that she has been unable to begin a
longer work, content to write entries to a
new journal called After the Stroke.
"People say I sound marvelous but they
don't know how my poor head feels."
And of course, there are the poems.
Sarton has never been one to play poetry
against fiction against nonfiction. One
is clearly superior in her mind, and that
is the art of the poet.
"To me, if you're a poet you're a poet
first. Ive been writing poetry since I
was twelve and getting published since
seventeen. If you're a poet, it's a
gift. Whereas you can start a novel on
will alone, and intelligence and
sensitivity -- you can't do a poem with
just that equipment."
The other side is that the novel is so
limited by its length, she said. "How
can anything so long be perfect? When I
knew Virginia Woolf, before I had
published anything but poems, she used to
tease me, saying, 'It's so much harder to
write a novel, too many ways it can
fail.' She was right of course, and I
know that now, but on the other hand the
poem has possibilities a novel can never
have."
Which helps explain why, following the
success of her first, lushly written
books, she worked so hard to separate her
poetic and fictional writing styles. "My
first novels were poetic and got
wonderful reviews, but I didn't want
that. I don't want people to say,
'Oh, you've got such a wonderful style.'
I want them to say, 'I can't forget that
character.' Or, 'Your book changed my
life.'"
In As We are Now, she pared her style
down to the point where an especially
obtuse critic claimed the writing was at
the 9th grade level. The novel, a
heartbreaking love story taking place in
a nursing home, was made deliberately
spare. "The book is a descent into hell,
and the last rung on the ladder was when
true love was made dirty, when Carol's
feelings for Anna, which were not
homosexual, but simply love, were made
dirty by the awful women there." The
story was strong enough to do the telling
for her, Sarton said -- writing it "up"
would have only muddled the issue.
"I also like that there's a minister in
the book who is not a caricature or
hypocritical or cardboard. Ministers
are seldom given much respect in fiction,
you know."
Some have suggested that, just as Sarton
prefers formal poetry to free verse
(though she claims to have enjoyed
writing without form in Gestalt at
Sixty), that explains her defense of the
art in her fiction above the less formal
craft required of her journal writing.
"I do enjoy free verse, but how do I know
when I am done with it? There are no
brakes, and the process of revision looms
eternally.
"I love the freedom that comes from form,
not just in art but in life as well. I
know that, as an artist, the form my day
takes, which is my routine, is terribly
important -- you write for a certain
number of hours every morning, not just
when you feel like it. If you waited
free-form for inspiration, you'd wait a
long time."
A routine which looks confining is what
actually refines one, she said. Sarton's
view of writing is of an intellectual
(novelist?) grappling with feeling
(poet?) -- and in her mature
works the two forces have come into
balance.
"What is good about the journal, I think,
is that it is so much more spontaneous --
it has no particular structure, but it
requires an intensity of being. Therefore
it is a very spiritual form of writing.
People don't read journals for wise
sayings but for the intensity of being
that is approached, the life that is lived
in them. When it is authentic it is very
comforting, and very powerful, too."
In an address to students at Scripps
College in 1957, Sarton laid down the
rule she lived by, and expected other
poets to live by as well. "Writing
poetry is a life discipline maintained in
order to perfect the instrument of
experiencing -- the poet himself."
Thirty years later, one wants to ask how
that process of perfectability, so
innocent and impossible (so Unitarian?)
has proceeded. Is the instrument, today,
perfect?
May Sarton smiles. "I don't feel it is,"
she says, "but the process has remained
remarkably intact and alive. And I truly
do believe that a point can be reached,
as in a poem, where nothing more can be
changed, no paraphrase is possible. And
that is a beautiful thing."
Looking back, would she wish to be a
young writer just starting out, with the
same brash head full of ideas, the same
record (as at Sunday School) of perfect
attendance, the same heart shining with
passion?
"It's always hard, I think. There might
be a few more grants and sponsors today,
but I don't think I would make that
switch. The truth is, I love being older,
and I always knew I would. I dislike
being sick -- that's the nuisance, right
there -- but I would never want to go
back. You pay a high price for emotional
involvement, the love affairs and so on.
I'm rather glad to be out of that.
"I know so much more, I'm more balanced.
Things are less intense, but deeper."
# # #
A Farewell
by May Sarton
# # #
For a while I shall still be leaving,
Looking back at you as you slip away
Into the magic islands of the mind.
But for a while now all alive, believing
That in a single poignant hour
We did say all that we could ever say
In a great flowing out of radiant power.
It was like seeing and then going blind.
After a while we shall be cut in two
Between real islands where you live
And a far shore where I'll no longer keep
The haunting image of your eyes, and you,
As pupils widen, widen to deep black
And I able neither to love or grieve
Between fulfillment and heartbreak.
The time will come when I can go to sleep.
But for a while still, centered at last,
Contemplate a brief amazing union,
Then watch you leave and then let you go.
I must not go back to the murderous past
Nor force a passage through to some safe landing,
But float upon this moment of communion
Entranced, astonished by pure understanding --
Passionate love dissolved like summer snow.
# # #
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