The Later Novels: Communion
[In the following essay, Sibley identifies the theme of communion as central to Sarton's later novels.]
In the second group of Miss Sarton's novels, published before Kinds of Love (1970), the need for communion is dominant. The passionate individual who so often appeared in the early novels is still prominent in the second group, but now his need is not so much for the ordering of his own inner chaos as for dealing somehow with chaos in the world. To some extent, of course, the attempt to bring order into both the inner and the outer realm is the same process; personal passion must be sublimated and become concern for the outer world. But the emphasis in the second group of novels is not so much on a necessary detachment as on the need described in the author's poem, “Innumerable Friend,” to “Take the immense dangerous leap to understand, / Build an invisible bridge from mind to mind. …”1
I FAITHFUL ARE THE WOUNDS (1955)
In Faithful Are the Wounds, set in Cambridge and Boston, the main character is Edward Cavan, a brilliant professor of American literature at Harvard. Beginning with the news of his suicide, the narrative moves backward in time to show how his family and his childhood help to explain him, and then forward, so that, through the reactions of his shocked and grieving friends, the reader understands why Cavan threw himself under a train. The era is during the national hysteria of the McCarthy investigations, which is just beginning (the germ of the book was, in fact, the suicide of Professor F. O. Matthiessen); but, in its wider implications, the novel moves beyond the immediate circumstances to the author's conviction that the true intellectual must be concerned not only with his own field of study but with the great political issues of his time.
The mood of tension that pervades the entire book is established in the first episode when Cavan's sister, Isabel Ferrier, receives a telephone call about her brother's death. Ever since they were children, Isabel has worried about Edward. Even now, living in California and married to a successful surgeon, she has been deeply troubled by Edward's extremism in politics, his attitude of angry denunciation of the middle-class values that she and her husband hold. When she hears of his suicide, she feels she has somehow always known it would happen—some frightful violence that she has been dreading all these years is the inevitable outcome of Edward's being so different and so difficult. Now she must leave immediately for Boston, and the departure from her safe, uneventful life is painful.
After the Prologue that shows Isabel at home and on her way to the East, the story moves to a week earlier and to the events that immediately preceded the suicide. George Hastings, a graduate student who greatly admires Cavan, finishes the outline of his doctoral dissertation and in mood of exaltation goes to find Cavan. He cannot, as he has planned, ask Cavan to dinner, for the moment is not right, but they have coffee together; George realizes that Cavan is deeply troubled by the state of the world—the fear that is creeping into many areas of life, as shown specifically in the firing of professors with liberal ideas.
The reader next sees Cavan attending, with his old friend Grace Kimlock, a meeting of the Civil Liberties Union. On hearing a request that their branch of the organization give a statement of non-Communist involvement, Cavan and Grace protest vigorously; but Professor Damon Phillips, another member of long standing, speaks in favor of the statement. Cavan leaves the meeting and breaks off with Phillips. Grace, who all her life has fought for political freedom and the rights of minorities, is terribly upset. But neither she nor Cavan's other elderly friend, Orlando Foscoa, can bring any real comfort to him. Fosca, when Edward comes to see him, has the impression that the “real Edward” is imprisoned inside this stranger who sits nervous, tense, and unable to speak of what is troubling him.
But Cavan carries on with his work at the university. George brings Pen Wallace, the girl he hopes to marry, to a meeting of Cavan's seminar, and she is impressed by his penetration and honesty as a scholar but also with his seeming to be terribly vulnerable. After the seminar, Cavan goes to see Ivan Goldberg, the head of his department, to ask him to lead a committee of protest against the firing of a midwestern professor who had campaigned for the liberal Henry Wallace, the Progressive party candidate for president. Goldberg refuses; he believes that professors should concern themselves with their teaching and scholarly work and not meddle in politics; to him Edward's feeling of responsibility for others is “morbid.” When Edward tries to convince him that the firing of Professor Lode is “‘the opening wedge in a fight against the intellectuals as subversives not only for political reasons but because they're intellectuals,’” he fails (106). Later, when he goes for a walk with Grace, she feels powerless to lift the weight of his depression.
Meanwhile, Julia Phillips, Damon's wife, with whom Edward has felt an affinity, has invited him to dinner in an effort to repair the broken friendship. Though Edward comes and though they talk frankly of their disagreement, he cannot accept Damon's compromising position; and he tells them both goodbye. Damon, who is always inwardly unsure of himself, wonders if he might, after all, be wrong. Julia is distressed to realize that their love and friendship for Edward cannot prevent his breaking away. Her cry, “‘Why can't love help?’” (134) expresses also the bewilderment of his other friends, when they learn that Cavan has killed himself.
Part II shows first the reactions of the various friends and associates when they know that Cavan is dead. George Hastings, dumb with grief, is appalled at his own self-interest, for his first reaction on hearing the news was to remember that Cavan had promised to help him get an instructorship at Harvard. Julia is more stricken than Damon, who temporarily puts aside his remorse by talking to students about Edward's value as a dissenter in society. Ivan Goldberg, who takes over Edward's seminar, is so filled with guilt and grief that he cannot bring himself to mention Cavan's name when he meets the students—and they think him heartless. Fosca, who has had the painful task of identifying the body, comforts Grace by saying that the dead reveal the essence of themselves and so sustain the living.
When Damon and Julia meet Isabel at the airport, she finds some relief for her pent-up feelings by talking with them about her brother. The next day Isabel meets the clergyman who will conduct the funeral and has lunch with Ivan Goldberg; at the Phillipses' house, where she meets Grace and Fosca, she talks again about Edward. None of them know just why he took his life, but they all find themselves having to re-examine their own beliefs. To Isabel, who has never before known university people, this world is alien; but she begins gradually to understand something of the spiritual conflict that drove Edward to suicide.
Alone in Edward's apartment, she thinks of how as a child he had been forced to witness his mother's suffering in her inharmonious marriage, and she sees the pattern repeated in his adulthood, when he was again a helpless witness who was aware of injustice and selfishness but unable to help. A similar revelation as to Edward's dilemma comes to George Hastings when he and Pen talk about the tragedy; and afterward when she leaves—too quickly as always—he feels his old frustration at never being able to communicate freely with her; his own deep feeling for her always keeps him too tense. This situation, he sees, may be, on a small scale, like the one that Cavan faced.
The Epilogue describes a senatorial investigation five years later. Damon Phillips has been accused of Communist sympathies and must stand trial. George and Pen, who are now married, drive Grace to the courthouse. Under the too-smooth questioning of the committee, Damon shows that he is no longer a compromiser; when asked abut his association with Edward Cavan, who is accused of having been a Communist, Damon defends himself and Edward as free, responsible citizens. When Damon refuses to give the names of other accused friends, he is held in contempt of Congress. Grace, who has been holding back her anger, cries aloud, “‘Disgusting’”; and, when Damon's speech about fundamental civil rights calls forth boos from the audience, she stands, shouts, and is forcibly removed from the room. But she is undismayed: she is sure that Edward would have been proud of Damon. As Fosca, who is now dead, had once asserted, the essence of Edward Cavan has remained to fortify his friends in their need.
Miss Sarton has said of Faithful Are the Wounds that it began as a question in her mind—Can a man be right and wrong at the same time?—and that therefore she could not make the book “move toward a complete justification of the main character.”2 She was more interested in the effect of his suicide on his friends and colleagues than in why he killed himself. Yet the fact that his associates cannot understand his reason for suicide enlarges Cavan's significance. He is seen as more than just a valuable member of society, the dissenter who is, in Damon's words, one of the “guardians of conscience” (133). He may have been wrong in his inflexibility, but in his fervor and love of humanity he is impressively right. The novel is, in fact, a plea like that of Francis Chabrier in Shadow of a Man, for people to become “more human.” Tortured and despairing though Cavan is, he achieves human stature because of his intense caring about the welfare of all people.
Seen against the background of Cavan's suicide, the lives of most of the other characters seem too small, hedged in by doubts and self-seeking. As one reviewer said of the novel: “It is about modern affections, loyalties, sympathies, sentiments, the simple, ancient human attributes which, maimed, safeguarded and hoarded, leave only Self-Protection, alone and counting losses. Only the act of Self-Sacrifice remains; and from that base is all the new beginning. …”3 Seen as self-sacrifice to which he was driven by people's blindness to the world's need, Cavan's act is inevitable for a man of his character. As a child, he was impressed by the contrast between the comfort of his own home and the barren conditions in homes of the door. Whether it was his mother's poetic temperament that gave him his intensity or his father's opposition that hardened him in his beliefs, he was enraged at injustice, hated thoughtless conformity, and never “played safe.”
Isabel recalls how Cavan the boy used to get into fights and come home “‘with blood all over his mouth and that funny little look he had, as if he felt somehow—somehow—as if he'd crashed through’” (11). She also shows how such childhood incidents foreshadowed his death and answered the question of its “rightness”: “‘I don't know how to say it, as if coming in to the house which was always so quiet, all bloody and dirty, he had won even when he had really lost’” (11). After his death, Cavan has “won” in that he has impressed indelibly on the minds of his friends and colleagues the need to be a “whole” person—involved in all of life with his entire being. Ivan Goldberg, who hated Cavan's being a kind of accusing conscience to him, sees after his death that Cavan's attempt was “‘to break through … a human barrier, to unite the intellect and life’” (192). And George Hastings, who had been only puzzled by Cavan's distress over persecution of the intellectuals, realizes that his greatness as a teacher came from his being as much involved in human affairs as in literature.
