by May Sarton
Thursday, March 11th
A REAL MARCH DAY that began with snow falling and ends now with a sky full of spring clouds and a calm blue sea, the snow melted, and mud to take its place. I did manage to drive to Concord to see Judy, and, as always, I feel so much better for having done so. After a month without seeing her dear old face I feel such a tug, such an inner imperative that I simply have to go.
Two nights ago there was a ninety-minute portrait of Piaf on TV. What a marvelous time I had watching it, hearing all those sad songs again! Some of the comments by her former lovers and associates were illuminating. One used the French word monstre; really it should be un monstre sacré, I believe. There is no English equivalent that I know of, but I think it means someone larger than life, set apart by genius, whom genius has made impossibly difficult as well as impossibly marvelous. Another said that she needed lovers as one needs oxygen and this shook me, for I recognized it as true, even in a small way, of myself … if not lovers, the new person who brings the world to life again, who makes one see freshly again, the magic encounter. It is a long time since I have experienced one. And perhaps I never shall again.
Tuesday, March 16th
I LIE AROUND enjoying the house, the flowers, wishing I could summon the energy to unpack and sort out the books from Judy’s, sitting up here at my desk for an hour or so, accomplishing very little. At such times the old conflict between art and life becomes acute. I am nagged and probed by doubts and fears about my work … shall I ever have an idea for another novel? And if I don’t, how shall I live? I begin to understand Louise Bogan’s panic in the last years of her life, the honors coming at last, but a diminishing power to create dogging her mind and depression creeping in. I have written no poems since January and what I did then seems to me negligible.
This morning in bed I picked up Rilke’s letters and opened to February 11th, 1922 (?), the day after he had finished the last of the Elegies in that great storm of creation, just after the Sonnets to Orpheus had seized him and been written. This happened after years of silence—long thinking and feeling—an excruciating tension of patience. My fear is that I am going slack. It is too easy to lie around, enjoying life at its purest and simplest, watching the downy woodpecker at the feeder, looking out to sea, rough and troubled today as a northeaster builds up and darkens the sky. I could immerse myself in such things for hours. But if all tension slips away, if one becomes simply a sentient being without the desire even to note down what is happening, in my case the reason for existence has gone too. I can justify this beautiful place and my life here only if, because of it, I am able to give through my work.
But life does always come in with some pressing gift or need. Eugenia sent me Melanie Klein’s fascinating book on Envy and Gratitude. It has given me a rather frightening insight into recent behavior of my own. I gave away a lot of money last year, mostly in gifts to friends and then quite unexpectedly I began to needle these friends because I had not (I felt) been thanked. Then I began to get into a real panic about earning, about paying the income tax, a whole neurotic fugue about money. All this seemed very unlike my usual self. So I was shocked into recognition when I read the following in Melanie Klein: “Even the fact that generosity is often insufficiently appreciated does not necessarily undermine the ability to give. By contrast, with people in whom this feeling of inner wealth and strength is not sufficiently established, bouts of generosity are often followed by an exaggerated need for appreciation and gratitude, and consequently by persecutory anxieties of having been impoverished and robbed.” How glad I am to understand a little about this at last! For it is true that I have felt impoverished and frightened about the future ever since I made one large gift. And now I suspect that it is all part of panic about my work, the fear that I cannot earn it back.
LATER
The storm has come, with wild white veils, high wind. I can’t see the ocean … really it is thrilling to be so isolated in such a fierce white wilderness of a world. I forgot to say earlier this morning that sometimes these days there are marvelous things on PBS. Last night I saw Archie MacLeish talking with Moyers for an hour. Archie is eighty-three, his face as smooth as a smooth stone. What a wonderful way to grow old, not to wrinkle, but just the opposite, to seem washed clear, down to an essence. I was moved when he reacted strongly to a question about poets and politics, reminding Bill Moyers that Yeats had only become a great poet after 1916 when he became passionately involved. I have always been attacked for writing political poems, first by Conrad Aiken years ago, then of course by Louise Bogan (some of this argument is in our letters). Bad rhetorical poetry is just as bad as any bad poetry and I think the question is how deeply moved one has been, whether the political poem can come from the subconscious or reach the subconscious to be fertilized. At Notre Dame I was asked to read the Kali poem—I have not done that often—and I think it did work. But why worry? One does what one can, and one does what one must. At the moment the inspiration for any poem at all would be a present from the gods.
Wednesday, March 17th
ABOUT A FOOT of snow fell, and drifted, so most of the terrace is snowed in up to the wall … quite a storm! I got up at six and shoveled a path for Tamas, filled the bird feeders, then went back to bed for a snooze with Bramble, who has a great capacity for sleeping all through a storm.
It is when the world outside is totally wintry that the plant window becomes a kind of magic: the cinerarias are still wonderful, also a white cyclamen with a purple throat.
