by May Sarton
The big curtains at the windows are drawn these days as it is light so very early.
On my left is a round turntable with rows of medicines on the top and two layers of books below—and these days a square wicker stool also covered with books. Medawar’s autobiography these nights, interesting and lively, but not to be compared with Juliette’s as a work of art. There is Mary Barnard’s new book of poems written around the astral myths, and Henry Taylor’s The Flying Change which has just won the Pulitzer prize—how happy I was when I read that he had won it, and he writes me that it came as a total surprise!
I read it through in one sitting with tears streaming down my cheeks to be with true poetry again—and have just gone back to the last lines of the title poem:
I see that age will make my hands a sieve;
But for a moment the shifting world suspends
its flight and leans toward the sun once more,
as if to interrupt its mindless plunge
through works and days that will not come again.
I hold myself immobile in bright air,
sustained in time astride the flying change.
Above the round table there are two calendars of the English countryside which I always order and always enjoy and somehow need—for England and these landscapes are in my bones.
Pat said she felt at home here partly because I and the house are so European, and I felt at home with her for the same reason.
Thursday, June 5
After the lovely moments of waking comes the reluctant tug every morning to get up and get going. It is now nearly half past nine and the “getting going” has taken almost three hours—partly because Eleanor Perkins is here cleaning and I have to tidy things up a bit more than usual. I went downstairs at a little after six to let Tamas out, set the tray for my breakfast (cream of wheat this morning), fetch the bird feeder from the garage, refill and hang it up. Then I offered Pierrot breakfast which he didn’t want, eager to go out and chase chipmunks.
I then went back to bed and dozed for an hour. Finally got up at seven, made my breakfast and, with Tamas preceding me, carried the tray up to have it in bed. Tamas lies beside me and wants to lick the bowl, and is given small treats, dog snacks, meanwhile. A friend who saw my tray all set and didn’t know about this asked, “Do you eat dog biscuits for breakfast?”
That time in bed after drinking my café au lait is precious. I sometimes lie there thinking for a half hour. Today I had to get up, before I was ready, to tidy up the guest room (take vases of dead flowers down, etc.) and wash the week’s towels in the washer on this floor. That was a bright thing I did for once (I am such a bad housekeeper)—to have it installed so nearby.
Then I still had to wash my breakfast dishes, rearrange flowers—I picked a few Star of Bethlehem, and five English bluebells to make a little magic, and added in some tiny lavender carnations I found at Foster’s yesterday. It worked.
Soon there will be peonies to pick in my garden. But the chipmunks have decimated the rhododendruns. It is very hard to accept this, as it would have been a glorious year and so much else suffered during this hard winter.
Writing this account of morning chores does make me see that I am better—although, when I finally got up the two steep flights of stairs to my study, I felt that strange drained exhaustion as though energy were a solid substance and had suddenly melted away.
Tomorrow I see Dr. Petrovich and we’ll see what he has to say. I can’t remember what it was like to feel well.
Friday, June 6
A dismal dark day, raining hard. Pierrot, who is in a state of ecstasy and frustration chasing the chipmunks he never catches, wanted to go out into the wet wild world, and out he is.
I went to sleep thinking of Sakharov and woke up thinking of him, what being locked away in Gorky and totally vulnerable means—at least once the KGB has come and tortured him. This could happen at any moment. One hears that he is close to being a saint, the most gentle man imaginable.
Amnesty International’s twenty-fifth anniversary yesterday. They have a remarkable record partly because they single out individuals and put up an intense barrage over him or her. Millions of others, not chosen, have no hope of course. I find I give to A.I. all I can.
If only Sakharov could be freed!
Animals and birds, except for the shrike, a bird who impales small birds in order to eat them later, as far as I know do not torture each other, and especially do not torture members of their own species. The fact that man does and has done for centuries remains horrifying—and of course we know more and more about what amounts to sexual torture within marriages. Give a person power over another person and the ease with which he uses it to punish is staggering—hardly aware of what he is doing—and if I use the masculine pronoun here it is because in spite of feminism so many women lack power because in our society money is power. I see it so clearly in my parents’ marriage—the absolute power the money he earned gave my father when my mother was doing all the housework and he never realized what food, clothes, etc. cost. It is hard for me to forgive—
So let me turn away and toward old age, the Fourth Season, as it has been called. How many times lately someone my age or older has said “if they had told us what it would be like we would have opted out”. Both Polly Starr and Molly Howe, roughly ten years older than I, have had implants which have not restored the vision so far. Eleanor Blair, now ninety-two, and legally blind, broke her left wrist and learned to cook with one hand—her faithful cleaning woman comes every morning on the way to work to help her do her hair and dress. Charles Feldstein’s wife, Janice, has some dreadful trouble with her legs and has to be in a wheel chair. Annie Caldwell, poor dear, has had to suffer a hugely swollen arm after her mastectomy.
