The House by the Sea

by May Sarton

  Sunday, December 28th

  IT HAS NOT BEEN the best of Christmases … I missed the real moment … that one always waits for. But this year it never really came … I think because it is very hard now being with Judy alone, Judy who is not there and has become terribly restless. The small frustrations are hard to bear in the middle of trying to lift the whole huge package that is Christmas. For instance, we always have breakfast in my big bed, and that is a lovely way of starting our day, looking out on the ocean and waves breaking in the distance to the left, and when there is sun, the sunlight touching the small brilliant objects on the bureau, with Tamas sitting beside us hoping for a small piece of toast, and Bramble purring on the end of the bed. That is lovely, but getting to it is often quite a struggle … one day Judy took off her nightgown five times and each time I explained, “Don’t get dressed; we are having breakfast in bed!” I run up and down the stairs five or six times to be sure she is ready, and there she is with her nightgown off again, thrown into the wastebasket once! But finally we make it, and then there is good hot coffee and peace for a half hour or so.

  I would like to remember the good moments … the first that comes to mind was dawn yesterday. I had promised Mary-Leigh to go out before seven and decide whether we should call the snowplough or not. It was still dark, a waning moon, very bright in the south and a single brilliant star beside it shone on the frozen crust of the snow. The sea was quiet after the storm and in the perfect silence my boots made loud crackles on the icy ruts; Tamas ran joyfully ahead, surprised into barks by this unexpected dawn walk. That was a perfect moment, the fresh new day.

  Another was Christmas Eve, getting everything ready for Anne and Barbara, who came to join us for dinner after an exhausting day at the airport in Boston getting the children off. It was good to watch them relax by the fire, and for the only time this Christmas I read “The Tree” and “Nativity.” It is really an exquisite tree this year, reflected in the big windows at both ends of the library, so there are three trees alight at the same time. “This is my real family,” looking at B. and A., I thought. All through this Christmas I have been haunted by Ruth Pitter’s poem “The Lost Tribe”: The last stanza is

  I know not why I am alone,

  Nor where my wandering tribe is gone,

  But be they few, or be they far,

  Would I were where my people are!

  Wednesday, December 31st

  THE YEAR is ending in peace … soft air … an angelic pale blue sea, breathing a long breath as the waves hush-hush against the rocks. And I feel greatly blessed. It still seems a miracle that I ever landed here. What if Bev and Mary-Leigh had not turned up that day in Nelson when I was so low and suggested that I think about a big move?

  Yesterday while a brief snow drifted down, and I was lighting the candles and the fire in the library for Caroline Cadwalader and her daughter, who were on their way to drink a glass of champagne—my last guests before the tree comes down—the florist arrived with a big bundle. What could it be? Chrysanthemums? When I opened it, out fell dozens of brilliant red and red-and-white tulips and three branches of mimosa! It really was magic—a thought from a friend three thousand miles away turned into spring here in the snow. I was transported for a few moments into a kind of ecstasy.

  It made me run upstairs and reread Vincent Hepp’s Christmas word, accompanying a card, a Japanese water-color of sparrows on bamboo. He says,

  “I send you these sparrows, thinking with Thornton Wilder and probably without Jacques Monod, that ‘they do not lose a feather that is not brushed away by the finger of God,’ and I wish you a happy feast of Christmas, with a recapture of this great sense of the meaningfulness of our lives, an enormous meaning, we are told, yet seldom obvious. Enormous or not, life is made of small things, small happinesses chained like daisies, one by one. Let the next year be such a chain for you.”

  Yet “Joy and woe are woven fine/in the human soul divine,” and I woke this morning in tears, thinking about a TV film I had to stop looking at because it was so painful, a stab to the heart, as I saw Japanese murdering hundreds of porpoises … as we too are doing every day in the tuna nets … the terrible image of man at his most cruel and devastating, his ability to rid the universe of one marvelous creation after another. Porpoises, so gentle, the friends of man! There are times when it seems unbearable to be part of this horrible race, mankind, the destroyers, the murderers of everything gentle and helpless. That is what we are. And, in the end, of course, the self-destroyers.

