by May Sarton
Saturday, August 16
Anne Woodson called yesterday to tell me there was an obituary about Robbins Milbank in the Globe. I feel an awful pang that that sensitive and committed man is no longer on earth. It brings back such vivid memories of Nelson, of dinner with Helen and Robbins, and a wonderful picnic by the lake with Julia and Paul Child.
Pat left after lunch, managing somehow to carry her heavy bags to Edythe’s little car in a misty rain. It gave me a strange feeling to walk back into the empty house—but we had good days and I do feel so much better it is marvelous. I am putting on my life again like a dear old corduroy jacket, worn but comfortable. It has been such an uncomfortable life lately.
Sunday, August 17
Oh dear it is now half past nine, so I think I must try to get up at five again instead of six. But it was such a joy to go down into the picking garden and pick a bunch of nasturtiums, then a great white lily and a few vermilion snapdragons to put around it—and nicotiana to freshen up a bouquet, and a whole bunch of calendulas, some pale orange, some with green hearts—at last they are doing well.
Before that I had washed my sheets, put on fresh ones, put away the dishes from the dishwasher—oh, and filled the bird feeders. The raccoon had pulled down the huge one, but I managed to fill and hang it, something I could not have done a month ago.
And now I am at my desk at last—looking out on a whitish ocean, which means hot humid air.
Pat called from New York so the little thread is there between us again—and all is well here for a change! All except the rapidity with which time flows away!
Monday, August 18
Such a heavy humid day I decided to run into Portsmouth to get a new blotter and pad for under the typewriter—and birdseed—now thirty-seven dollars for fifty pounds of hearts of sunflower! But they last longer and do not make a mess as sunflower seed does. I enjoyed the trip, but of course not writing letters after nine-thirty this morning simply adds to the mountain at my left.
I got Xeroxes of the fall poetry tour—it looks fun and not too tiring—and had a few copies made of my poem for Bramble too. It is still not quite right. But when I put on a Mozart concerto and wrote it last week, even though it is not good enough, I knew I was well at last.
With the grasses all golden now, the path through the field is a bright green ribbon as it winds down to the sea.
Tuesday, August 19
Before I go to sleep, old forgotten poems often come to mind, this one by James Stephens in Kings And the Moon for instance. I had forgotten his charming inscription and was happy to find it again. This poem, “Tanist,” comes back to me now because I have been struggling with a new problem. I used to be able to give lots of money away—the needs are everywhere. But as everyone insists that I do, illness has made me face the fact that I have what I earn plus social security—and a small income from the Shawmut Trust, not enough to live as I do and feel able to give large amounts away to individuals. So I have to deny myself generosity and sharply curb the galloping horse. This poem haunts me as it always has for we never do enough.
Remember the spider
Weaving a snare
—And that you did it
Everywhere:
Remember the Cat
Tormenting a bird
—And that you did it
In deed and word:
Remember the fool
Frustrating the good
—And that you did it
Whenever you could:
Remember the devil
And treachery
—And that you did it
When you were he:
Remember all ill
That men can know
—And that you did it
When you were so:
And then remember
Not to forget,
—That you did it
And do it yet.
A poem with great weaknesses, yet it has haunted me—at least it stabs smugness to the heart.
Another muggy day but the LeShans are coming at five to take me out to dinner—and that is a rare event.
Also Hurricane Charley has blown out to sea.
Wednesday, August 20
A wonderful day yesterday because Eda and Larry LeShan drove up from New York to celebrate with me their forty-second wedding anniversary! I didn’t know what the occasion was except that they had been concerned about my health and we have not seen each other for a year, but I was touched when I heard what day it was for them. Luckily I had put a bottle of champagne on ice.
Larry had a severe heart attack in the spring, so we talked quite a lot about hospitals and he insisted that I write to the director of Massachusetts General—which I must do for the sake of others who have suffered as I did. Annella Brown called the other day and told me that a friend of hers had been kept in Emergency for six hours, sitting on a hard bench. It seems unbelievable.
Larry looks extremely well and is determined to smoke his pipe again soon. In the course of our conversation Eda said that when there was a certain kind of silence in the apartment, she knew Larry was reading my journals, which he has read and reread. “They give me peace,” he said. Other people have said so, but his praise means a great deal—and so much for those who think of me as a writer pleasing only women!
They were very kind to Tamas who revels in attention and when he gets it almost becomes his old self again. Meanwhile Pierrot had disappeared—he had followed me down to the picking garden at around four and didn’t come back, but thank goodness I did hear a mew at the door and knew he was safe before we left to have dinner at Dockside.
We sat at a splendid table in the window looking out at the harbor and off to the side so it was not noisy. I had a simply delicious sole stuffed with lobster. Eda had her ritualistic Maine lobster and Larry had a seafood mixture. This was followed—except for Larry whose doctor insists that he lose weight—by praline and walnut ice cream pie. Wow!