I got distracted about Yeats yesterday and forgot to go on to two things connected with that evening’s TV pleasures. Seeing Archie sitting by the big pond in Conway brought back a vivid memory of my day with them there years ago. I had driven over from Nelson. We walked down to the pond before lunch and had a swim—among the trout! It’s a beautiful secret place with tall trees around it and a brook running through, and all that day Ada and Archie and I shared such a perfect communion and so much joy that I felt I must never go back. Perfection, as I wrote Archie yesterday, cannot be repeated. The lilies were in flower in Ada’s formal garden. Everywhere I saw the signs of their work together over many years to create this place that is both formal and casual. An unforgettable day!
Later that evening (looking at TV) there was an hour with Kenneth Clark on an Edwardian childhood. There are similarities between the two men, each having created a world of elegance out of self-made rather than inherited taste (Kenneth Clark’s environment was rich and vulgar, as he said himself—pool playing, gambling at Monte Carlo, and a series of hideous big houses here and there), each having a genius for friendship, but differing in that Clark has not had to suffer the agony of the creator in the same way as MacLeish. Moyers probed for the “agony” and Archie answered so well … yes, there had been tragedy in his life, the death of a brother in World War I, and of a son … but these sorrows can be absorbed and accepted, he suggested, weaving themselves into a life, becoming part of its richness and meaning. The true agony, Archie said, has been in the work itself, the struggle with that.
A long letter from Charles Barber in England came yesterday. He is beginning to feel the need, after a very rich year abroad, to get back to roots. “Living in a foreign country is so exhausting in that one’s vision is so enlarged and is constantly being demanded of …” and “being stared at constantly, the butt of unfunny cross-culture jokes and all that nonsense loses its novelty after a while.” I recognized those feelings very well. In spite of everything, the European attitude toward Americans is one of barely concealed disdain. “But you don’t seem like an American!” is the greatest compliment. I used to react violently to that!
Charles is also fed up with the academic life, with analysis of works of art that ends by short-circuting creation.
Friday, March 19th
BY AN ODD COINCIDENCE I came upon a paragraph from Ruskin’s A Joy Forever that I had been looking for for years. It turned up in an old journal I uncovered in a box of the books from
Wright Street. The coincidence is that I found it this morning, with young Morgan Mead coming for lunch to celebrate his first story’s having sold to Yankee.
“For it is only the young,” Ruskin writes, “who can receive much reward from men’s praise; the old, when they are great, get too far beyond and above you to care what you think of them.
“You may urge them then with sympathy, and surround them with acclamation, but they will doubt your pleasure and despise your praise. You might have cheered them in their race through the asphodel meadows of their youth; you might have brought the proud bright scarlet to their faces, if you had but cried once to them. ‘Well done,’ as they dashed up to the first goal of their early ambition. But now their pleasure is in memory, and their ambition is in Heaven. They can be kind to you, but you can nevermore be kind to them.”
Of course, on the other hand, it is Heaven not to care, or to feel secure enough no longer to crave praise. I fear I never shall.
I was so afraid that I might not be wildly enthusiastic about Morgan’s story, but I was. I found it full of charm and truth; I feel he is a novelist—he manages in this short story to weave such a rich web, to evoke so much between the lines. It made me happy to be able to tell him this.
Altogether a lovely day, though it began with thick wet snow, nearly two inches, and I was awfully afraid he wouldn’t make it from Hartford. We are real friends in that we can talk about everything very freely and I know he enjoys me as much as I enjoy him. Our yearly meetings are true festivals. There are nearly forty years between us—amazing!
Thursday, March 25th
FOR THE FIRST TIME in a year or more I set out for a lecture in lovely warm sunny weather and had good weather the whole three days … I really can hardly believe it. In New York forsythia is out and the magnolias in front of the public library are just on the brink.
I talked and read poems on the theme of “An Experience of Solitude” at the College of Mount St. Vincent in Riverdale.
I was away only for two nights, but it seemed ages. I was very glad to get home yesterday afternoon to warm wind, spring air, a rough blue sea … and a few tiny early crocuses as well as snowdrops to welcome me.
It is time I caught on to the fact that people who say, “I make no demands” are the ones, of course, who, whether they know it or not, are out for the blood in one’s body, are out to catch the soul, and to dominate a life. The least they demand (but that is everything) is one’s attention.
Tuesday, March 30th
JUDY HAS BEEN HERE for the weekend, for the first time since Christmas. The weather was beautiful, though windy and cold, but at least the ocean was that marvelous shining blue under blue skies. After twenty-four hours I began to feel the awful woe, like a rising tide. Yet, in a way, it was a good time. It’s only the relentless truth of her condition that gradually permeates everything for me after some hours with her. It makes me feel abandoned and desperately lonely, lonely partly because I believe no one can quite understand who has not experienced it what it is to lose through senility the person closest to you.
