by May Sarton
Is Israel itself to become another Warsaw? I have not spoken about this before, but I must say that fear about Israel is never out of my mind and has not been for months.
Sunday, February 8th
AFTER ANOTHER DAY entirely alone in the bleak cold, some sort of breakthrough that has been coming since Christmas happened. I think it had to. I wept torrents of tears—even the cat got up and came and looked down at me (I was in bed by nine), while Tamas licked my eyes frantically. But animals are not enough. I am simply too isolated and starved. And it is not the easiest thing to solve … there are people I could call, who would gladly come and have dinner if I invited them. But that becomes a great effort, breaks into my meditations, destroys all real work for the day; so it is not a solution. What I need is “family” and by that I mean a family on whom I could drop in sometimes, with whom I could share a meal informally, someone with whom I could go for a walk. Without Heidi, with whom I have lunch once a week, I would be absolutely desolate.
I hesitate to offer invitations far ahead, because what if I was at work on a poem suddenly? I feel I have to keep the channels uncluttered—that is my first responsibility. Vincent Hepp comes tonight. He is a person with whom I can talk about the great impersonal problems such as Israel, and I look forward to seeing him; yet this imminent visit has changed the color of the week in an absurd way. I have been “preparing” and that has taken time and energy. Only people who live alone, as alone as I am here in winter, can understand the agitation that “entertaining” even a single guest induces.
When I am depressed I realize very well that everything I do, such as tending the flowers, talking to the animals, walking with them, is a kind of wall against woe. A substitute, for what? For one person who would focus this beautiful world for me … and I think that that will not happen again. It some ways I do not want it to happen. I am beginning a new phase. Perhaps one must always feel absolutely naked and abandoned and desolate to be ready for the inner world to open again. Perhaps one has to dare that. This morning I feel better for having let the woe in, for admitting what I have tried for weeks to refuse to admit—loneliness like starvation.
Thursday, February 12th
A GLORIOUS DAY, shining blue sea, just a few small white clouds sailing along in the sky … the détente caused by warmer weather is amost unbelievable. I feel lighter in every way.
Vincent and I had some hours of real exchange, more, strangely enough, about human relations than about the “world situation.” I was startled by his acceptance of hostility and tension as the inevitable in family life. How hard it is for us to admit this! I think everyone lives by some illusions, but the illusions do not help. On the contrary, they make us feel guilty before any stress, as though it were some personal disgrace. I was amazed when Vincent simply took hostility for granted, something not so much to be dealt with as simply to “wait out,” as one waits for a rainstorm to blow off in time. He stopped here overnight on his way to take two of his sons to Halifax for the final paper signing that will mean they can get jobs in America and live here without having to go to Canada every now and then to get back in. Of course, it is frightfully expensive and just another sign of how bureaucracy works to devour lives and substance.
I was quite alarmed when he said unequivocally, apropos of my sense of isolation, “But you are a leader and you must know that.” I have never thought of myself as a “leader” since the 1930s, when I was responsible for a small theatre company. A “leader” surely presupposes some group or cadre that he is “leading.” Can a shepherd without sheep be called a shepherd? I think I was startled because my whole bent is toward not admitting the idea of an élite, of believing that to become more and more human (as I wish to do) means just the opposite, to admit all the ways in which one fails, to join with others in a great invisible community of the nonleaders and the nonled, simply plain human beings in a universal struggle to survive with grace.
The British Empire was founded on the conception of élites. Bloomsbury thrived on the sense of its “specialness.” To what extent does one have to “belong” to “become” someone? I should like to prove that it can be done in almost total isolation from groups in general and in particular. But of course the price is high. And one must have a pretty tough core to be willing to pay it.
Monday, February 23rd
BACK TO A NORMALLY cool day, after this disconcerting week of very warm damp weather, and back from four days at the Notre Dame University literary festival. I went in fear and trembling, exhilarated by the prospect of meeting Louis Simpson, Stanley Kunitz, and Galway Kinnell, as I see so few poets, and these are all three ones for whom I have respect—fearful that I would not fulfill Michelle Quinn’s expectations. The festival is run by the sophomore class … they choose the writers they want, and Michelle, the sophomore chairman, had especially wanted me to come.
It turned out to be a true festival, everyone filled with love and joy. Such an audience! Standing room only, with six hundred seated in a charming auditorium. Louis Simpson had been so fine the night before, the wry delicate tone so very different from mine—I wondered how my work would stand up, especially as I was reading from As We Are Now, as well as poems. It did … dear Michelle was sobbing as the applause swelled and swelled, and I remembered how when I was her age I did that sometimes in the Old Civic Repertory days, weeping from a kind of joy. What moved me most, perhaps, was the way some of the women professors and instructors came to thank me, saying, “You don’t know what you have done for us.” (I was the only woman writer at the festival).