Among all my old friends only Patience Ross, who was my English agent as well as my friend since the thirties, is rejoicing. But there is the change over from the long years with her friend Louise Porter to a happy new companionship. Patience says, “I only feel old physically. Life continues full of discoveries, some being made so late. (But I can’t agree with Oscar Wilde!) I’m hideously lazy and self-indulgent and enjoy, enjoy—”
I’ve been going back to Ruth Pitter in my mind and reread a poem I have loved:
An Old Woman Speaks of the Moon
She was urgent to speak of the moon: she offered delight
And wondering praise to be shared by the girl in the shop,
Lauding the goddess who blessed her each sleepless night
Greater and brighter till full: but the girl could not stop.
She turned and looked up in my face, and hastened to cry
How beautiful was the orb, how the constant glow
Comforted in the cold night the old waking eye:
How fortunate she, whose lodging was placed that so
She in the lonely night, in her lonely age,
She from her poor lean bed might behold the undying
Letter of loveliness written on heaven’s page,
The sharp silver arrows leap down to where she was lying.
The dying spoke love to the immortal, the foul to the fair,
The withered to the still-flowering, the bound to the free:
The nipped worm to the silver swan that sails through the air:
And I took it as good, and a happy omen to me.*
* The Spirit Watches, Macmillan, 1940.
Saturday, June 7
Rainy, foggy like yesterday—dismal weather for early June and I feel low, pushed by the need to be up here at my desk.
The lowest day for a long time.
Monday, June 9
It gave me a shot in the arm to offer a glass of champagne to three women who had been at the H.D. centennial celebration at Orono this week. It was Diana Collecott who had asked to come and Silvia Dobson and her friend had offered to drive her here on their way to Philadelphia. After all the rain and loneliness I felt warmed by their pleasure in being here. And what a delight to lear
n that D.C. teaches me at Durham University in England in a course on American women poets! She talked a lot about my correspondence with H.D. I had forgotten how many letters there were—but she wondered why there were comparatively few from H.D. Now Nancy has helped me find four more in various books of hers. What would I do without Nancy who knows where everything is?
Today at last a clear June day—it seems unbelievable, for it is only the second time this spring that I have picked flowers. I went down to the annual bed because the yellow day lily that always flowers first is in flower, and picked some and a dark purple iris. I seem to have escaped through the long wet grass without a tick. They are extremely healthy and numerous this year. To this I was alerted when I discovered a whole covey in Tamas’s poor ears. After that Nancy and I check him every morning, and I do it at night too. Apparently the cat, white as he is, does not attract. That is a real help as his fur is so long and thick.
Diana, with whom I had lunch alone, says the poems are really getting through in England—partly because the paperback Selected Poems of May Sarton can be bought (she assigned it in her course)—and she was excited about possibly publishing the H.D.-Bryher-Sarton correspondence and had copied out parts of my letters to Bryher about H.D.’s poems.
Janice came at four for a good catch-up—I have not seen her for ages—and to weed her vegetables (she is using half the annual bed), and brought me the first fruits, two radishes, when she had finished.
It was a good day but I was pretty tired by the middle of lunch. I could not eat at all—only a glass of milk and a pretence of eating a clam roll. Pierrot had a little nap with me and that was a great help.
Afternoon
A moment of pure joy, as I lay in the chaise longue for a few minutes—it was four. The afternoon light struck two sprigs of mountain laurel, so richly white, in a brilliant blue glass vase—the whole room was filled with their presence and I just lay there and looked. Duffy who sent arbutus in April (what a miracle its pungent scent seemed) had sent the mountain laurel in a box.
Tuesday, June 10
A pure June day. An early pale pink single peony is out and I picked two, and one velvety deep blue Siberian iris this afternoon. But it is a dismal afternoon inside me, so tired I am of never feeling well; I expect the double dose of Amiodoroni is beginning to poison my system. It does not, however, give me the violent cramps Lanoxin did, thank heaven. I am on the fourth day of seven on the double dose.
This afternoon I felt too sick to be able to rest. It has gone on so long, five months and a half, that is why it gets to me—and so little hope. Why do I trust Dr. Petrovich? He has been talking about electric shock for months. Is he just an experimenter with drugs? I do not feel I am being treated as a whole person or that he has the slightest idea what it is for me not to be able to work.
This afternoon I felt almost ready to go to a major hospital—everyone outside thinks I’m crazy as a loon not to.
Wednesday, June 11
Edythe brought delicious veal stew for supper and lemon pie. I could only eat a few mouthfuls but it was a feast day for Tamas and Pierrot, and since Edythe loves the animals she didn’t mind.
Yesterday was a fine day but today rain again! It is hard because Karen Olch has had to take several days off and now again a whole day is lost. But she has already done wonders in the garden. The strange bronze tree peony has one flower out and the other peonies are on the brink now.
Two remarkable letters, one from Montana, the other from Oklahoma yesterday. From Montana, an artist, who inherited from her father a rough piece of land in an old mining town which had been used as the town dump. How thrilling to read:
We pitched a tipi amid the rubbish—the cans & broken glass—an old shoe, a purse, a broken toy, the dead car bodies & a horse whose rotting fragrance filled the air on the hot days of that first summer. These bits & pieces, discarded from other’s lives became, quite literally the ground, the foundation of our new one.