Cavan's tragedy, as his friend Orlando Fosca explains it, is that, despite his insight and his sympathy, he could not communicate “the very essence of his belief” (209). Isabel wishes that just once Edward had explained to her, without anger, the things most important to him; but Fosca explains that he could not, for “‘When he fought you, he was fighting himself’” (209). Edward's loneliness is apparent, but what he most longed for was communion—the first and basic irony of the novel. He was separated from people partly by his very intensity; and this situation is what George finally understands, for Edward's passion was in one way similar to his for Pen. And the reader recalls a similar situation between characters in the earlier novels—Mark's passion for Georgia keeps him from knowing her: and Sally's for Violet keeps them from easy and relaxed talk. Though the passion in these instances is more personal than Edward's, the author is saying that any kind of too-great intensity shuts off communication.
Most of the main characters change and grow in the course of the novel. Damon Phillips, who impresses Isabel as being like a caricature of a professor—“his thin uncombed hair falling down over his forehead, his face all broken up by lines, his air of agitated incompetence” (170)—is, despite his intellectual brilliance, constantly fighting self-doubt. Yet in the last scene, where he appears before the committee investigating so-called Communist activities at Harvard, he shows remarkable poise and firmness. Time and thought and the memory of Edward's sacrifice have matured him. He says that “in the essence of his belief” Edward had been right. At the climax of his speech, Damon speaks of Edward's fear of “‘the increasing apathy and retreat of the American people before such encroachments of fundamental civil rights as are represented by this committee’” (279). Not only is Edward's apparent radicalism justified here, but Damon gains in stature.
The change in Ivan Goldberg is even more noteworthy. Outwardly cold and collected, he suffers more than anyone would suspect; as a Jew, he feels he must surmount his feeling of defensiveness by being always in command of a situation; his habitual shield is a little half-smile that makes him look superior and not quite human. After Edward's death, his self-doubt at first becomes a self-hatred. He feels bitterly that he had failed a man whom he greatly respected, and in the privacy of his own home he weeps. Later, in a long talk with Isabel, he shows that he knows his need to become more involved in the suffering of other people. He sees the contrast between Edward's deep and generous concern for the world and his own narrow absorption in his academic subject. Though he still disagrees with Edward's ideas about socialism, he says, “‘Who are we, unwilling or unable to commit ourselves, to judge?’” (198). Edward had made him expect more of himself—has, in a sense, forced him to grow. Yet Isabel is not really at ease with Goldberg. His own pain seems to make him wish to inflict pain—or perhaps he only wishes to enlighten her as he himself has become enlightened. But he is not a pleasant person, as the following passages in their conversation show:
“I didn't know I was divided,” Isabel said quickly. “I'm not.”
“Because, I suspect, you have like me deliberately chosen to shut yourself away from the agonies of your times. …”
“And we're both wrong?” she asked. Goldberg pushed the cigarette out hard in the ash tray. “Not wrong, less than we might be, less than Edward was. But we'll live, Mrs. Ferrier, won't we?” He smiled his intolerable smile.
(193-94)
“Must one be ‘committed’ as you call it? Why can't people go about their business in peace?” she asked passionately. Every time she came close to people's feeling about Edward, Isabel felt as if she were being sucked down into a whirlpool where nothing was clear, where everything was struggle and agony.
“There is a price to be paid for not participating and for refusing to be responsible. I wonder,” Goldberg said, and she felt the slight barb in the question, “what price you have paid.”
(198)
This man who, in an agony of nervousness, meets Edward's seminar after the suicide, finds that he can make no reference to him: “It was clear to him that if he even spoke Edward's name, his voice would break, he would disgrace himself and be unable to go on” (156). In the figure of Ivan Goldberg, Miss Sarton has drawn one of her most perceptive and fascinating portraits.
Like Goldberg, George Hastings comes to see that Cavan's death has given him a responsibility—“to get through … to arrive at communion with other people somehow and at communion with a whole self in himself” (260). But the change in him is less striking—for he is young and ardent—than that in Isabel Ferrier. Miss Sarton has said that she began writing the novel with the idea that Isabel was to be treated ironically: “She was to incarnate the American middle-class woman, terrified of her radical brother (because he was so disturbing), clinging to the status quo, encased in a smug sense of superiority toward those conflicts which ended in suicide.”4 But Isabel refused to be an antiheroine. In order to understand the “forces which, at the time of McCarthy, seemed to be about to tear this country apart,”5 the author had to get inside Isabel; the result is that she is presented with sympathy.
Isabel's bewilderment and sense of alienation from her brother, her fears on entering the strange academic world of Cambridge, and above all her self-examination as she sits in Edward's empty apartment—these endear her to the reader and make her very real. In the apartment, thinking of their childhood, she sees that the incompatible marriage of their parents had made her long for a life of peace without tension; but, for Edward, it had had another effect: “It had made his loyalty intransigient and narrow, deepened him, tightened him, matured him—and, in the end, murdered him” (246). Although Isabel tries to dismiss her new insights as mere “emotional response,” her realization of what it had been like for Edward to stand by and watch suffering is a crucial experience for her: “To be a witness, what could suggest more terrible responsibility? To have no human responsibilities such as marriage and children had been to her, but to be left, naked, the witness always, the one who is aware and can do nothing?” (246). From her conversations with Edward Cavan's colleagues, and now from looking about his rooms, she understands for the first time the pain of human existence—“the whole world like a cry, like a need—” (247), and it is difficult to believe that she will return unchanged to her secure life with Henry.
So it develops that, reacting to Cavan's death, some of the characters change: they grow in understanding and sympathy. In this second splendid irony of the novel, greater life comes from death. The ones who do not noticeably change—Julia, Orlando Fosca, and Grace Kimlock—are already more open to the needs of others, less self-centered than the ones who are driven by Edward's action to a painful kind of stocktaking. Yet Julia, who had longed for Edward to be able to receive love or give it, feels a shocked guilt at her own complex reaction to the suicide. Though she does not feel so personally guilty as Damon does, she has a moment of relief, knowing that Edward's presence, like “some aching conscience,” will not again trouble her and Damon. “At least now there would be no more arguments. There might be a little peace” (144). The author's revelation of the inevitable self-interest that intrudes on even the purest grief is in the tradition of the great Russian Realists like Tolstoy. A similar concern for self is George's swift recollection that Cavan would have got him an instructorship; he hates himself for thinking of it.
Grace Kimlock is an old woman, one who has been fighting the battles of the liberals for years, working for the persecuted and the underprivileged. Of all the characters, only she comes near to being a stereotype—the strong-minded, rather waspish New England spinster. She reacts to the news of Edward's death with grief that masquerades as anger; tells Orlando that she must know why Cavan did it, or she will die; and only after he has talked with her for a while does she confess how unbearably lonely she feels with Edward gone.
Orlando, like Grace, feels no guilt, nor does he know the wrenching of her loneliness; for he is—surprisingly in one so unassuming—nearly the “whole man.” A fine scholar and teacher, caring about people, loving and yet detached, he grieves for Edward; but he would not have had him different from what he was. He thinks, “One cannot wish the people one loves to be other than they are. An Edward not torn to pieces, an Edward concerned only with literature, would seem a monster” (166). Sitting alone for the first time in many hours—for he had been the one summoned when the terrible news came—Orlando groans, not for himself so much as for the loss that Edward is to the university. He thinks of a chestnut tree he has recently seen that lost a branch in a storm, and the image haunts him in its suggestion of Edward's death: “This was the great tree standing with a limb torn off, bleeding into the air, that branch rich with leaves and flowers which would never grow back again, never bear its real fruit, that branch which had just fallen with a great crash” (165).
When Orlando first sees Grace after Cavan's death, he goes straight to where she is standing by her fireplace and embraces her; but the comforting gesture is refused. “She disengaged herself stiffly, turned her back on him, and said rather gruffly, as if the episode had not taken place, ‘Where's Ellen with our tea?’” (158-59). She cannot admit to emotion yet, and Orlando reflects that she is always pushing life away from her or trying to hide from it. Here is a theme that is to become increasingly important in Miss Sarton's novels—the fear of feeling. Early in Faithful Are the Wounds, Isabel reflects that families are cruel because so often parents and children are afraid of showing their real affection for one another. Part of Edward's rebellion against his father may have come from Mr. Cavan's stiff withdrawal from any indication of his love for his son. And Isabel had loved her brother but could never let him know: “All through her childhood she had looked and looked at Edward, as if through a pane of glass, but she could never hug him. It was never simple” (14). George Hastings, too, thinks of how Edward had mutely asked his help in some problem: “I suppose, George thought, he wanted something of me that he couldn't ask, that I had to give. But I didn't give it. It was too big; it upset my feelings about things. It broke down walls like breaking down houses. … We're all so scared of our feelings …” (140). The fact that Cavan has “naked feeling” sets him apart and makes him the hero in a world where more and more people, the author implies, are turning away, like Grace, from spontaneous, openhearted emotion.
In addition to introducing new themes and subjects, the book also make more noticeable use of images to convey meaning than did Miss Sarton's previous novels. Fosca's thought of how the great tree, “wounded,” reflects the university maimed by Edward's death, is echoed elsewhere in references to Edward himself as a wounded man. The guilty like to think of him as “sick”—as verging on insanity, but they are only trying to escape the attack made by his death on their own cloistered virtue. The reader is left feeling that a hard, self-seeking society has wounded him; but the depth of his love, which makes of him almost a Christ figure, causes Cavan to injure himself for the world's good. Such is the implication of the verse in Proverbs from which the book takes its title: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend.”