  Tuesday, January 6th, 1976

  FOUR BELOW ZERO today and the sea was steaming so, as the sun rose, it looked as though it were on fire. Now at nine o’clock there is just a faint white fog on the surface below cold blue sky. I have been rereading a little of last year’s journal and am amused to discover that it seems chiefly concerned with the weather. That is one of the joys of living in New England—if ever boredom sets in there is an immediate weather change that would rouse the dead. Today, for instance, will warm up, we are told, and it may rain tomorrow.…

  The first week of the New Year is nearly over, and what has been accomplished? A little work every day at purely descriptive poems. The pleasure is very great. I can work at a few lines for hours, lose all sense of time passing, like someone working at a difficult puzzle or a gambler at the tables, and it resembles both those occupations. So far I haven’t hit the jackpot, a real poem, but I do have a wonderful sense of freedom, of being in my element like a fish in water, of relief from pressure. I had so hoped for this, but since the gods enter into the writing of poetry and it cannot be done on will, I started off on January 1st in fear and trembling.

  I suppose I am still in a transition between two years. Last year was not a good one, not from any point of view, the world or my world … except that I did finish A World of Light, and then started the new year knowing that Norton will publish. It was a year of loss, too many deaths, and the increasing senility in Judy. For six months or nearly between February and July I felt ill with a low-grade nose and throat infection; the summer was as hot and damp as summer in Florida; a lot of gardening work did not get done because Raymond was exhausted by his sister’s depression and by anxiety over his ninety-five-year-old mother. It was a year of effort, and I’m glad it’s over.

  I feel now very much at peace, even happy, as I start a new year with poetry. It is the first time in three years that I have dared look down into the depths or play records while I am working. Until now music has been too painful … if I opened that door I began to weep and couldn’t stop. I had been traumatized by the final year at Nelson.

  My experience with senility has been gentle with Judy, but it was traumatic with Dr. Farnham. For mental torture the paranoia of one’s psychiatrist directed against oneself is pretty bad. I was accused of trying to murder her. Lawyers were involved. But at least some of the anguish was transformed into As We Are Now, so it was not all waste. What deep experience, however terrible, is? And I think I came out stronger and more sure of my own powers than I have ever been.

  The sea has erased the pain. I have never been so happy as I am here, and I welcome the new year with great expectations. Since they are expectations that I can myself fulfill and have to do with inner life and with the beauty of the world around me, I dare to say this. Peace does not mean an end to tension, the good tensions, or of struggle. It means, I think, less waste. It means being centered.

  Thursday, January 8th

  MY HOPE that I would have a whole series of empty days, days without interruption, days in which to think and laze, (for creation depends as much on laziness as on hard work), was, of course, impossible. Three days ago in the morning a young woman called Jody who had written me in November to say she might turn up, hitchhiking from Ohio, phoned from Portland and asked to come over. I’m afraid I was not exactly welcoming … I felt dismay at the prospect, and never got back to work that morning.

  She came yesterday, in workman’s boots, overalls, a t
hin short coat (how not freeze to death at below zero yesterday here?), and a tam-o’-shanter, carrying the usual canvas tote over her shoulder. And I was suddenly delighted!

  I met her at Foster’s and drove her in over what is now a nearly impassable road on foot, and very slippery even in a car, every rut glare ice. I was delighted because Jody, unlike anyone I have ever met, perhaps represents a new breed. She is not, I feel sure, unique in her thirst for rootless wandering from place to place—Berkeley for a time, then New Orleans, now perhaps Boston. In her knapsack three of my books and a slim blue notebook in which she jots down poems. I liked her face at once, the quirky mouth and keen blue eyes behind huge gold-rimmed glasses, mousy hair all over the place.

  Setting her down here in front of the big fireplace in the library, I felt disgustingly rich and safe. But after all I am over sixty and she is twenty-three. When I was twenty-three I too wandered (though in those days only real bums hitchhiked) and had many love affairs and worried about them. But there are differences. Jody takes LSD now and then. I think she takes it when she gets scared, scared of herself and where she is going, and realizes that time is running out. Soon she will be twenty-five, then thirty.

