The House by the Sea

by May Sarton

  In the Times a report on John Hall Wheelock reading his poems at a special celebration at the Institute of Arts and Letters. He is ninety, and what he said that struck me was, “As life goes on, it becomes more intense because there are tremendous numbers of associations and so many memories. So many people you loved are gone. It’s almost two societies, the living and the dead, and you live with them both.”

  But does life really become more intense with age? I feel so much less intensely than I used to. I wake up nearly every morning (at five now because Tamas sees the light and wants to go out and bark the sun up) thinking of something, someone, sometimes a small forgotten incident that flows in on the tide of memory. I do lead two lives, the past and the present, and sometimes the past is far more vivid than the present. How moving Wheelock’s long passionate love for his wife, Phyllis! In one of these new poems he evokes her as he first saw her, coming out of the ocean, “dark eyes out of the snow-cold sea you came” …

  Monday, April 12th

  A CLEAR SHINING blue sea, but the Montreal Express came down from Canada last night with bitter wind, and this morning it was 18° above zero. The snowdrops are lying down—a desolate sight.

  This morning the icy wind still roars around. But at last I am beginning to feel some sap in my veins—the novel is beginning to form itself. The key is not to push it, let it put forth shoots that may or may not survive. I am stuck on the leading character’s name. Once I have that, the character will begin to shape itself. What is coming to the surface now is a conglomeration of experiences I have had in the last year—Julian’s death and J.’s question, “Who was he?” that has haunted me for months; the emptying of Judy’s house, finding old letters, et cetera; and, most of all, my fear for a short time before Christmas that I might have a limited life expectancy, the kind of excitement that gave me, and the feeling that it would be wonderful to try to die well. It sounds absurd, but it seemed to me then that dying might prove to be a final act of creation.

  Yesterday was quite simply blown to pieces by an unexpected visitor. I was asleep on my bed, the first real and complete letdown since I got back from Oklahoma, at about half past one.

  Tamas on one side and Bramble curled up and purring on the other … perfect peace. I had just fallen asleep when Bramble, quick as lightning, ran to the window and jumped up, and then I heard a car coming round the drive. Tamas growled. I got up and watched the car turn around and go away. Sometimes people are curious and manage to get in, but when they do I always feel a little anxious … might they be looking around with the idea of breaking in some other time? I went back and lay down and then a few minutes later the car was back again and out in the field. So I opened the window and called, “What do you want?” “I’m looking for May Sarton. I’m a friend of B.’s.” “You’re driving over daffodils,” I said, suddenly furious, not only at the intrusion but at such brutality. “I am May Sarton.”

  I tried to be polite when the person came in, offered coffee, but I felt like a cat rubbed the wrong way. I felt “broken into.” As usual the excuse was that there was no time to let me know, that she didn’t know when she would be in the area, that she was on a photographing job (I think that’s what she said) and this is what it always is. Because it is convenient for the intruder, they intrude. It is then I wish I had a butler, a formidable one, to open the door and say, “Miss Sarton regrets—” As I don’t have such a factotum, I have to do it myself, and am rude. This time the person left in a huff … and the result, dismay and fury on my part.

  After this event I was so restless and at loose ends I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I got up and did some sorting of the dusty books from Judy’s house, it’s a depressing job, but no doubt it will get done eventually. At present it feels like the work of Sisyphus. Finally at four I decided to go and see Raymond, to be sure he can walk and feed Tamas on Wednesday, and it was balm to sit in their parlor, always full of African violets and all the other plants Viola, his sister, has growing, and at the door a marvelous collection of cats, round-eyed, waiting hopefully for food. We had a good talk about everything and I came home at peace once more. Raymond’s mother will be ninety-six tomorrow. I take comfort in those three beautiful faces, full of compassion and humor. I take comfort because I think we understand each other very well.

  Monday, April 19th

  WE ARE in the middle of a sudden heat wave … it was over 90° in Boston yesterday, Easter day, and I had a blazzing hot drive to Concord to have Easter dinner with Judy’s family and take Judy a little Easter basket of chocolate eggs with a tiny bunch of crocuses, scillas, glory-of-the-snow in the middle. Phyllis and Timmy have a genius for making family gatherings easy and graceful, and I love being part of the group, ranging in age from eight to eighty.