The most frequent image is that of walls—used to show the divisions between people or the barriers that prevent the active, “human” participation in all life. Ivan Goldberg feels that mutual respect has brought Edward and him so close to being friends that only “a thin glass [exists] between them” (108), but he cannot slide it away with goodwill alone; since he thinks of Edward's concern for academic freedom as only a “morbid sense of responsibility,” the door between them, literally and metaphorically, closes. Similarly, Isabel remembers how their father and Edward had “walled themselves in against each other” (202); and she herself, when she finds that she can talk freely to Damon and Julia about her brother, becomes almost afraid. “She felt as if a high wall had just fallen down, the wall that had protected her, and now she was naked. She had given herself away. ‘I must go,’ she said, getting up as if actually to run away.” (208).
As someone who has chosen the opposite way of life from Edward's, Isabel is frequently spoken of in association with walls. At her luncheon with Goldberg, at a French restaurant where, he says, they will feel “less exposed” than at the Faculty Club, Goldberg tells her she has, like him, remained safely outside of the agonies of their time. They have, he means, erected walls. The idea returns to her forcibly when she faces herself and her life in Edward's apartment. Here she seems to be asking questions of the very walls, which, like her dead brother, do not answer. But she admits honestly that she and her husband, in their luxurious house with its swimming pool and deep freeze, its bridge games and cocktails, have paid a price for remaining “secure behind the walls of their life” (247). They have been less than fully human.
Similar to the image of walls is that of prisons. Julia, another person who desperately questions the silent walls of her house after Edward's death, feels at times imprisoned in her “narrow resentment of Damon” (229). Edward is not the only one who feels in a prison and is tapping on the walls, as Orlando imagines, in a frantic attempt to communicate. The prison image, like that of walls, indicates the loneliness of each human being who, caught in his own personality and inheritance, longs at times for real communion with others. The theme of human loneliness, developed in Shower of Summer Days, returns in this novel in a more tragic context.
In some of her poetry, particularly in The Lion and the Rose and in The Land of Silence, Miss Sarton has expressed the idea that everyone should show active concern for the suffering of all people in all places; but most of her poems on this theme are too obvious and lack the grace and music of her best verses. Her fictional treatment of this appeal “to the living” is much more effective. Faithful Are the Wounds transcends in its meaning the particular era of American history in which it is set. Instead, it has a universal theme—the urgent need for man to be his brother's keeper.
II THE BIRTH OF A GRANDFATHER (1957)
In her next novel, The Birth of a Grandfather, Miss Sarton again uses the New England setting—the Wyeth family live in Cambridge; and, like the Bradfords and others in Shadow of a Man, they spend their summers on the Maine coast. A novel about family relationships and the difficulty of communication between husband and wife, parents and children, its themes have been touched upon in earlier books but are more fully developed here. The title refers to Sprig Wyeth, who, with his wife Frances is in early middle age. Their daughter Betsy, who marries Tom Dorgan, has a child, whose impending arrival marks for Sprig the beginning of a new phase in his life.
The three divisions of the novel indicate the pain of the spiritual rebirth that must be undergone, not only by Sprig, but also to some extent by Frances. Part I, “The Island,” tells of a family vacation on the island in Maine; but it bears the obvious symbolism of the isolation of each individual, their reaching out to one another across inevitable divisions. Part II, “Children of the Ice Age,” shows the emotional tightness and inability to give of self which maintains tension within the family; and in Part III, “The Birth of a Grandfather,” there is an indication that Sprig has found a more mature philosophy that will keep his marriage on a steadier plane as he and Frances approach old age.
The idea that only in old age do people attain real maturity and know themselves is suggested in the first part in the character of Aunt Jane, ninety and very frail, who has a strong spiritual influence on all the others. She and Sprig's father, called Gran-Quan, live together and have come to the island as usual to be part of the Wyeth summer. Others who are there are Caleb, the son of the family, a senior at Harvard; Sprig's unmarried sister, a teacher; Betsy and her fiancé, Tom Dorgan; and, for short periods, Uncle Joe and Frances' good friend Lucy, whose husband has left her.
The center and heart of the family is Frances, whose energy and passion remind the reader of Melanie in The Bridge of Years. On the first morning of the story, Francis finds Sprig in the wood where he has been chopping trees, and as they sit on the grass watching Caleb sail, she knows that Sprig does not want “to be reminded of that hour of passion in the night” (12); he has retreated into his habitual reserve. Frances feels there is always a tenseness between them. An even greater tension exists between Sprig and Caleb, who wants to be treated as an individual on his own, not just as the son of the family. Yet, for all the difficulties among them, there is a solidarity about the Wyeth clan that makes Tom Dorgan feel them to be a powerful entity, bound together by all they have shared.
On July Fourth, the whole family sails to a more distant island for its annual picnic supper. Tom and Lucy have returned to the city, but they are joined by Uncle Joe and by Sprig's friend Bill Waterford. Aunt Jane feels strangely dizzy and weak but does not complain when even the slight exertion of getting out of the boat seems almost impossibly difficult. During the display of fireworks that ends the evening, Jane dies so quietly that at first only her brother Joe, sitting near her, is sure that she has gone. Caleb and Betsy sail back alone in his boat, wondering how the death will affect their parents, who seem to the children strangely innocent and vulnerable.
In Part II, Gran-Quan, who is in a nursing home, is trying to die, for his existence seems meaningless after Jane's death. Life in the house at Cambridge continues in its usual pattern, with Caleb more than ever rebellious. When Betsy comes to the house one afternoon to say that she is to have a baby, Sprig is pleased that Betsy intends to name the child, if it is a boy, after his grandfather; but he is also oddly troubled by Betsy's news. He feels that his own marriage has never been happy, that he is constantly failing Frances; and the idea of perpetuating the family, with its tangle of emotional demands, upsets him.
While he, Frances, and Hester are still at dinner, Sprig receives a telephone call from his old friend Thorny Stiles, who reports that Bill Waterford has lung cancer and will probably live only six months. Sprig goes to see Thorny, and shortly afterward Bill unexpectedly arrives to ask Thorny not to reveal the truth to his wife, Nora; for her day-to-day life, if she knows, will be intolerable. Sprig returns home reluctantly, feeling that life has become unbearable; he longs more than ever to escape from all his responsibilities as a husband and a father. Bill, with his gaiety, his enormous zest for life, has sustained Sprig in a way that he is only beginning to understand.
The father-son antagonism reaches its climax one Sunday when Tom, Betsy, and Hester have come to dinner, and Sprig and Caleb quarrel over the boy's wish to spend a year abroad. Caleb leaves the table in anger and goes to his room; Betsy follows to try to comfort him; but she returns to tell her father that, in his anxiety not to spoil Caleb, he is ruining his life. Hester and Frances try to show him that, if he sends the boy abroad, he will not be “rewarding indolence” (155) but helping Caleb find out, completely on his own, what he wants to be. Sprig admits he has been wrong, goes to his son, and they are reconciled. Sprig offers to give him the money for Europe if he will wait until after their usual summer in Maine. It is as if Bill Waterford's illness and the knowledge that he soon will die make Sprig gradually more understanding of other people and less shy about speaking of his own feelings.
After Sprig has made peace with Caleb, he asks Frances to go for a walk, realizing how he has failed her in recent years. When he goes to see Bill (and finds to his surprise that he likes Nora, whom he has never really known or wanted to know), Sprig reveals, in answer to their questions, that the two things he most cares about in the world are formal gardens and translating Greek plays; he also comes close to forming a definite idea as to what he thinks is the purpose of life, concluding that it has to do, not with outer achievement, but with building character. Yet he cannot tell Frances this, and the tension between them remains.
When Part III opens, their marriage seems in an even more precarious state than before. Sprig is now wholly absorbed in Bill's dying, and Frances gets none of his attention; for, when he is not at Bill's house, he is secluded in the barn, playing Haydn masses. The summer on the island is this time dealt with in only one chapter, showing Frances in a state of muted sadness that is almost apathy. Yet, when they return to Cambridge, she recovers her spirits in the golden autumn days, and, after a visit with Lucy one afternoon, she decides to stop to see Bill. Even though he must gasp for breath, Bill tells her of his concern about what will happen to Sprig after his death. Sprig, he says, “must begin it”—meaning a less self-absorbed life.
On a night in early October, Nora calls to ask Sprig to come. She says that Bill wants to die; and Sprig, telling her that she must let Bill go, suddenly realizes that what he had thought was his love for his friend has really been self-love in disguise. Frances, left at home in desolation, recognizes on the same evening that she must detach herself from dependence on Sprig—like Nora, she must “let him go.” The next morning, when Thorny arrives to tell them Bill has died, both Frances and Sprig feel, after the shock of grief, that there is a new understanding between them: she has “learned to withhold,” and Sprig has “within the limits of his temperament, learned to give …” (270). When Betsy's boy is born, Sprig has another revelation of what life can be; for he finds it is more important to think of the child than of himself. He also realizes that what he and Frances are together transcends their individual entities. He is at last learning something about love.
The Birth of a Grandfather, coming only two years after Faithful Are the Wounds, shows the author's continuing concern with the loneliness of people—their need for communion, which at the same time must leave them free as unique individuals. In this later novel, the scope is more limited; whereas Edward Cavan's lack of communion symbolizes man alone in the universe, Sprig Wyeth's plight arises from the New England temperament and stands at the center of tensions within his family. Sprig fears that, if he gives more of himself to other people, he will somehow lose his identity. Throughout the novel, he is unable to make “any final and absolute gift of the self.” He fears that if one does, “then you were no longer safe, separate, you were caught. You might be destroyed” (30). So burdensome does the guilt about his own withdrawal become that he wishes constantly to escape, to leave his family to return to Japan, where he had visited as a young man. After he knows of Bill's illness, he feels more than ever “empty.” Thinking of his children and of Bill and Thorny, he reflects: “They know what they're doing … and I'm walking in the dark, a kind of monster who has neither been a real husband nor a real father, nor perhaps even a real friend” (134).