  When I asked her why she thought my work attracted the young now (as it had not before), she answered, “Because it’s so trippy” (that was about the poems, many of which she could quote from memory, especially the Santa Fe one “Meditation in Sunlight,” which she had read when on LSD). And when I asked what she meant by that, she said, “Cosmic, relating.” I suppose that intensity of feeling plus detachment (the detachment of the craftsman) is a little like LSD in its effect. I explained that I couldn’t take drugs because I had to keep my mind clear and to tamper with it would be too frightening.

  She spoke warmly about her father (a mechanic) and mother, but feels stifled in the small college town where she grew up—and that I understand perfectly. That orange has been sucked dry. Her brother is “brilliant, but close to becoming an alcoholic.” What does he want out of life? “To be loved.”

  She is religious, was tempted to join a Christian commune in Columbus, and may still do so. Under the anarchic life rooted nowhere there is, of course, a tremendous hunger for roots and for community. I suggested that, since she takes odd jobs just to keep alive, why not take a meaningful job such as working in a nursing home or insane asylum?

  As we talked, I came to a fresh understanding about dedication and responsibility. How hope to find roots without taking the far greater risk of commitment? Far greater even than the risks attendant upon an unrooted, floating-free life that may, at first glance, appear “adventurous” and/or “dangerous”? The leap into commitment, in love, or in work, or in religion, demands far greater courage. It is just from that that Jody draws back, because she isn’t sure enough of anything. What one fears for such a person is an accidental taking root simply because of circumstances … at the moment Jody is staying with a friend in Portland and next door lives a man alone with his two small children. Perhaps in the five days Jody has been there, he has fallen in love with her. He is a mechanic and she is drawn to this kind of nonintellectual. What if she “floats” into a permanent relationship there? Finds herself caught (because, after all, why not settle down?) bringing up another woman’s children, almost by accident, no real commitment having been made at first?

  Jody has not even begun to realize what being dedicated (I prefer that word to the overused “committed”) to an art means. She jots down poem ideas, but never revises, never breaks it down, uses it as she uses everything else for a moment’s interest or kick. The writing of poems is the best way I know to understand what is really going on inside the psyche, but to do it you have to use your mind and you have to look at it as a craft not a self-indulgence. There is a huge gulf here between Jody and myself at her age. For I was writing poems and I knew that in doing that I was serving something greater than myself, or at least other than myself. One does not “find oneself by pursuing one’s self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through some discipline or routine (even the routine of making beds) who one is and wants to be.

  At four I drove Jody back to Route I and left her there, by the snowy barrier left by the ploughs. I felt like a mother who has to let her daughter go, even into danger, must not hold her back, but I left her there with an awful pang. I had slipped some chocolates into her knapsack and gave her a warm mohair scarf. But what else had I given? Not good advice—that comes a dime a dozen. But perhaps (I hope) the sign that one may be rooted and surrounded by plants and beautiful objects and still not be a square, still be alive and open.

  And what did I learn? That it’s all very well to shut myself up to write poems, but life is going to break down the wall—and it had better!

  Monday, January 12th

  I WOKE to gray light, howling wind … a real blizzard. I have never before seen snow as high as the bushes on the terrace and the terrace wall. About eight inches on top of what was already there, frozen solid. It’s still bitterly cold, and the hot water tank is not working, I discovered.

  After I shoveled a path out to the turnaround and also down to the bird feeders, I went back to bed with my breakfast and had a long think. In Nelson I never experienced quite the same stir-crazy feeling I get here when I can’t get out … and that is because I was on a road there, could see Mildred’s light, and knew that by eleven Win French would be along with the mail. There is no one who comes regularly to this house except the Withrows, every two weeks, to clean. So now and then I get into a sweating panic about having an accident, and not being found for days.

  I am self-reliant when it comes to the inner world. I do not need a friend around most of the time, but I am not so self-reliant physically. Any very great physical effort may risk a heart attack and it is not foolish, I guess, to be afraid.