That was one part of the experience. The other, even more important to me, was to hear those three good poets read. I have been starved for that, to feel myself part of the communion of poets again, to learn from my peers. It gave me a new sense of confidence in what I am doing now—not in strict form. I saw very well how such poems can have momentum and thrust, and even float the hearer on their music. Reading Kinnell on the plane home I came upon this, part 4 of Spindrift:
I sit listening
To the surf as it falls.
The power and inexhaustible freshness of the sea,
The suck and inner boom
As a wave tears free and crashes back
In overlapping thunders going away down the beach.
It is the most we know of time,
And it is our undermusic of eternity.
Many doors opened for me during the four days, among them someone giving me Tillich’s The Shaking of the Foundations after we had been talking in the student coffee shop and eating doughnuts. It sounds like nothing—a casual meeting with a young man and a young woman, both instructors at the university. But in that atmosphere of the festival it had great force. I needed this book. It has solved (the chapter called “Waiting” especially) something that has been troubling me for a very long time. It has helped me back to a state of grace.
In that same half hour the young man told me that his aunt is Catherine O’Leary, who worked for us as housekeeper for many years in Cambridge, who loved my mother. It is wonderful that I can now write to her and send her I Knew a Phoenix. It made me so happy!
Friday, February 27th
SPRING BEGINS in the sky—we are having delicate pale blue skies and they reflect on the ocean, so it too is a blue I hardly ever see in the winter. But the earth is sodden and gray, some ice patches still not quite melted. Snowdrops are showing round the big maple! We are certainly being given an early spring (if it lasts!) to make up for harsh old January.
I wonder why it is that “inspirational” writing such as appears in The Reader’s Digest and in religious magazines so often, far from consoling or “uplifting,” makes me feel angry and upset. Most of the platitudes uttered are true, after all. But the fact is that this kind of superficial piety covers the real thing with a sugary icing meant to make it more palatable. It makes me feel sick. And the sickness is because I feel cheated. It debases God (by making him a kind of universal pal), and sentimental
izes Jesus, and—what is most dangerous and unchristian—it makes its communicants feel superior, part of an élite club where the saved can gather, shutting everyone else out. Into all this Tillich enters like a cleansing, ruthless wind. The thing that moved me so deeply when I read The Shaking of the Foundations came as an answer to my long anguish over the absence of God. The chapter called “Waiting” begins
“Both the Old and New Testaments describe our existence in relation to God as one of waiting.… The condition of man’s relation to God is first of all one of not having, not seeing, not knowing, and not grasping. A religion in which this is forgotten, no matter how ecstatic or active or reasonable, replaces God by its own creation of an image of God.… I am convinced that much of the rebellion against Christianity is due to the overt or veiled claim of the Christians to possess God, and therefore, also, to the loss of this element of waiting, so decisive for the prophets and the apostles.… They did not possess God, they waited for Him. For how can God be possessed? Is God a thing that can be grasped and known among other things? Is God less than a human person? We always have to wait for a human being.”
Sunday, March 7th
A LONG HIATUS, for I have been in limbo due to a very bad cold (“the worst cold I ever had,” as my father used to say whenever he had a cold) just at a time when I had to make a very great effort and hence couldn’t rest. I had to go to Cambridge and take away everything of mine from 14 Wright Street, where Judy and I spent ten happy years before I moved to Nelson. I had left paintings, hundreds of books, and some furniture because I didn’t want to spoil that house as long as Judy lived there. Now her nephew (who had been renting it) has bought it and naturally wants to start fresh.
It is touching to see how little the neighborhood has changed. It is still the same folksy jumble of ugly three-decker apartments and small delightful houses, of which 14 Wright Street, a harness-maker’s shop one hundred years old, is one. Timmy Warren, Judy’s great-nephew, was there to meet me and so was Eleanor Blair, who, now eighty-two years old, had driven from Wellesley through the storm to come and help me. She knew it would be a hard day and it was entirely characteristic for her to make the effort—what a great friend she is! She set to at once, packing the small treasures in the corner cupboard which I am giving Anne Woodson and Barbara for their farm. Timmy had packed all the books, so that huge job I had dreaded had already been accomplished. The worst was finding masses of old photographs and some tiny objects … a small ashtray covered with butterflies that Vladimir Nabokov loved when he was a tenant of ours in another house where Judy and I lived. (I wish Judy had given it to him! It has been broken, and mended, and I threw it away.) The ghost of Tom Jones, our cat, appeared and reappeared in old snapshots … how vividly I remembered him lying in the window box, upside down, as I have described in The Fur Person!