Such is the state of individualism or egotism pushed to its limit. Sprig's failure to achieve communion comes—not from too much love as Cavan's does—but from a complete lack of understanding of selfless love, which he begins to approach only after Bill's death. Yet Sprig is drawn as a character with whom the reader sympathizes, for his very awareness of his coldness and imprisonment within the self makes him touchingly alive.
Sprig's greatest failure in communion is within his marriage. Though he and Frances have been “happily” married for twenty years, she feels that they are at a distance from each other. Even in physical intercourse they remain separate: “Their union was not the flowing together of two deeply joined selves, but only a desperate moment of possession of each other, which disappointed because something was always withheld” (5). Frances has long seen the difference between her marriage and that of her mother and father; she recalls the “immense warmth” there, how they “walked down the garden together in the evening, the way life flowed between them, unstopped, unstinted …” (14). And, as she sees something of the same love between Betsy and Tom, she envies her daughter a deeper communion in marriage than she herself has ever known.
Frances, like Sprig, is a completely believable character. At times she seems too demanding, constantly wanting more affection than her undemonstrative husband can show, giving way to tears so much that she seems a quivering mass of sensibility. But again, with the inconsistency of real people, she shows her fortitude, her enormous patience at the times when she appears to herself to be nothing but a cook, caterer, and general servant in Sprig's house. The reader sees her appearing always “airy and bright” (135) with Sprig to try to hide her own hurt and sense of loss. And Sprig understands something of her feelings; in a moment of insight, he sees how he has made her shy in his presence by the barrier he has erected. “The realization of how he had abandoned her right there within the walls of the house, and of their life, suddenly broke over him.” Yet he cannot ease the situation, for “the awful thing was that knowing something did not make one able to do anything about it. The more he saw, the more he felt incapable …” (168).
Both of them think, now and then, of divorce. A teasing thought, it cannot be fully suppressed, as they drift farther and farther apart during Bill's illness. It is as if both are dying—Bill and the Wyeth marriage. Bill, who had seemed so enormously vital, like a great tree firmly planted in the midst of life, can die. And if so, can anything that seems durable, like a marriage, really survive?
Most of the Wyeths' problems seem, in the end, to be focused on the painful transition they are making in middle age. The time of youth, when everything seemed possible and somehow enduring, is past. Both Sprig and Frances wonder if there will be time for them to become themselves, a personality apart from family ties. Sprig's longing to go to Japan and Frances' momentary rebellion against sewing on her husband's buttons—these are symptoms of their feeling that time is slipping away before they have attained the spiritual stature that in youth seemed always just ahead. After Betsy has told them she is to have a child, and Sprig, Frances, and Hester are alone for dinner, Frances proposes a toast, not to the child but, as she says, “‘to us … not to our family selves, not to this web of relationships, but to our secret selves, whoever they may be’” (117). And when Frances talks with Lucy about her divorce, she tells her that “‘You'll have a chance to find out who you are’” (44).
Yet Frances, though she wants to keep her identity, believes that personality can be developed through and with others and not in withdrawal into some secret place where nobody can follow. In this respect, she differs from her husband who believes that, in the midst of all the drastic changes that life brings, one must hold onto some permanent core of the self that is detached from all other people. He has not learned, as Paul Duchesne in Bridge of Years finally did, that there can be “positive detachment.”
Sprig, afraid of being absorbed by other people, only gradually sees that the self becomes whole and integrated by giving—that he must lose his life to save it. His friend Thorny Stiles tells him that his grief and bewilderment over Bill's approaching death and Frances' unhappiness cannot be lightened by his withdrawal: he must “let in” what he fears; he must become more involved. Thorny's words, repeated for emphasis, are “‘not by withholding …’” (214).
The need for a spiritual rebirth, which runs through this novel, is paralleled in Miss Sarton's poetry of about the same date—particularly in the volume entitled In Time Like Air. In the novel, the theme comes through not only in Sprig's struggle but also in images of enclosure that emphasize personal withholding and the restricting nature of family life. As the baby in Betsy's womb comes forth in due time, so Sprig breaks out of his personality. The family as an institution is seen as both good and bad. It is good because it provides continuity and a place where psychic wounds can heal. Aunt Jane's reflections voice the author's thoughts, not only in this novel, but in others such as The Bridge of Years: “The family was what consoled, sheltered, kept the past and present flowing together; understood things without being told, remembered names when you forgot them” (42).
But it is bad that the family can restrict, as is shown in Caleb's experience. He feels bound to his parents in a painful way, as if they represent a debt that he can never pay. Even when he is happily preparing to break away by going for a year to Greece, he knows that he will take with him the memory of his parents' present misery. In a last talk with Betsy, he says of Frances and Sprig: “‘They're so terribly controlled. They imprison each other. … And this is supposed to be a happy marriage’” (248). The image of the prison, or someone locked up, is used in this novel, as in Faithful Are the Wounds, to show the need for greater communion and for freedom of the individual within the family group.
Perhaps the best image of the family, showing its double nature as both shelter and prison, is given in the observation of Tom Dorgan on his first visit to the island: “Now he and Betsy had found a haven on the window seat where they could hold hands unobserved. Tom looked out into the great cavelike room, firelight throwing shadows on the ceiling, and everything here massive and dark. The Aladdin lamp made a circle of bright light around the old man sitting in an armchair, a book open on his knees” (15). It is a memorable and ambivalent picture. Soon all the Wyeths will assemble to listen to Gran-Quan, a patriarchal figure, read Wordsworth's poetry aloud. So it has always been during summer on the island. Patterns are so fixed that, when Caleb wants to break them, he feels both anger and guilt. It is not only the room in this picture that is in partial darkness; the family relationship conceals hidden angers and resentments. Yet the bright light on the book perhaps shows the Wyeths' traditional reliance on intellect or on the truth of poetry that can free them from forces “massive and dark.”
Miss Sarton herself evinces in this novel the same ability that a reviewer of Faithful Are the Wounds found remarkable—the ability to “turn to light what is shadowed, raise to the level of common ground what is half-buried underground.”6 One thinks of how often someone with cancer is spoken of in hushed tones, almost as if he were already dead. In The Birth of a Grandfather, the relationship between the ill person and his friends and relatives is treated with candor. Bill asks his doctor not to reveal the truth to his wife until he has been able to achieve some detachment. The suffering of his wife and Sprig is revealed, as is their necessary acceptance, at last, of the fact that Bill wants to die. And just as the author considers such subjects in the novel, the characters also feel a sense of relief when hitherto unbroached subjects are openly examined.
What, finally, is the significance of the novel in the sequence of Miss Sarton's work? It must be admitted that it breaks no new ground; for even the theme of rebirth, made specific here, was approached in the previous treatment of other middle-aged characters such as Isabel Ferrier in Faithful Are the Wounds and Violet Gordon in A Shower of Summer Days. The author again presents her faith in man's intellect and in his need for continuity with the past. The New England scene, faithfully portrayed, has also been beautifully presented before. But this comparison does not imply that The Birth of a Grandfather is valueless. It does, however, rework familiar material, and the themes are stressed rather too much. The conflict between generations, for example, is too heavily underlined. The novel lacks the brilliance of technique of Shower of Summer Days, which leaves more to the reader's imagination; and it lacks the tragic implications of Faithful Are the Wounds. Although consistently interesting, it is not a memorable achievement.
III THE SMALL ROOM (1961)
In her next novel, The Small Room, Miss Sarton explored relationships and communication on a college campus. Although the academic world had been the background of Edward Cavan's tragedy in Faithful Are the Wounds, this later novel presents a quite different picture. It is not a large university but a women's college in New England; and, though some of the types of academic person are similar in the two novels, most of the teachers in The Small Room are women who are absorbed in their work in a way that is more personal, more intense, than that of most men teachers.
The story is told throughout from the point of view of Lucy Winter, a young teacher who has just received her doctor's degree and is on her way, when the book opens, to Appleton College for her first job. She has broken her engagement to John; and, throughout the novel, her painful remembrance of that unhappy love affair runs as a kind of minor theme. Lucy finds her colleagues and students extremely interesting. At a tea given by Hallie Summerson, the head of the English Department, she meets Henry Atwood and his wife Deborah, who are also new at the college; Jack Beveridge, who teaches Romance languages, and his wife Maria; Jennifer Finch of the Mathematics Department; and the famous Carryl Cope, who teaches medieval history and inspires everyone with awe. Lucy learns that Appleton College has a reputation for fostering the brilliant student, and she approaches her first class with some trepidation.
After her lecture, she is embarrassed by Pippa Brentwood, a student who wants to confide something about her father's death. Lucy feels that a teacher's relationship to students should be kept on a professional basis; but, on another day when she sees Pippa in a conference and learns the whole story, she feels pity for the girl and speaks to her gently. Afterward she reflects that knowledge cannot be taught in a vacuum; feelings are also important. This theme is dominant in the novel—that one must teach the “whole person”; the mind cannot be trained on its own. At a dinner given by the Beveridges, Lucy hears additional discussion about getting a resident psychiatrist for Appleton; she learns that Olive Hunt, a member of the board of directors and a good friend of Carryl Cope's, is strongly opposed to such an appointment, feeling that students should handle their own problems.