This morning Tamas managed the stairs so I shared my breakfast with him. It is the only intimate time together now and I treasure it. Pierrot displaces a great deal of atmosphere and comes to lie beside me at night—but I miss dear Tamas. I had to give up coaxing and laboring to get him upstairs at night when I was ill, and this is one of the real losses of old age as he and I grow old together. He is very lame these days.
The LeShans must be about ten years younger than I, so I felt rather proud to be myself and nearly seventy-five.
People imagine my life here as peaceful and sedentary, but they can’t imagine of course what human problems pour in here every day. Yesterday a parcel which contained a letter and a cassette. An aunt whose nephew is dying of AIDS begged me to listen to the cassette, a concert which included his setting of two poems of mine—and to write him. I’ll do that today.
A long unhappy letter from an old lady shut up in a nursing home—we have corresponded for years, and whatever else I don’t do, I must write to her.
Thursday, August 21
Yesterday was perfect, clear and cool, and again today everything shines and sparkles with just a hint of autumn in the air. I went out to the garden and worked for a happy hour, cutting back the autumn-flowering clematis which had taken over half the fence, smothering the larger and more beautiful clematis that flower in June. Of course I am discovering all the things Karen did not have time to do. The lilies are doing very well; they had to be staked with longer stakes. It does seem very odd that the picking garden is finally, in late August, giving me flowers. Next year I’ll buy more flats as the snapdragons I bought in flats are at present “best” of the lot. As usual self-sown nicotiana has taken over flower beds and must now be pulled out. The calendulas are delightful. I love the silky orange ones with green hearts.
It is impossible to write letters morning and afternoon, so I have decided to get back to my old routine of gardening in the afternoon—a way of rinsing my eye and feeling whole again. It is hard to say how tired I am of responding by letter, even to dear
friends. The endless answering was always a problem, but now with diminishing energy—I have to remind myself that I am nearly seventy-five—it often seems beyond my strength and will.
I love writing to Juliette, but she is really the only correspondent I look forward to answering.
Friday, August 22
Because I am well I no longer suffer from the acute loneliness I felt all spring and summer until now. Loneliness because in spite of all the kindnesses and concern of so many friends there was no one who could fill the hole at the center of my being—only myself could fill it by becoming whole again. It was loneliness in essence for the self. Now that I can work, taking up the healthy rhythm of the days, I am not at all lonely. It means not writing letters in the afternoon but going out-of-doors to the garden, and having a bath when I come in, dirty and somehow relieved, as though the chaos here in my study had fallen into place and it did not matter too much that so many people have been left unanswered.
Yesterday I pulled out a lot of the nicotiana and the big opium poppies—which have sown themselves here every summer—so the garden, which was being smothered, has some neat borders of flowers again. Imagine waiting for annuals till late August!
It is, I realized suddenly, my eye that suffers from disorder and lack of form, so giving the garden some form again was deeply satisfying whereas the untidy drawers and cupboards do not really bother me, because they do not disturb the eye, and only occasionally the back of my mind.
When I was ill I resented that I had some years ago called old age an “ascension” in an essay which appeared on the Op Ed page in the Times. It did seem too ironic for words, but I believe there is some truth in it as I go back to it now. The ascension is possible when all that has to be given up can be gladly given up—because other things have become more important. I panted halfway up the stairs, but I also was able to sit and watch light change in the porch for an hour and be truly attentive to it, not plagued by what I “ought” to be doing.
But the body is part of our identity, and its afflictions and discontents, its donkey-like refusal to do what “ought” to be done, destroys self-respect. The wrinkles that write a lifetime into a face like a letter to the young are dismaying when one looks into a mirror. But this is the test, isn’t it? How contemptuous I have been of women who try to look younger than they are! How beautiful an old face has been to me! So if I mind the wrinkles now it is because I have failed to ascend inside to what is happening inside—and that is a great adventure and challenge, perhaps the greatest in a lifetime—not sparing the rich or the famous, a part of accepting the human condition. At least, being well, I may be able to do better at it now than even a month ago.
Saturday, August 23
Yesterday a rather “too much” day. Anne Tremearne came late to photograph me because of the awful traffic, and I was nervous and on edge when she got here with a box of strawberries and lovely thin beans from her garden.
I need a publicity photo badly so I hope she did well with my old face.
I took her out to lunch and on the way she noted a wild tall purple orchid by the roadside—Anne notices everything—later a large white egret in the salt marsh. I have only seen small ones.
After lunch she took me to the post office and the IGA. When I got home I found there was a slip saying an Express Mail was at the post office, so I started out early to pick it up before meeting Marilyn Mumford from Bucknell University and Karen Elias from upstate New York. I had a bottle of champagne for them in the fridge. It was a celebration of their meeting and becoming friends, partly through their both knowing me. I was one of Karen’s adjuncts when she got her Ph.D. from Union College, and Marilyn I feel is an old friend too, since Bucknell gave me—and Carol Heilbrun—honorary degrees two years ago.
The express was not a letter but Eda’s new book, Oh, To Be 50 Again!, which I opened to the dedication page and discovered that she has dedicated it to me and another friend. I am touched.