She goes on to tell what has happened since in twelve years:
In these twelve years, many people have come & gone and helped to build “the place” as it is now—a large fenced garden, 2 small cabins & a big house of logs & timbers, the goat shed (now used for storage) and most recent & most exciting—the studio of my dreams. It’s large (20 by 40 ft.) and snugly built with high ceilings & a clear-story [sic] for north light.
And it’s here I sit to write you, this morning full of bird song & sunlight. (Nan Parsons, Basin, Montana)
She wrote me because of At Seventy.
Thursday, June 12
The rain let up briefly yesterday afternoon but now it has become a steady downpour. My next to last day on two Amiodoroni a day—the end is in sight.
Never have I been more aware than in these last months how life-preserving my routine is. The day becomes a series of stepping stones—from breakfast to household chores, to coming up here to my study for an hour or so, then the change of pace and relief of driving the car down to the town to get the mail and do errands. I get back very tired, and there is Tamas eagerly awaiting his one dog meal of the day. I’m afraid he has quite a few people meals as he licks my plate at lunch and dinner and these days I can eat almost nothing. Next stepping stone, I lie down on my chaise longue and read the mail, which often takes an hour and sometimes—so many people depressed or ill or in need!—is too much for me. But after lunch—often chocolate milk and a peanut butter sandwich on thin bread because I am lazy—I fall on my bed and go to sleep at once. After taking a Coumadin and waking an hour later, I lie there for a while considering what to do—and read the paper with a glass of orange juice and Metamucil—then climb the stairs to this study once more, sort out the mail, see what Nancy can answer for me tomorrow, and maybe write one letter.
At half past five, next stepping stone, put on the local television news and get my supper together. The last stepping stone is doing the dishes and by eight I am in bed—these days reading with the utmost interest the meaty and fascinating long biography of Helen Waddell. I haven’t read as absorbing and nourishing a book for ages.
Between twenty and thirty Helen Waddell had to give up everything she wanted—including a fellowship to Oxford, seeing her friends, going to dances, leading a normal young woman’s life—to take care of her extremely selfish and ungiving stepmother who took every sacrifice for granted. Ten years of this imprisoning of a free spirit, and a gifted one! Even reading about it is hard to bear. But she managed to graduate from the University of Belfast with high honors, nonetheless. Yet what comes through, too, is her own belief that nothing worth winning is going to be easy. She and her eight brothers and one sister were brought up as children in Tokyo …
So the routine makes a frame and I feel that there is a next stepping stone to force me to do something, helps me get through the hours when I feel simply ill, passively and hopelessly ill.
The animals are also a help—even looking for ticks on Tamas becomes a kind of game. And Pierrot’s wild antics tell me “to hell with your routine—I want to fly downstairs and play!” Fly he does, his feet not touching the steps, or so it looks.
Pat called from Los Angeles to tell me the dress rehearsal, given for theater and Hollywood people, was a triumph. They stood and cheered at the end of each part—the whole thing takes eight hours! This news cheered me immensely.
Friday, June 13
Still pouring! “Wildness and wet”—Pierrot is in a frenzy of frustration—and so am I. Due at the dentist in Portsmouth for the cleaning of my two remaining teeth—and also to do errands. It’s a rare thing for me to drive so far and stay away so long—and unfortunately I have to stop on the way at the hospital for a blood test (“pro-time” they call it).
Yesterday—rain all day. Karen Olch came and spent the day cleaning out the plant window, washing and pruning plants, feeding them, clearing out some of the detritus that accumulates—and even washing the windows! It makes an enormous difference in the whole feel of the room, neg
lected as it has been for months.
Karen is a treasure—a very careful and thorough workman who shames my casual ways.
Sunday, June 15
The effect of the last days on two-a-day of the drug has been devastating, and after a hell of a day yesterday I woke even worse off this morning. I’m glad I managed to go out for dinner with Nancy and to the movie A Room With A View as planned. I felt awfully sick all through it but it’s visually a marvelous work of art and made me very nostalgic for Italy, for Florence where I spent May of my nineteenth year.
Afternoon
Unfortunately I felt Bonham-Carter was miscast as Lucia—L. must have character and that pudgy little face lacks just that.
For only the second time this spring I sat out on the terrace at four and drank my orange juice and Metamucil—lots of sails on a hazy blue ocean, and as always at that time lots of birds all flying south, some only to my feeders just south of the terrace. I chased a huge gray squirrel off one of them before I came out. Poor Karen said something is eating the tops of her seeds as they push up, cosmos among them. Snails? I wonder.
On Friday—and it did finally clear up after all the rain—Karen Saum came at four-thirty bearing our supper: sword-fish, lettuce and aspargus from the garden where she is house-sitting, a melon and Camembert! What a feast. It was feast enough to see her and we had a good long talk.
But I could hardly eat one mouthful when she served our supper, so it turned out to be a feast for Tamas and Pierrot—and I burst into tears of shame, so awful it felt after all the loving trouble Karen had taken.
Things are not easy at H.O.M.E. but she never wavers in her dedication, and she looked radiant. One of her sons is teaching Spanish there this summer and her mother will come in July. So many of my friends do have family, it feels strange sometimes to have none, as though I am at the center of an immense emptiness—alone.