  Sunday, April 25th

  ON THE WAY home from Clark University I stopped to see Judy and take her out to lunch … we had a lovely walk by the “Rude Bridge” and up to the big house that has now been given the town, as I had hoped to see the formal beds in flower. A little too early for that, but “the leaves of the willow were bright as wine.” It was a perfect hour of sharing the early spring leaves—“point d’esprit,” Judy always murmurs when she sees them. A great sweetness flowed through me and I hated to leave her. “It is going to be awfully lonely,” she said as I kissed her good-bye. And it’s the first time she has ever said that.

  The heat wave, meanwhile, has gone on and on, so it is good to hear the sound of rain today … so much will burst out after a good soaking. Yesterday when I walked the “crits,” as Marynia always called her animals, I saw the wood anemones were out. The goldfinches are gold again and the purple finches are back, very gay at the feeder, unfortunately also frequented by hosts of grackles, cow-birds, and starlings.

  I’m in a whirlwind because not only did I find tons of mail when I got back on Friday, but also the proof of A World of Light which they want back day after tomorrow. That is not possible, but I hope to get it off the next day. Tomorrow I spend the day at Durham at the Elder-hostel board meeting. Heaven knows when I’ll get off the roller coaster of these past months! I found a rosebush with the mail, and managed to put that in somehow yesterday, in spite of the proof. Living things can’t wait.

  Wednesday, April 28th

  MARY-LEIGH reminded me last night that April 27th is the anniversary of my arrival here! It has been three years, three of the happiest years of my life. I’ll never forget the first night, the 26th, that Tamas, Bramble, and I spent on the daybed in the library, alone in the empty house (the furniture came the next day) in the middle of a wild nor’easter. And the joy it was that when I let the cat out with Tamas, she did come back (I had been told to keep her in for three days). What she did was to sleep in Tamas’ bed, the “security blanket” she needed in a strange new world.

  At Vassar the heat wave was abating, but it was still beautiful and warm, and the campus in its full glory of dogwood and every kind of flowering bush and tree. Although I have not been there for forty-one years (that does seem incredible!), it all felt quite familiar. Then I was twenty-three and in the midst of battling to keep the Apprentice Theatre alive. We came up to give a rehearsal performance, but I can’t remember at all what play we chose. This time the moving spirit in getting me to speak was Anne Constantinople of the department of psychology (she has used both The Small Room and Mrs. Stevens in her courses), and the English department was cordial. In fact, I had a lovely time, a good final stop to what has seemed an endless series of public performances since February. Everywhere I go now there is good discussion about women and their lives … Anne C. led a long one the morning after the reading. She picked a phrase of mine, “honoring the work of my father,” to comment that one hears this very rarely these days. Why not, I wonder? We had quite a long discussion about self-regard and how one achieves it. This seems to me a circular argument, for does one not achieve self-regard by doing something one can respect, rather than by turning in to examine one’s self? The
great thing is that it is quite acceptable now to talk frankly about what women can give each other, about the Muse (Mrs. Stevens) as a woman for the woman poet, and so on. Woman’s Lib has already changed the ethos in a most remarkable way. But again it all comes down to an examination of what it is to be a woman, and how grooved we all are still in our relation to men—a built-in deference.

  At a luncheon in a fine house, sitting atop a steep incline, so it seems to be in the treetops, we had a hot discussion about aggression in men and women. Mr. Daniels, the hostess’ husband (she is head of the English department) appeared to take the view that women are just as aggressive and brutal as men. Yet it is surely on the whole husbands who beat their wives. On the whole it is men who torture (the Times had a horrendous description of torture in Iran that morning) other men and women, though there have been exceptions—in the Nazi camps we now know women were as brutal as the Nazi men. On the whole it is men who indulge in blood sports. Are women just as bloodthirsty? I had been mildly needled for some time, but finally the worm turned, and I said, “Men rape women. There is no way out of that!”