On Sunday morning we paid a call on Elizabeth Knies Pevear—she had asked me to come to be given a copy of her poems, at last out (a charming small book where she appears with two other poets, published by the Alice James group). After twelve years of marriage to Richard (also a poet), they are having a time apart, E. living in the Garretts’ house on the river. How hard it is to make a living as a poet … or to be a poet and produce enough with a full-time job too! E. works at Strawbery Banke, doing publicity for them, and Richard at the Marina here. I have the greatest respect for them both. E. is a real poet but she has found being a wife and a jobholder makes it next to impossible to get anything of her own done. We talked about it—how a woman almost inevitably finds herself doing most of the housework, for instance. During this time alone she has occasionally asked one man friend or other over for dinner … but of course she gets the dinner, waits on him, etcetera. I felt the same thing and was horrified at myself at Notre Dame—the instinctual giving way to a man. Stanley Kunitz, Bob Haas, and I were to answer questions one morning. About a hundred students showed up. The men were late, so I plunged in and we had got quite a lively discussion going about being a woman writer. The minute the men joined me, I found myself deferring (especially to Stanley, that gentlest of men); I heard the very tone of my voice changed. Other people noticed it, and we laughed about it at a party that night.
What is it to be a woman? I have been thinking a lot about this lately because of Karen Elias-Button’s PhD thesis (I am an adjunct for her at Union Graduate University) that uses mythology and comes out over and over again with how male-oriented mythology is. We are born and bred reading about Eurydice, the passive, who has to be rescued by Orpheus, and so on. Leda!
But mythology cannot be artificially created. We have to come to understand ourselves as central, not peripheral, before anything real can happen. We have to depend on ourselves, and that must include our own instincts both for kinds of nurturing and kinds of self-preservation. This cannot be done against men, and that’s the real problem. It is what makes me less than enthusiastic about a good deal of feminist literature at present. It is not either/or. It cannot be woman against man. It has to be woman finding her true self with or without man, but not against man.
When I think of myself, I realize how singular a life mine has been, since through luck or through will, through having a viable talent (viable in that it provided me with a raison d’être and eventually a place in the world), I have never really had to work any of this out. My deep conflict has had to do with my work.
Wednesday, March 31st
YESTERDAY for the first time this spring I went out and did a little raking—raking leaves off a place where I have planted a row of crocuses this year. Then I took some salt hay off the upper border, and luckily I did so, for the white heather is in flower. I brought in a few branches of forsythia in bud.
Today is a gentle gray day, with rain expected, but I hope to manage an hour’s work outdoors before it comes, at least fertilize the azaleas. The flat sentences perfectly express my dull state of mind. I feel like sowing-mix in which some random seeds may have been planted, but none have “taken.” There are only vague stirrings about a new novel, though I long for an imaginary world in which to live again. I have missed having a novel going these past months. Maybe that is really the reason for a long period of moderate depression. I enjoy life but without great enthusiasm.
Friday, April 9th
DEAD TIRED. Yesterday, home from three days at the University of Oklahoma. I felt a little crazy, unable to concentrate, wandering around holding myself together. It is, anyway, the hardest season in New England, “the cruellest month” not because the lilacs are in flower but because they are not … nor is anything else except a few crocuses. It’s a gray cold world, and I feel old and cold myself.
The expenditure of every ounce of psychic energy I have—which is what these quick lectures-cum-classes-cum-concentrated-social-life demand when I meet perhaps one hundred new people, each of whom feels we are old friends because they have read the books—is bound to boomerang, of course. The bad thing now is that I have an overnight trip to Clark University next week and the following week Vassar and New York—dinner with Carol is the carrot I hold before me—if ever I reach it!
The time in Oklahoma was a surprise and a great pleasure, or many great pleasures of rather differing sorts. What I had not expected was so much beauty and style … on my first evening being taken around a tiny but exquisite garden, full of corners where strawberries grow, dark purple iris in clumps here and there, many ornamental trees. Jim Yoch is an exceedingly civilized young man, a man of many gifts (his field is the Renaissance and he has all his students acting scenes from Shakespeare in class). Sensitivity to other people is quite rare in the degree to which one feels it in him.
I was not surprised but deeply moved by the open tilled fields and the great skies … an
d the air wonderfully fresh like a cool white wine the whole time I was there. One has to get used to a whole town where there are few houses of more than one story, a horizontal town, the residential streets rich in trees. I enjoyed the change of pace, the slowness of speech, unhurried response in hotels and restaurants. Only I was pressed, rushing from one class or luncheon to another, envying the students lying around on the grass.
What I had not expected was to find such a fine enthusiastic group of young women instructors and graduate students, deep into the Journal and Mrs. Stevens and As We Are Now. The audience for the poetry reading was not large, but the discussion next day for two hours with groups of students, men and women, who came and went as their classes permitted, was one of the best I have ever experienced. They are keenly involved in Woman’s Lib (Adrienne Rich has been there this year) in the most authentic way, that is, trying to direct their own lives into channels where they can be fruitful as individuals, yet also marry and have children. They are living it all on the pulse, which means they cannot be arbitrary and merely theoretical. It did me good to realize that I can be helpful, that everything that has been so lonely in my own struggle is now very much in the air and relevant.
But all the good discussion and the praise (how new to me to find lots of people have read the work!) is at the opposite pole, of course, from creation. And when I come back from these trips I feel depleted in that part of me, empty, and in a curious way desolate—like a woman exhausted by giving birth.
Saturday, April 10th
YESTERDAY I accomplished next to nothing, except a good walk through the woods with Bramble and Tamas. There, only the rich brooks, overflowing still from winter snows, speak of a change of tempo, of something coming alive.