While we sat in the little parlor having a glass of sherry before lunch, I found myself evoking his great-aunt for Timmy who, after all, hardly knew Judy before she became senile. As I talked, it all came back—our life together in that house and two others in Cambridge before it, for over twenty years, and I was happy to remind myself of the remarkable person she was, her dark eyes that sometimes reflected somber moods and always suggested a strong inner life, as was indeed true, for Judy was a birthright Quaker and, in a most unassuming way, a good example of what being a Quaker means. She carried a heavy teaching load as professor of English literature at Simmons College, corrected papers till late at night, and was off to school by seven in the morning. Nevertheless, she spent many summers of volunteer work for the Quakers, once working with the Japanese Americans we treated so badly during World War II, and, after we met, teaching English with recently emigrated Latvians. Her Quakerhood showed itself in little ways too in her moderation in daily living … she never had more than one drink, for example, one drink for sociability, and that was enough. But, above all, she was a real Quaker in her tolerance of and quiet grace before my extravagance of temperament, and that is partly why our relationship endured.
Judy was born rich in the safe gentle world of West Newton, but by the time she was nineteen, a freshman at Smith College, that world had cracked under her feet in terrible ways—her mother’s complete breakdown—she lived out the rest of her life in a sanatorium—and her father’s bankruptcy. Charles Matlack was a charming cultivated man who had inherited a fortune with not the slightest trace of business acumen with which to invest it, and the results were tragic. His eldest daughter had married very young, fortunately, but Judy and her younger sister were faced with not only the loss of their mother, but the necessity to earn a living at once. Judy managed to work her way through Smith with the help of scholarships and then embarked on a career of teaching, after a winter at Oxford University, thanks to the generosity of a friend.
Judy always had a genius for friendship, and I think it came partly from her marvelous capacity for really listening to other people. She shared with her friends in a rare way, and it was just this that had drawn me to her when we first met as fellow lodgers in Santa Fe.
We had a beautiful life together. In the winter she was away all day while I worked at writing and waited happily for her to come home for tea and a little walk before she went upstairs to read papers and prepare her classes. But in the summer more than once we took off for Europe … one memorable trip after World War II, when we drove down through the Dordogne to the South with two English friends, starved for sunlight and good food and France itself after the long hard years of war in London. And after I moved to Nelson we still spent all holidays together and Judy came to me for a month in the summer. So what is unknitting now, as she grows more and more absent, had been knitted together for many years, and is still the warp and woof, the deepest relationship I have known.
Tuesday, March 9th
I SAW THE DOCTOR yesterday … I have the bug and there is nothing to do but wait a month, six weeks, he says, to feel better. I panic at the very idea of the lectures ahead, but even more at no work getting done at all. Where have my dreams of poems gone? As for this journal, I break into sweat in my bed at night, thinking how little I manage to get down of significance here—the deep sense I have of dying and of death, for one thing. It is not that I think I am mortally ill, but simply that I feel the heaviness of mortality upon me. I am tending toward the earth, and more so each day, I feel. A profound sense of dissatisfaction with my life (too comfortable, too self-indulgent). The house is a mess, boxes of books from Wright Street standing about everywhere and no energy with which to deal with them. I am torn between two ways to handle this doldrum that has been going on for weeks, really since January, when I did at least get down a few small poems.
The first way is to give in, to enjoy the light on flowers—yesterday white daffodils and white iris in the dusk—to enjoy this beautiful place, rejoice in the animal presences (Bramble at last comes up here to my study and curls up on the daybed—it has taken all these months for Scrabble to be exorcised), to live the slow quiet rhythm of a day as a kind of healing. The other way is to ask a great deal more of myself, to drive myself, and hope to break through into deeper, more valid places.
The only creation I can point to, if it can be called one, is that my dream of having the plant window filled with many-splendored cinerarias has come true. It has taken ten months from seed … ten months of anxiety as the tiny plants grew under lights in the cellar, and were transplanted from flats to peat-moss pots to larger pots … ten months of getting rid of white fly over and over, as well as anxiety during the bitter cold of January. But now they are upstairs. One very intense cobalt blue nourishes me like food. There is a purple one with a white border, a pink one ditto … every shade of pink, even salmon pink, deep red, brilliant magenta (a color I dislike but in the group it flashes out and is beautiful).
A long letter from Camille Mayran, now eighty-seven, made me sad. For almost the first time in our long correspondence I feel an abyss between us … there is too much on w
hich we profoundly disagree, too much that she cannot accept about the world as it is now. And it exhausts me even to contemplate trying to answer her. But what upsets me most was her saying that the French have always separated politics from morality—this apropos of Watergate, which she feels has been made too much of. I would say that once politics and morality are separated, civilizations must crumble. She refuses to grant that the war in Vietnam was wrong, nor accept the conscientious objector as a moral person. How can I find the strength to answer her—and all the other letters strewn about on my desk, waiting like animals to be fed?