  A young Mississipian boy who had been sitting on my right, listening with extreme attention, at that point made a sound of muffled applause. Later when he heard that I was leaving for New York City the next morning by train, he told me he would come and wash the train window so I could see the river. Of course, I thought it was just an idea, but, sure enough, he came along to the station bearing a long-handled sponge and a bottle of Windex! I have never had such a charming send-off … I felt like a queen.

  And the whole ride down through a gentle mist was like a dream. The high mountains were often clouded at the tops, so it looked like a Chinese painting. Everywhere the dogwood was in its delicate glory in the wild woods. (Will the two I planted here flower, or were they blighted by the mid-April freeze?) The Victorian river towns, dilapidated, a little lonely now, have immense charm. I wanted to get out and live in Cold Spring, where an abandoned brick house of some distinction would have suited me perfectly.

  In a way the whole journey this time was a journey into various pasts—Vassar forty years ago with my company. And the last evening there I spent with Charles Peirce and his wife, Barbara, talking about his great-aunt-godmother, Grace Eliot Dudley, and her house at Vouvray about which I have just written in A World of Light. I had to keep so much out of that chapter about her marriage that it was good to be able to speak about it with someone who had been so moved by her presence and her legend when, after her death, he and Barbara stayed at Le Petit Bois. I felt that Grace would have been happy to see us there, all three, talking of her so raptly in the young Peirces’ beautiful house.

  That was one way into the past, and the trip down the Hudson the next day brought back very vividly the Baekelands’ big place near Yonkers, that looked out over the Hudson from a high cliff. Our first vision of America was that river.

  The final dip back into the past, a less happy one, was to go back to the Cosmopolitan Club (where Carol Heilbrun kindly put me up) for the first time since our disastrous arrival there, Marynia Farnham and I, after she thought she was leaving New Hampshire for good, six years ago. It was only then, far too late, that I realized she was not quite sane, for when we got there I found out that no shoes at all had been packed in her luggage (she had on a worn pair of snow boots … it was March). She had apparently simply dumped whatever was in her bureau in one suitcase, and a few oddments in another! I felt at the same time panic and acute distress because I had to leave her there and go home myself. My anxiety in the next months, as she wandered up and down the country, dragging her poor whippets with her, in and out of trains, to Florida and to Minnesota and finally back to New Hampshire, was like a mental illness in itself. And that was far from the end of the tragic decline.

  It was good to exorcise that time with a lovely long talk with Carol, whom I have not seen for a year. We drank a bottle of Pouilly Fuissé with our dinner and caught up on our lives at last. I’m so happy that she and Jim will be in Cambridge this winter, so I’ll see them now and then. There are very few people in my life now whom I admire as I do them, few from whom I feel I have so much to learn. What I admire about Carol is her cool … she has a detached humorous yet enormously sensitive way of handling her life, and always sets mine into proportion again for me. A great person!

  And now it is time I got back to the present, to the horrendous mess on my desk, to planting a rosebush Mary Tozer has sent for my birthday, to resuming my real life, my life here.

  Thursday, April 29th

  WHEN I HAVE my breakfast now (in bed) I am watching the screen of leaves slowly thicken between me and the ruffled edge of the sea as it breaks on the rocks to the east. The maples are in flower and I can still see through their yellow-green; soon it will be all green and then good-bye to the ocean as it breaks, until November. But soon I can open the door to the porch off my bedroom and look straight into treetops and sometimes catch a warbler on his way through, and almost always a song sparrow on the very tip of a branch.

  I had two experiences in New York that I want to record. After that heavenly train journey down the Hudson, and once I had registered at the club, I walked down Lexington Avenue to Bloomingdales’ to try to find some summer shorts and jackets … as usual, in total despair because I wear a size 18 or 20. I was shunted from floor to floor, on each seeing exactly what I needed, “But, oh no, madam, we only have sizes 8 to 16. Try floor 3 …” Finally I managed to find a pair of very expensive jeans to garden in and a couple of shirts on the unchic, sad floor for half-sizes! Meanwhile, two thirds of the women going up and down the escalators were obviously not size 16! Why do we lie down and allow fashion to dictate our lives and to humiliate us? I think the Fat Panthers (emulating the Gray Panthers) had better launch a crusade—large posters showing gaunt, thin women looking tense and one hundred years old beside round, rosy, happy women might be a first attack.