  Anyway, it’s a miracle that Lee came and went in good weather … though she met the blizzard at La Guardia. I admired her courage, as walking is still very difficult for her, and stairs agonizing pain when she bends the artificial kneecap. She is thinking about the house we saw. It’s a very big step to consider—almost as dangerous as marriage; for what if one did not really like a house after buying? I tried to put no pressure, but I shall be sad if she decides against it.

  Luckily that night (for it had been a grueling day for Lee) I could open out the big sofa in the library, so she didn’t have to go upstairs at all while she was here, and went to sleep with the firelight. We had a good cozy time, the first time I have seen her since Labor Day, when a woman on a ferry backed into her car and smashed up her knee. She has been in a cast for months.

  It’s a strange sight to look down the field now and get the illusion that it is breaking up … as big waves crash in white foam against the white snow. It’s still snowing hard, so it will be some time before the ploughs come, and Dixon opens the frozen garage door to set me free.

  Tuesday, January 13th

  A BAD DAY yesterday, but at last I have hot water again and it’s ten above zero, gradually warming … we shall have more snow this afternoon and tonight, it seems. Today overcast; sunlight filtering through shines on the dark gray water like moonlight—a melancholy and romantic scene. It was almost a relief to wake up with a badly congested chest and a hacking cough, as my depression and even panic yesterday may have been simply the grippe coming on. I have to go out for food … and also a thermometer, as I can’t find mine.

  What an excitement it is to order rosesbushes in this glacial world, and also to read the seed catalogues by the hour, slowly coming to decisions!

  Thursday, January 15th

  IT DID NOT SNOW; instead, we had a wild night of rain, temperature up to 40°! Next morning I could hardly believe my eyes, as I could see brown grass at the end of the field. A treacherous mask of ice on the path and the road, but they did sand it and I was able to get out. I’m sick with a virus much like the one that knocked me out for six months last year. At such times
it becomes plain that I cannot be ill here. I have to walk the dog, put out birdseed, fetch the mail, however I may feel. Otherwise I just lie around. Temperature 100° yesterday. My whole rhythm is in reverse as I can do nothing in the morning but sit at this desk and contemplate all I have no strength to do. But I do have a brief emergence of energy around four P.M. as the light goes over the sea.

  Lee has decided against the house. Probably it was not right for her, but I wonder what she can find that is. This also depressed me, because I have spent energy I really didn’t have and wasted four or five days in all over this project. Waste of time enrages me. I am overaware these days of how little I have left, how few years. I used to brag that I could never retire, but now sometimes I dream of only living and gardening and leaving words alone. Heaven!

  In all the bad old year one thing shines as pure joy—that at last Eva Le Gallienne is in a huge hit on Broadway, The Royal Family. How beautiful it is now to read in Newsweek, for instance, “Eva Le Gallienne makes you believe for two and a half hours that the theatre does breed people of unique beauty, grace and human richness. Now nearing 80, Miss Le Gallienne has been almost everything it’s possible to be in the theatre. She casts a rainbow across the stage.”

  Monday, January 19th

  IT’S BEEN A HARD WEEK, bitterly cold again. Yesterday was ten below zero, today eight below, and even the brilliant sunshine feels cold as it shines off ice underfoot and across the frozen snow on the field. I do not feel very well, though the fever has gone. However, not being able to push very hard—even writing a letter a day has seemed an enormous effort—I enjoy this house, the space and light, the plant window full of flowers, cyclamen and begonias, the browallia I brought in from the garden still a marvelous deep purplish blue. The little orange tree is covered with round oranges, and, amazing to say, the lavendar star-of-Bethlehem still falls in showers of little flowers. A final bowl of paper white narcissus takes my breath away with its intoxicating sweetness as I go past, for such perfume really does seem a miracle with the frozen world outdoors. The white hyacinths that Harry Lapirow gave me are in flower too. A great bunch of spring flowers, red-and-white tulips, iris, and daffodils came from “The Barn.” It took me a while to gather who “The Barn” was—dear Agnes and Anne Thorp. So it’s a flowery house for the convalescent, and the best hospital I can imagine.