At the first faculty meeting, the possible dismissal of a student is discussed—she is Agnes Skeffington, a girl who has become so absorbed in working out an unusual mathematical problem that she now attends no classes or meetings and refuses to do any other work until the problem is finished. Her professor says that she is a near genius and should be allowed to continue at Appleton; others object that she will become too specialized and not receive a liberal education. Carryl Cope makes a strong plea that Agnes be kept, feeling that objectors are unwilling to “pay the price of excellence.” The vote is close, but Agnes is allowed to stay. After the meeting, Lucy goes home with Carryl for a drink and learns more about the life of this unusual teacher and scholar. She also meets Olive Hunt. Before Lucy leaves, Carryl asks her to read an essay by her most brilliant student, Jane Seaman, which has been published in a college magazine.
Most of the plot revolves around Jane Seaman, the bright senior from a broken home who, Lucy discovers, is guilty of plagiarism. As she reads the essay on the Iliad, Lucy realizes that she has seen it before, and next day at the library she traces it to Simone Weil's little-known essay published in a British magazine. After consulting Hallie Summerson, Lucy calls in Jane for a talk before the news is broken to Carryl Cope. Jane tells, after trying at first to deny the charge, of how the pressure on her to produce excellent papers had become so great she could no longer endure it: “‘The more you do, the more you're expected to do, and each thing has got to be better, always better’” (100). Lucy feels that subconsciously the girl had wanted to have the plagiarism discovered, so that the pressure on her would cease; someone—probably Carryl Cope—has failed with Jane.
Lucy is now more than ever convinced that “teaching is first of all teaching a person” (104). Later she is surprised to find that Carryl takes the blame on herself, realizing that she has pushed Jane too hard. Jane's theft is, she sees, an attack on her, and she is grieved by what she has done to a student. But, in trying mercifully to keep the matter quiet, she has reckoned without the other students. Rumors about the plagiarism are soon all over the campus, and Pippa comes to tell Lucy that Jane is thought to be unfairly sheltered from the consequences of her action; therefore, she is being ostracized by other students.
Tension among the faculty also arises. Maria Beveridge, who is not an intellectual and who resents her husband's admiration of Carryl, says at a party given by the Atwoods that Carryl feels guilty and is “protecting an investment” (144) by trying to keep the plagiarism quiet. In spite of Jennifer's attempts to calm them, Jack and Maria become furious with each other, and the party ends in embarrassment and bad feeling. That same evening, Jane knocks on Lucy's door at the Faculty Club and comes in drunk. Lucy makes coffee, and during their talk she learns how lost the girl feels and how deeply she hates Carryl. She invites Jane to come home with her for Thanksgiving vacation and see a psychiatrist.
On their return to the campus, President Blake Tillotson calls a meeting of several faculty with the dean, Miss Valentine, to discuss the crisis. Students are now demanding that Jane be tried by the usual process of their government; and, because of angry comments flying about among them as well as among the faculty, the matter must now be dealt with openly. Lucy goes to the meeting wondering if she will be blamed for having taken Jane to see a psychiatrist. Jack Beveridge tells her privately that the tension with Maria has increased and that their marriage is almost wrecked. Others at the meeting with Jack are Hallie Summerson and Jennifer Finch; President Tillotson has not asked Carryl because she is too personally involved in the affair. Hostility on the campus is directed not only at Jane, who has escaped punishment, but also at Carryl, who had had power enough to shield the student. After a long, difficult discussion, the group decides to put the case to the whole faculty in the light that Lucy sees it—that Jane has been a victim of the overemphasis on intellectual achievement at Appleton, and that a resident psychiatrist is desirable. Jane has, they realize, projected her conflict onto Carryl, but it stems partly from her unhappy home situation; and, had a psychiatrist been present, the crisis might not have happened. Tillotson regretfully gives up hope of Olive Hunt's millions, as she has said she will not leave money to the college if the psychiatrist is engaged.
At the faculty meeting, “a battering, shattering experience” (183), Carryl says that she had been wrong and now wants Jane judged by the faculty and students in the usual way. But she confesses to Lucy later, when they are having a cocktail, that her prestige among both faculty and students is now very low. She is also depressed because Olive Hunt will be furious about the decision to appoint a psychiatrist. As they talk, Olive arrives, and an argument begins over her now not wanting to leave her money to Appleton. Carryl says that, although Olive has the right to leave her money where she will, using it “to browbeat people” is a misuse, just as she, Carryl, had “misused power to try to cover for Jane” (191). She also asserts that, if Olive removes herself from Appleton, she will at the same time end their friendship. The quarrel comes to no conclusion, for Tillotson telephones to say that the student council has acquitted Jane and asked that the college receive her back since she has already been punished enough “through the long delay and suspension of justice” (198).
At a pre-Christmas party at Hallie's, Carryl insists on discussing the Seaman affair and on understanding how her colleagues feel about her part in it. She acknowledges that, when Jane came and went freely in her house, it was not because she wanted books or intellectual exchange but because she had somehow wanted help that Carryl had not given. What, she asks them, had she withheld from Jane? In the end, Jennifer realizes that what Carryl had withheld was love; and Carryl admits she had been afraid to show it. The novel ends with Carryl's inviting Lucy for supper after the party, admitting that she is lonely without Olive, and talking about her own life and Lucy's future. Lucy feels that, when she has overcome the hurt of her broken engagement, she might, inspired by Carryl and the others at Appleton, become completely committed to teaching.
The Small Room is a perceptive and sympathetic portrayal of the inner life of the teacher. As in her previous novels, Miss Sarton brings to light truths that, though sensed by some people, have seldom been dealt with in fiction. And she shows an awareness of the intricacies of campus politics and the possibility of moral conflict in a college community. But, though the plot of The Small Room has suspense and excitement, the core of the novel is not the question of what will happen to Jane Seaman or whether the pattern of Carryl Cope's personal relationships will change. Rather, it is the author's intensely interesting analysis of the college teacher's job.
Lucy realizes, from visiting a class of Hallie Summerson's, that the great teacher induces learning as it cannot ever quite come about without his providing the living contact between the student and his books. Hallie's skill in leading a discussion of Keats' letters, her knowing how to direct and channel enthusiasm, and her giving a clear line to the questions and answers is like the skill of a composer in a fugue; and her masterly summation near the end of the hour has been made possible by all the talk that has gone before: “Never, Lucy felt sure, would Hallie Summerson be able to speak to one person as she now did to sixty. Something streamed out of her was was absolutely open, passionate … the freeing of a daimon. … It surrounded Hallie Summerson with the aura of a person set apart, lonely and—Lucy half-smiled at the word, but uttered it to herself nevertheless—sacred” (116).
Lucy sees the great teacher, who can be, like Hallie, “a plain middle-aged woman in shabby classroom” (115) as someone with “immense inner reserve” and a “dedicated life.” If the skill, power, and dedication of the teacher gave the whole picture of the profession, it would be highly idealized. Miss Sarton also shows the teacher as in conflict with himself, doubting the value of his work, wondering about his methods with students. An image in the Prologue of the novel indicates this theme. As Lucy is riding in the train, going north from New York, “Suddenly, by some trick of light, she was confronted by her own face, standing out enormous against a white farm and rocky pasture …” (11). She wonders for a moment if she really knows herself, and her examination of her face in the train window stands as a symbol of the self-examination that is constantly going on among the teachers at Appleton. Hallie Summerson says, as Lucy is leaving after her first tea party, “‘Is there a life more riddled with self-doubt than that of a woman professor, I wonder?’” (29). And by the end of her first three months of teaching—the time span of the novel—Lucy finally understands the question.
The question of the price of excellence is a basic theme of the novel. Carryl Cope, in the faculty meeting where Agnes Skeffington is discussed, says forthrightly that her colleagues talk a great deal about excellence but are unwilling to pay the price, which is, she believes, “‘eccentricity, maladjustment if you will, isolation of one sort or another, strangeness, narrowness’” (69). After this meeting, Agnes' name is hardly mentioned again, but Carryl's words remain in the reader's mind when Jane Seaman, also a brilliant student, fails in a more serious way to conform to the rules. How much is Jane's maladjustment the result of Appleton's emphasis on high achievement? Is Carryl right in saying that the price of excellence is some kind of strangeness or isolation? Near the end of the novel, someone asks why the word in connection with excellence is always price; why, she wonders, can it not instead be joy. And Jennifer answers that it is because “‘we have—haven't we, Carryl?—come to equate excellence with some sort of mutilation’” (233).
Whether or not excellence always means the sacrifice of a more normal and joyous life is never really answered. The author throws it out to the reader to contemplate. But this question is also related to another that is central in the story—the extent to which a teacher should be involved in students' private lives. Lucy is disturbed by Pippa's appeals for sympathy after her father's death, and Carryl does not give Jane the love she needs, thus helping to drive her in desperation to plagiarism. Both the younger and the older teacher have an ingrained belief that their business is to train the mind; and, although they really know that mind and emotions cannot be separated, they want, as Lucy tells herself, “to teach … in peace … without all this personal stuff” (51). But it cannot be done in peace. She realizes quite soon that she cannot be exclusively concerned with knowledge, that “intellectual brilliance divorced from life” (128) cannot be defended. Thus, the novel presents questions that are crucial in the world of learning; and these questions are made dramatic by the painful situation of Jane Seaman, the student who is driven to dishonesty and suffers a near breakdown; by the dilemma facing the college over employing a psychiatrist for students and thereby losing Olive Hunt's millions, money sorely needed; and by the strange, conflicted mind of Carryl Cope, who towers over the book as she towers intellectually over her colleagues.
Carryl is similar to other passionate characters of Miss Sarton, but she is at the same time unique. An outstanding scholar of medieval history who could have gone to any of the famous universities, she has chosen to remain at Appleton because she feels that teaching women is “a special kind of challenge” (247). She says frankly that she teaches for the exceptional person, and she has no patience with ignorance and sloth. Though a small woman physically, she gives an impression of power; people sense a hardness in her, a rigid control of emotion. Her eyes, which can look hooded like a hawk's, and her habit of “pouncing” in a conversation make her formidable. Her vitality makes Lucy compare her also to a tiger, and Carryl herself says she is committed to teaching “‘because a fire burns in my head’” (249).