Karen, Marilyn and I had a splendid talk about everything under the sun. But after dinner at Dockside it was around nine and I felt awfully tired.
It is better not to have two social occasions in one day if possible. But of course August is the month when people pour in to Maine.
The weather has changed to a gritty wind, lowering sky—and I hope it may rain tonight. But I feel low and depressed—and only the animals are any comfort.
Sunday, August 24
It did rain and all feels fresh today—with a lovely European sky, big clouds with sun breaking through them—it occurs to me that this is not an effect we often see in Maine. There is often fog or a closed pewter-gray sky, or a clear blue one, but rarely the cumulous clouds, light-shot, which make me think of Suffolk and of Belgium where the sky is rarely still and clouds come and go all the time.
Eda LeShan speaks to the point in her book when she talks about the necessity to break habits that encrust themselves sometimes over the spring waters of a life. I think I must not allow myself to be imprisoned by my compulsive need to answer so many people—but the problem is old friends who are, many of them, far away, and keeping in touch with them is important. It is again my old problem of the immense number of beloved people who have entered my life for sixty years or so. I want to respond always, but the frenzied push-push-push has to go now. How does one break such an ingrained habit with so much guilt and pressure held in it?
Some years ago I went to Larry LeShan for four sessions as a patient to get his wise help about this. He tried to persuade me that I did not have to answer everyone, that the letters were answers to my books. It did help—but I fear I was not wholly convinced. My mind accepts the reality, my heart was warmed by his kindness, but somehow the spirit was not quite ready to give this compulsion up!
Monday, August 25
A brilliant autumnal day with autumn’s dark blue ocean and again some architectural clouds edged gold moving across the blue. The wind whistles around the house and I think of chrysanthemum plants and just called Edythe to see if she would have lunch with me and go and find some—although the traffic is bound to be bad.
I am immersed in Eda’s book, full of anecdotes and the wonders and alarms of a first coming to terms with what old age will bring—for she was sixty-three when she wrote it, and it was like the touch of autumn I feel in the air today. Maybe that’s when one can write best of autumn. Now I do not want to write about old age because I am there, I suppose. Yet I know that the challenge through a thicket of physical problems is to believe in ascension still and manage to throw the crutches away, so to speak, and the more helpless in some ways, the more of a triumph to keep carting away non-essential things and climbing towards death in naked joy.
Having uttered that I must admit that when I was ill I could not think about clothes at all, and now, yesterday, ordered a stunning purple suede jacket! But maybe the ascension can’t do with crutches but does do with looking as well as possible.
The Nickleby reviews are splendid! I’m so glad for Pat Keen and the whole cast. The Times review ended:
For its entire duration, it enraptures the audience in a romantic, but throbbingly real world, moving us with an eloquent moral tale of the possibilities of redemption and regeneration.
Tuesday, August 26
Such autumn in the air—it is exhilarating! Another “first” since my healing—I watered the terrace beds. I had dreaded it, dreaded being out of breath after moving the sprayer around, running upstairs to turn water off and on, etc., but I did it with ease. Before that I had done some more pruning and clipping. The garden is mine again. All spring and summer I did not even notice what was going on. I couldn’t bear to have abandoned it. Karen worked hard and I wish she could see that at last the annuals are flowering—and the purple, pink and white phlox flooding the terrace beds with color.
Thursday, August 28
On Tuesday Edythe and I went on an expedition to get chrysanthemums at a place in Wells on Route I—it was a glorious, sunny, windy
day—and I felt quite drunk trying to choose three chrysanthemums—I was after spoon ones or daisies, the two kinds I like best. I did buy a Comanche blue flower which grows wild around here, a heavenly blue like a small daisy, three asters as they appear to have been decimated last winter. We had lunch nearby, lobster stew and strawberry shortcake, and then after going home and an hour’s rest I went out determined to plant them. The earth was very hard in spite of my watering, so it was more of a job than I had imagined it would be, but I got it done so all were safely “in” when it rained hard yesterday. But I have a feeling the fibrillation is back—and it may be that I forced things a little.
When one has not been able to walk for months, taking life at a fast run is not a good idea—and that is what I have been doing! Oh dear—
Yesterday I got my flights set for October and November—and it all begins to feel real. Then I began to think about what poems to read on the theme of Ordeals and Rebirths which I shall be doing in Indianapolis and in Louisville. So the engine begins to hum.
Tamas, Pierrot and I had swordfish for supper—what an extravagance! But we all three agreed it was very good indeed—and for me the added pleasure of a glass of the Vouvray Pat Keen gave me.
Friday, August 29
Brad Daziel came at five-thirty to talk over work on his essay on the letters to me he has been reading—a very perceptive job, but as he later admitted he had not really studied any of the material after Faithful Are The Wounds. I had hoped he would start with three fat folders labelled “Total Work” for in the last twenty years or more I get fewer and fewer letters about one book that has struck a reader, and more and more from women and men who have read them all. Brad has had a hard year for personal reasons and I think he bogged down about halfway through—and this is a pity because the most interesting letters are about the whole work. Maybe when things are better he will be able to go back.