  Friday, April 30th

  A PERFECT SPRING DAY … cool and bright, and a gentle blue sea, no wind. I must go back to the other experience in New York last week. After my discouraging rove through Bloomingdales’ I went to a small French restaurant, Le Veau D’Or, took refuge there during a thunderstorm, having bought a book to read—an ideal one, as it turned out—Helen Bevington’s Journal of the Sixties. The place was jammed; my table faced the door; I could observe people as they came in while I sipped my drink and waited for my filet of sole. I realized how good it was not to be waiting anxiously for “one person,” to be so free, no entanglements, no little thread pulled taut inside me, so that in an hour there I had the feeling of a whole holiday and enjoyed myself immensely.

  Monday, May 3rd

  MY sixty-fourth birthday, and a singularly happy one. I woke before five to Bramble’s loud purrs and lay there for a while listening to the gentle sigh of the sea. There was dense fog. Tamas licked my hand to suggest that it was time to get up; so I did, in time to catch a vision of gold and purple finches at the feeder. I opened Blue’s presents with my breakfast in bed. She has made an emergency sewing kit for my travels, such an imaginative present, and after breakfast I opened Mary’s present, she who always spoils me terribly, and she the only person now who thinks of the kind of things family give to family … this time, pale blue sheets and a light blue blanket. Lee, Blue, Laurie, Mary-Leigh and Rene all called before nine. Yet, despite all these friends, I am suddenly in tears, thinking of my mother. In the middle of the night I had a strange and rather awful dream about being born, struggle, and fear. I can’t capture it now, but I was aware of Wondelgem, an atmosphere. Joy and pain. Must they always go together?

  It is a good birthday because I feel I am coming into my own this year more than ever before. I heard on Saturday that I am to get a third honorary degree, this one from the University of New Hampshire. It’s great fun. For one who only graduated from high school there is a slightly malicious pleasure in it: “I did it my way.”

  Maybe the
most important reason I feel happy is that I am learning not to push quite so hard—“She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs.” I’m calmer and more sure of myself. That doesn’t mean that anything is solved, only that the conflict is not so destructive. I am thinking of the conflict between art and life, of course … that will never be solved. But I am coming to be more able to do what I can, answer letters when I can, and to have less guilt about what is not done. And perhaps I am happy also because the panic that I would never have another idea for a novel is gone, and I do see my way ahead for another two years.

  Yesterday I planted bush sweet pea seeds, a mixed packet of radishes that will mature at different times, a box of forget-me-nots, and one of large white Swiss pansies on the terrace. When I look at the expanse of earth ready to be sown I wonder how I shall ever get it done with guests coming almost every other day this month. I’m going to try a few hills of potatoes just for the fun of it.

  On Saturday it took most of the day to take Jill out for lunch in Portsmouth. She is twenty-three, full of life and hope. I have great respect for her, for her passionate sense of being a Jew (she went to Israel for a year all on her own). But I also felt how dangerous it is to be brought up in such a close-knit Jewish society because, outside it, one feels alien. She has landed at the University of New Hampshire, where there happen to be almost no Jewish professors or students. At first I think she felt like a stranger in a foreign land. She is such an open, loving girl that the force of goy society hit her with a wham, and perhaps I can be of some use because she can talk openly with me, and knows that I am sympathetic.

  I feel a pang when I realize her illusions about writing professionally (she is on a teaching fellowship that provides time for writing). One must believe in one’s talent to take the long hard push and pull ahead, but a talent is like a plant. At J.’s age it may simply wither if it is not given enough food, sun, tender care. And to give it those things means working at it every day. It is no good at twenty-three to produce a story or two in a year. A talent grows by being used, and withers if it is not used. Closing the gap between expectation and reality can be painful, but it has to be done sooner or later. The fact is that millions of young people would like to write, but what they dream of is the published book, often skipping over the months and years of very hard work necessary to achieve that end—all that, and luck too. We tend to forget about luck.