Carryl's strength of feeling has been directed not to people but to her work. In all other areas, she has distrusted her own emotion. Afraid of feeling, she has severely disciplined herself to appear unmoved by people; for this reason, she is unable to communicate to Jane the love that the girl sorely needs. An indication of Carryl's greatness is her acknowledgment of this truth when she finally sees it. She admits that she had refused to consider more than Jane's mind, yet she loved Jane. Olive tells Lucy of how much the girl meant to Carryl and of how much she has suffered, wondering how she could help the student in the crisis.
With Carryl it is, in fact, a failure in communication rather like the failure of Edward Cavan of Faithful Are the Wounds. Both of them lack the detachment necessary to communicate love; they care too much and have not achieved the detachment that made Persis Bradford in Shadow of a Man such a powerful influence on people. All of Miss Sarton's treatments of the subject make clear that true detachment is only possible to a passionate person. It is not feeling itself that should be condemned; Carryl fails, not because she loves, but because she fears her own emotion instead of accepting it. Her story shows, as does that of Sprig Wyeth, that denying or suppressing feeling only creates suffering. Detachment, however, brings peace and fulfillment. The achievement is what T. S. Eliot is talking about when he writes, “Teach us to care and not to care.”7
Perhaps one reason for Carryl's lack of detachment is the very smallness of the academic world she inhabits. Along with her appreciation of the art of the teacher, Miss Sarton has an awareness of the tensions that rise to an extreme height within the closed circle of the campus. The word “small” is used not only of Lucy's office but also of Hallie's living room and other rooms where the professors meet for drinks and talk. It suggests the confinement that might produce intellectual work but that could also cause emotional chaos. Carryl, refuting the idea that a college is “a safe little world,” says to Lucy, “‘It's simply a microcosm where every normal instinct and emotion gets raised to the nth power’” (122). The idea of enclosure as related to intensity gives rise to many animal images throughout the novel. This college world is like a zoo, and both students and faculty are compared to creatures of the animal and bird kingdom. The students, not so individualized as the faculty, are compared to flocks of starlings, “perpetual chatter and perpetual motion” (30); or, when Lucy is angry with their lethargy, she says to them, “‘Wake up! … It's nine o'clock in the morning and you look like a drove of whales washes up by the tide’” (107). Her freshman section, she often feels, is so lacking in animation that it is like a “huge passive elephant she had to try to lift …” (45).
Images for the faculty are of more alarming creatures. Professor March, when he is presenting the case of Agnes Skeffington, likens them to formidable lions. Carryl glares like a tiger and sometimes shows her claws; but, towards the end of the book, when she is attacked by furious adverse opinion on the campus, she is compared to a desperate fox with the hounds after her. Both students and faculty, at this point, are called a “wolf pack in full cry” (172); and Jane feels caught, like an animal, by all the strong feelings that cage her in. Jennifer Finch, after trying unsuccessfully to calm the heated quarrel at the Atwoods' party, suggests “‘Perhaps it is time we retired to our separate lairs’” (152).
Such images, and many more like them, show both the vitality and the anguish of the college world, refuting the idea of the “quiet groves of academe.” One of the most powerful of the images is caused by Lucy's intense pity for Olive Hunt and Carryl when their long friendship is broken by the quarrel over a psychiatrist for Appleton. Olive, hating herself but unable to change her stubborn resistance, seems near despair. And Lucy thinks, “Everything's so ragged and unfinished. Does life really go on tearing at people's vitals forever like some cruel bird of prey? Is there never to be rest or peace, no final and abiding wisdom or fulfillment?” (208). This question, with its weight of suffering, runs through the whole novel. It defines the tone as much as does the strong conviction about the importance of the teacher that the book communicates.
IV THREE SHORT NOVELS
Four years after the appearance of The Small Room, Miss Sarton published Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, which has been discussed in connection with her theory of poetry. Before and after the publication of Mrs. Stevens, she wrote three shorter works of fiction, Joanna and Ulysses (1963); Miss Pickthorn and Mr. Hare (1966); and The Poet and the Donkey (1969). In all of these, the dramatic action is chiefly internal, in the manner already established in her full-length novels; but in the three shorter works both plot and characterization have become so simplified that the effect is almost that of allegory.
Joanna, the heroine of the first “tale,” as the author calls it, is a young Greek woman who goes to spend a month on the tiny island of Santorini. In this long-delayed holiday, she hopes not only to paint but also to recover her “real self” which has become almost buried during the years when she and her father have been recovering from the effects of war. Her family had helped prisoners escape from the Germans; her mother had been killed and her brother made deaf by torture. Since then, Joanna has patiently cared for her father, doing office work that she dislikes, instead of painting, because she must help earn their living. Now, with a month of freedom ahead, she is exhilarated; and, when she arrives at the marketplace of Santorini and sees a donkey being mistreated, she at first tries to turn away from the sight of more pain and bondage. But she cannot; the animal's belly is covered with sores and he will soon die if not removed from his cruel owners. Recklessly, Joanna buys him and takes him with her as she goes to find a lodging place.
Her first night is spent in an abandoned chapel, but the next day she persuades a woman to rent her a room. Ulysses, as she has called the donkey, is not a welcome guest because he eats everyone's flowers; but she arranges to tie him in the chapel at night and during the day to take him out on the hillsides with her. Her first job, though, is to cure his wounds, which she gradually does with many tubes of salve from the druggist and some old burlap bags. Ulysses responds quickly to kindness. She begins to think that, in saving him, she has also somehow saved herself, for she now begins to paint more seriously than ever before. She spends long days working in the open air and feels a wonderful new happiness. Her only human companion is a small boy, Nicholas, who expresses to her the curiosity of others in the village—why is she alone? Why has she not married? She tells him about her family and finds a release from tension in at last talking of her mother and of the pain of the war years.
As the month draws to an end, Joanna sadly realizes she must also leave Ulysses, and she persuades a kindhearted donkey driver to accept him as a gift. But, as her boat is leaving the quay, Ulysses strains forward on his rope, wanting to follow; and, when he utters “a piercing bray” (88), Joanna realizes she cannot leave him behind. She returns and takes him with her two days later on the freighter. With the help of a friend in Piraeus, she brings Ulysses home to Athens and hides him in the cellar, afraid to tell her father that he is there. For now, more than ever, Ulysses seems to her a symbol of her new self—the free person, the painter, discovered on Santorini—and she dreads returning to her role of housekeeper, nurse, and office worker.
But the presence of Ulysses, which her father soon discovers, leads to better understanding between father and daughter. When his refusal to take the donkey seriously angers her, he cries out in protest, “‘Don't just stand there … looking like your mother!’” (123). As if his words break an evil spell, they can now communicate naturally again, for this is the first time in ten years that he has spoken of his wife. At last they both understand that the past should not be buried but lived with. Her father sees, on looking at her paintings, that she has real talent; and he insists that she give up her office job and try to become a painter. Happy in her new life, she is willing to let Ulysses go to a friend of hers on the island of Mykonos.
There are, from the first, religious associations with Ulysses. His patience under his suffering and his quiet, meditative air suggest that he is a symbol of Joanna's soul. Just as the great sores on his belly have not been able to heal until she rescues him, so do her own psychic wounds from the war remain raw. Her first step toward recovering or developing her real self comes when she looks steadfastly at suffering—both Ulysses' and her own. Together they spend their first night in a chapel—suggestive of the spiritual nature of Joanna's quest. Her inability to part with the donkey as she is leaving Santorini (she has not yet achieved her soul's freedom) is emphasized by the high wind and rough sea as she sets out the first time. In contrast, her second departure, with Ulysses, is on a peaceful afternoon at sunset.
Numerous other details enforce the allegory. The reader is left with the impression that in Joanna and Ulysses, the author has attempted to produce a work of art comparable to Joanna's paintings—simple and bare to the point of austerity. There are no richly complex characters like Edward Cavan and Carryl Cope, and Joanna herself is interesting but not difficult to understand, since only one aspect of her life is touched upon—her recovery of her “real self.” To achieve this, she must be alone, as she is for most of the story, except for a nonhuman companion. All of her conversations give the effect of an inner dialogue with herself. So she becomes a symbol of the human being who, not quite at Dante's midpoint of life, is aware of the need to make a journey—the journey to a spiritual rebirth. With that rebirth comes the power of communion with others; for the first time since her mother's death, Joanna is able to talk freely with her father. Because of its concern with communion, the book is akin to the other novels of Miss Sarton's second group.
Miss Pickthorn and Mr. Hare is regarded by the author as a fable, perhaps because the main characters' names and personalities suggest animals. Miss Pickthorn is a “maiden porcupine” who wants to be left alone. After years of teaching Latin and coping with people, she cherishes her privacy, spends her days translating Horace, and greets uninvited guests with a curt dismissal: “‘No doubt we met in some former incarnation, but not, I am sure, in this one. I am very busy this morning’” (10). Trumbull Hare, easily frightened by people and civilization, is like some shy woodland creature. When the story opens, he had just moved into an abandoned henhouse that he furnishes with discards from the village rubbish pit; he finds an old iron cot, a stuffed deer's head—all sorts of treasures. Such collecting is not “work” (he fears and avoids conventional jobs) but great pleasure. Nobody interferes with him; and Harry, the road agent, even helps him carry home things too large to balance on his bicycle. But, although Mr. Hare is quiet and attends to his own business, Miss Pickthorn resents his being in the henhouse. To her, he seems “feckless”; and she goes to the selectmen to protest their allowing a hobo to live in the village. His house, she says, is a fire hazard. Although the selectmen promise nothing, she cannot rest until Hare has been removed.
But not only the risk of fire disturbs her: Mr. Hare upsets her unaccountably. Her curiosity about him grows, and she cannot work. She feels “bewitched” and keeps watching his house across the road, with its curl of smoke rising peaceably from the chimney, and she imagines meeting him. When Seth tells her that Mr. Hare had once worked in the mill but had left because he could not stand machines, she gets a new insight into his character.
The climax comes when two pranksters decide to drop a firecracker down Mr. Hare's chimney, and Miss Pickthorn gets out the shotgun (that she keeps handy for scaring away woodchucks) and forces them to stop. There is a great deal of noise when she makes them explode the firecracker in the road; and poor Mr. Hare, just returning from the dump, takes to his heels in alarm. Harry goes to the woods to find him and tell him what has happened. That night the first snow falls, and the next morning Miss Pickthorn, going to her mailbox, meets Mr. Hare on his way to get water. They are like “two solitary polar bears” (78) in the snow; they exchange a few courteous words. But it is their only encounter, for the next day Mr. Hare leaves the village. Seth thinks he has gone because he cannot stand having had his life saved, but more probably he has found the henhouse inadequate protection in the great snow.
At any rate, he vanishes; and again Miss Pickthorn is strangely upset. He has meant something that she cannot, until the end of the book, decipher. But she begins to understand his significance when she finds a small box he has left her; it is a box that once contained peppermints, and inside is a penciled note from Mr. Hare, reading, “‘Thought you might like this little box to keep something in. Hope it wasn't you threw it away!’” (90). This odd memento tells her why Mr. Hare has managed to cast a kind of magic spell over her and over the village, “making them feel for a while as if they were all part of some heroic dream” (90-91). The reason is that Trumbull Hare lives “inside poetry” all the time. He has the poet's or the child's sharp awareness of the world and its strange, unexpected beauties. He will never be dulled by commercialism or by conformity to a pattern. As she returns to her house with the peppermint box, she feels her world is made new, for she now understands poetry better than she ever did in all her years of translating Horace.
As in Joanna and Ulysses, the characters in Miss Pickthorn and Mr. Hare are extremely simplified, even stylized. Both of the main actors in the tale are elderly people who illustrate the idea that in old age it is possible to escape from some of the conventions and become supremely oneself.
The very unconventionality of Mr. Hare's life in the village interests the inhabitants in him. Without realizing it, Mr. Hare shows the ordinary man, like Seth the postman, what poetry is all about: “Seth was well aware that almost everyone in the village lived a life of wild dream, the dreams of the lonely and the confined. One did not have to tell him that Trumbull Hare had, in a way, opened a door for them all into adventure, into a wilderness they thought they wanted to keep at bay” (88-89). The poet in Mr. Hare accepts the fact of a “wilderness” in life and in people; and in similar way, Miss Pickthorn, who has studied the Latin poets for years, comes to accept Mr. Hare and to realize that he has taught her a great deal about the magic of poetry. After she has “saved” his life, thus openly admitting her covert liking of the man that she has called a hobo, she sees that she and Mr. Hare are really much alike; he is an example of qualities she admires—“hard work, independence, thrift, courage”; in fact, he seems to exemplify these traits more than she does herself. Her complete change of heart shows that one aspect of poetry's magic is its appeal to the essential humanity linking the most opposite of people.
Janet Malcolm, in a review in The New Yorker, says that the change in Miss Pickthorn is the focal point in the book since it is “a fable about the function of poetry,” for “what has happened is in a sense what happens to a person when he is reading a poem. He sees things in a different light.” This reviewer also distinguishes between poetry and fiction as she discusses Miss Sarton's achievement in the book, saying that where fiction deals with “choices and clashes,” poetry's realm is in “matters that there is no choice about and no arguing about.” After discussion of the author's characters (not taken, she says, from the animal world, but from English novels; for Miss Pickthorn is “the conventional prickly old spinster,” and Hare is “the conventional romantic misfit—tramp, free spirit”) and the climactic change in Miss Pickthorn, this reviewer returns to the difference between fiction and poetry: “The question that occupies the novelist—how shall we live?—is parried by the poet, whose subject is the fact that we all must die. The issues that divide the Miss Pickthorns and Mr. Hares of life and of novels simply don't exist in poetry, and this is the moral of the fable.”8
As in Joanna and Ulysses, so in Miss Sarton's third short novel, The Poet and the Donkey (1969), a donkey plays an important part in a person's spiritual development. This time the chief character is Andy Lightfoot, an elderly poet who has lost his Muse. When the story opens, he is disconsolate. For the past three years, his poems have been inspired by Miss Hornbeam, a charming but inaccessible college administrator who caught his imagination when he gave a poetry reading at her college. Like several embodiments of the muse in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, Miss Hornbeam has been unaware of her magnetic influence on Andy—unaware that his being able to communicate with her now and then has flooded him with happiness and made it possible for him to write poems. Her continued silence and the difficulty he has in telephoning her finally cut off the rich source of creative power.
In his despair he borrows Whiffenpoof, a donkey at a farm near his village, for the summer. Though Whiffenpoof does not become another Muse, caring for her gives Andy a new interest in life; and gradually, as her arthritic ankles are helped by medicine and she becomes again frisky and unpredictable, Andy begins to regain a sense of his real self that has been lost in grieving about Miss Hornbeam. Whiffenpoof's antics—she forms the habit of running away every afternoon at four o'clock—restore his energy and joy. He leaves the impossible dream of Miss Hornbeam's love and returns to reality.
He also returns to charity. Near the end of the story, Mrs. Packer, a wealthy summer resident of the village, brings him some of his books to autograph and while there helps to catch Whiffenpoof, just returned from one of her daily sprints. As Andy and Mrs. Packer talk, he realizes that he has long had a stereotyped idea of her as someone rich and aloof. Instead, she is as vulnerable as himself: “He sensed that behind the matronly figure, the heavy jowls and the tight little mouth, she was full of tremors, a very delicate and sensitive machine, afraid of its own power to register distant earthquakes” (110). During this short visit, they feel a kinship. They are both growing old, and they both have suffered. As Mrs. Packer had lost her maternal role when her son died, so Andy had lost his sense of himself as a poet when Miss Hornbeam withdrew.
The Poet and the Donkey, set in the same New Hampshire village where Miss Pickthorn and Mr. Hare live, is similar to the previous tale in its simplicity of plot and its delicate humor. The spectacle of the elderly poet running down the road after a donkey and feeling exhilarated by the chase is as amusing as Trumbull Hare's enjoying life in his henhouse, or Miss Pickthorn's brandishing a shotgun. In both tales the serious subject—the value of poetry in the world—is just below the humorous surface, never made too obvious but always kept in view.
A comparison of The Poet and the Donkey to Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing can also be made; in both, the creative process is seen as the outcome of love, an intensity and excitement arising from attachment to a person who is the embodiment of the muse. But Andy Lightfoot comes to a deeper understanding of poetry than Mrs. Stevens has. Through his care of the donkey he finds that inspiration can come from giving of oneself and not just from waiting for a word from the muse. Whiffenpoof is to him a “magic animal” (119) who makes everyone around her seem more likeable; but it is Andy's own demanding self that has become, through the experience with Whiffenpoof, less egoistic and more human. In discovering that he can write poetry without his inacessible Muse, he takes a step forward on his spiritual journey.
V KINDS OF LOVE (1970)
Miss Sarton's latest full-length novel, Kinds of Love, is again set in New Hampshire, and has some characters similar to those in her other novels. But it is distinctly different from all the others. As the story opens, Christina and Cornelius Chapman, who for years have spent their summers in the small town of Willard, decide to spend the winter there for the first time; for Cornelius is recovering from a stroke, and their whole pattern of life must change. Christina's best friend in Willard is Ellen Comstock, a native of the town, whose grown son, Nick, returned from World War II unnerved to the point of mental instability.
At the beginning of the novel, when Christina and Ellen take a walk through the woods, the reader learns of their affection for each other and also of the tension between them because Ellen has always been poor and very conscious of Christina's different social world. Their friendship goes back to childhood, but as a young woman Christina was so involved in college, parties in Boston, and trips to Europe that she saw little of Ellen. On the autumn day of their walk, they are observed by Old Pete, the town “character,” a cheerful ne'er-do-well who lives in a shack and knows all the woods and trails around Willard.
Plans are going forward in Willard for the celebration of its bicentennial in 1969, and both Ellen and Christina are asked to write chapters for the town history. At a meeting of citizens planning the bicentennial, the reader becomes acquainted with Jane Tuttle, a charming elderly lady who specializes in natural history; Jem Grindell, the town historian; Susie Plummer, a retired missionary who is now the librarian; and Sally and Timothy Webster, summer residents.
When the hunting season begins, Ellen is increasingly worried about Nick, who has an obsession about wild life and cannot bear the thought of any woodland creature being killed. Accompanied by Old Pete, he sets out one afternoon to throw some New Yorkers off the trail of a deer. But the hunters have wounded the deer, and Nick, after mercifully killing it, gets into a fight with the men who claim it. As the incident occurs on the Chapman property, Cornelius accuses both the strangers and Nick of trespassing. Christina, not wanting to upset Cornelius but anxious about her relationship with Ellen, goes to ask advice of Eben Fifield, a former admirer of hers who, since his wife's death, has lived alone in Willard. Eben suggests someone who can handle the matter out of court, and gradually all resentment of Nick is forgotten, especially since he is—apart from his sudden rages concerning wild life—a most gentle, kindly man. When the winter begins, Nick comes to shovel snow and carry in wood for Christina and Cornelius.
The first section of the novel ends with the Chapman children and grandchildren coming to the Ark, the family home at Willard, for Thanksgiving. John, the eldest, who is subject to moods of great depression, goes to visit Jane Tuttle, who enlists his help with her chapter on the natural history of Willard. At the Thanks-giving dinner they all discuss what the town has meant to them over the years.
In Part II, winter sets in with great snowfalls. Christina takes Cornelius to the doctor in Boston and learns that his hold on life is precarious but that his illness may go on for years. She herself, with a stiff knee, is finding the household work more than she can manage, and Ellen kindly offers to come twice a week to help her. Both of them are writing their chapters for the town history, and the reader learns about early schools in Willard and about how a group of women and children managed on their own when their men were away in the Civil War. In mid-winter Jane Tuttle dies and is mourned by everyone. After the funeral Christina invites Eben to call at the Ark, and he and Cornelius have a long talk; it is the beginning of a real friendship between the former rivals. Old Pete is taken to the hospital with both feet frozen.
In the late winter, Cathy, one of the grandchildren, comes to live with Christina and Cornelius and go to high school in Willard, as she has been unhappy in her Boston school. She brings new life into the Ark. She also is fond of Ellen, with whom she can have real conversations, such as are impossible with her own parents. One night a Dartmouth student, Joel Smith, wrecks his car near the Comstock house, and Ellen and Nick take him in. Having no wish to return to college, he remains with them during the spring. Nick and Cathy between them teach Joel much about animals, birds, and flowers, and he comes to appreciate the peace and welcome of Willard. He and Cathy fall in love.
One day when Nick and Joel are walking in the woods, the road agent comes along with a bulldozer, ready to widen a part of the road to accommodate snow plows the next winter. The place to be cut is especially beautiful with wild arbutus, and Nick is furious at the impending destruction. Before Joel can stop him, he strikes the road agent, who threatens to send him to jail. When Ellen learns of the fight, she decides that the time has come to take Nick back to the state hospital, where he had spent some years just after the war. On the same night that Joel drives them to the hospital, he has dinner at the Ark, and the next day he leaves to begin his two-year military training. Soon his long letters to Cathy begin to come, and she writes dozens of poems about their love. But as the weeks pass she begins to feel she is changing, falling “out of love”; she is miserable with uncertainty.
The last section of the novel describes the celebration of the bicentennial, at which Eben Fifield gives a magnificent speech showing the continuity of past and present and seeing the town as a creation of many people.
A summary of the plot of Kinds of Love cannot do justice to its complexity. In its variety of themes and breadth of vision, it stands apart from all of Miss Sarton's previous novels.
It is notable for its sympathetic portrayal of many types of personality. All of the Chapman clan are seen together only once, at Thanksgiving; but the reader gets a clear picture of each one and feels something of the problems, relationships, and activities that will be continued after they all leave the scene. In the same way, the townspeople, such as Jem Grindell, the Websters, and Old Pete—all minor characters—are felt as real people, who together make up the great diversity of life in Willard. As in all of Miss Sarton's novels, the thoughts, feelings, and interaction of the characters are more important than any external action. And the town itself, with its “raggedy weeds and stony pastures” (464) is like another character, influencing and being influenced by all those who have ever lived there. In addition, much of the novel's interest comes from the reader's awareness of the dead—Cornelius' father, Ellen's husband, and, further back, Sophia Dole, who in Civil War days was in charge of the group of women who kept the town going while the men were fighting.
Unlike many of Miss Sarton's other novels, Kinds of Love does not emphasize a need for communion. Rather, it shows communion being achieved—not perfectly, of course, but more nearly so than in any of the previous novels. It is achieved sometimes by a look or a handclasp between two people who love each other; sometimes by silence, like that between John Chapman and old Jane Tuttle, who have been friends for years. Ellen and Nick usually understand each other without words. The most nearly perfect communion in the book is between Christina and her husband, who find that in old age they know each other better and that their love is growing stronger. Christina says in one of the journal entries interspersed in the narrative: “in all these weeks, we have moved into a deepening phase where we are closer as souls than ever before” (251).
The love of Christina and Cornelius is tenderly and beautifully portrayed. Christina delights in their isolation in the winter; she even dreads the coming of Cathy in the spring, as the absence of visitors has meant a chance to be alone with Cornelius in a way not possible before. Paradoxically, they are happiest with each other at a time when they might have expected only sadness. Their “second honeymoon” is the result of Cornelius' illness and of their both being aware of the nearness of death. Cornelius marvels that he can now live without the bank and his club, things that formerly seemed essential. He says, “‘Other things have come to the surface. We are in a great adventure, Christina. … I am a better man than I was a year ago, a richer man, a … happier man. How strange!’” (234).
Eben Fifield also finds that love in old age is still vital. He and Christina still light up each other as they did in their twenties. After his speech at the bicentennial, he tells her, “‘Between you and me there is fire. There always was and there always will be. It burned so brightly today that I hardly dared look at you from the platform. Yet because you were there, and I so aware of your presence, the thing worked’” (451). Though both of them have been happily married and would not change what has been in the past, they accept a truth that strikes Eben as a sudden revelation: “‘What is young love compared to this—this incomparable truth of old age—that nothing dies, all is transformed?’” (452).
Another kind of love explored in the novel is that between friends. Christina and Ellen, so different in background and temperament, are alike in tastes and values and are a constant comfort and joy to each other. Their relationship is so close that it can endure strains and only becomes stronger for them. Another deep friendship is that between John Chapman, a middle-aged man who often feels himself a failure, and gentle, elderly Jane Tuttle. Since he was four years old and they went for walks together, they have felt an affinity arising from their love of the natural world, and Jane has been able to give John something very precious, a sense of his real, inner self.
A love of nature pervades the novel. It is seen in an extreme, obsessive form in Nick Comstock, who is called a one-man conservation society. Joel Smith thinks Nick a saint because of his selfless caring for every wild creature; but Ellen, with typical clear-sighted realism, says, “‘It isn't saintly to my way of thinking to care more about animals than people’” (458). Nick's concern, however, affects everyone in the town. And other characters besides Jane Tuttle and John are moved by the natural beauty of the wild country around Willard. The Chapmans turn again and again to the mountain, Monadnock, for reassurance and joy. Joel, the city boy, is entranced by the delicate beauty of the wild arbutus in spring. And Miss Sarton's own love of New England pervades the book. One reviewer said:
Most of all, the novel concerns the reciprocal love between mankind and nature: the love that the earth gives to those capable of taking its pulse and the love that human beings give to nature when they are close enough to receive its love. A New Hampshire village is the brooding alma mater, with its tempers of winter, bursting joy of spring, laziness of summer and flaming last vivid flair of fall. Only a poet—and May Sarton is a poet—could translate into words the special relationship that prevails between the timelessness of the earth and the evanescence of the creatures, great and small, which live upon it.9
Other kinds of love are woven into the intricate texture of the novel: the young love of Cathy and Joel; the almost wordless love of Ellen for her child, Nick; the concern of the townspeople for one another, as shown in the care for Old Pete; and the love of people for Willard—its past history and its future. Those who work for the bicentennial celebration begin to see the relationship of the “summer people” to the natives—how these two groups, often considered antagonistic, actually have given much to each other. Cornelius, who had formerly thought of the summer residents as being the “civilizing influence” (240) in the town, comes, through his new knowledge of Eben, Ellen and Nick, to respect the intelligence and integrity of people who have never left Willard.
Ellen Comstock has the toughness characteristic of those who remained in Willard. Her problems—poverty, an alcoholic husband, and a mentally unstable son—have made her realistic but not bitter. She can comfort Cathy, who is fifteen, and Christina, who is seventy. She represents all the women of Willard who, in the words of Old Pete, “‘have been given a grain or two more pluck than the men’” (17).
Kinds of Love is also a novel about kinds of courage. Young Cathy and Joel bring to the town a greater awareness of materialism, injustice, and war, all of which demand courage. But the problems of old age are treated in more detail: the loneliness of Ellen, stitching away at other people's sewing, and of Eben, standing in the garden on an autumn day and knowing he should cut down the peonies as his wife always did; the frailty and dependence that Jane Tuttle must live with; Christina's knowledge that Cornelius may soon die. All of these are faced with courage. Miss Sarton shows her elderly characters as not only able to achieve communion but as also able to endure.
In its variety of themes and characters, then, Kinds of Love is richer than any of Miss Sarton's previous novels. It marks a peak of achievement, for it depicts more than one town and its people. A reviewer who commented on the novel's containing “so much of what life is” also saw the wider implication of the story: “Miss Sarton's book, despite the setting, is not purely about a New England village. It is about the world. She finds the macrocosm in the microcosm of Willard and she makes us see it, too.”10
Notes
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Cloud, Stone, Sun, Vine, p. 119.
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The Design of a Novel, Scripps College Bulletin, pp. 6-7.
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William Goyen, “A Craving for Light,” review of Faithful Are the Wounds, New York Times Book Review, March 13, 1955, p. 6.
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The Design of a Novel, p. 14.
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Ibid.
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Goyen, loc. cit.
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In “Ash Wednesday,” T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (New York, 1952), pp. 60-67.
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Janet Malcolm, “Children's Books for Christmas,” The New Yorker, XLII (Dec. 17, 1966), 210-40.
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Fanny Butcher, “A Poet's Novel,” review of Kinds of Love, Chicago Tribune, Dec. 25, 1970.
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Eugenia Thornton, “The World in New Hampshire,” review of Kinds of Love, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Nov. 29, 1970.
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