SOURCE: Bakerman, Jane S. “‘Kinds of Love’: Love and Friendship in Novels of May Sarton.” Critique 20, no. 2 (1978): 83-91.

[In the following essay, Bakerman emphasizes the themes of self and personal relationships in Sarton's work, perceiving them as the unifying forces of her oeuvre.]

With the publication of As We Are Now (1973), May Sarton added another perspective to her continuing examination of two central and important themes. She treats in her novels two basic motifs from a variety of points of view, one of which is the driving need of each individual to “create” himself, to come to a deep and positive kind of self-understanding which will both liberate and discipline him so that he can live in the deepest and highest reaches. In the process of achieving that understanding, the individual must, also, come to understand others and his relations with them. The conflict that such a search generates is always identified in Sarton's works as the difficult and sometimes destructive thrust of each human to unite with others in friendship and love while he is dealing with an equally strong urge to remain aloof and inward, to limit his connections with others in order to preserve an “easier” sense of self and to protect himself from the exposure and even pain that love and friendship can sometimes inflict.

In attempting to examine these motifs, Sarton has produced a series of novels in which various relations and points of view are explored, always striving to maintain in the works a cool and quiet tone which is designed to lend perspective and balance to what are crucially powerful patterns. That tone, a quality of perspective, is the focal point of both negative and positive critical comments. She has been criticized for a “certain chilliness in the writing”¹ and for leaving the reader “on the outside. … she tells us of feelings rather than showing us.”² Another critics says, “there are two things I miss. One is force. The other is quite possibly related: this novel [The Birth of a Grandfather] rather gives the impression of floating in space … and I have the feeling that a little more energy in its presentation would have given it a firmer foundation.”³

About the same novel, however, another critic remarks, “her situations, though low-keyed, are basic, alive with their own kind of tension, drama, and suspense,”⁴ and notes that The Birth of a Grandfather (1957) is “like all her work, civilized and profound.”⁵ At other times, the calm and quiet tone has been identified with “delicate skill and intelligent compassion,”⁶ and with the “cool flow of imagination which invigorates and refreshes.”⁷ Other critics are even more enthusiastic, pointing out that her work “at times … rises to the beauty which poetry alone can deliver,”⁸ and associating the tone itself with “that atmosphere of breadth and clarity which Miss Sarton has made her own.”⁹

While no reader is surprised to find contradictory evaluations among reviews and reviewers, one is surprised to find that little attention has been paid to the central themes. Too often, the analyses are limited to plot commentaries, without articulating the thematic unity of the various works. Sometimes the themes are touched on in evaluating an individual book: “as human beings worthy of the name, we never stop learning; never cease to explore the mysteries of this life in which human relationships are undoubtedly the greatest mystery of all.”¹⁰ In one instance, the thematic force in Sarton's works is clearly perceived: “The author has long considered the difficulty of achieving personal harmony through human relationships. All her books, and much of her poetry, have shown preoccupation with the growth of personality, the ability or lack of it to communicate love, or, for that matter, to feel it in the first place, the acceptance of birth and death as cyclical parts of man's continuity.”¹¹ The observation is sound and speaks to the heart of Sarton's work.

Not only are the themes themselves exciting, but the various stories into which Sarton embeds these explorations are fascinating—quite possibly a reason for critical preoccupation with the evaluation of plot and the confusion about Sarton's special, cool, clear, lucid tone. In the five novels to be discussed here, a wide variety of situations and character is presented; in each, the plot is handled fully and well, the situation resolved honorably and properly. The books are certainly entities in themselves, and yet, despite their diversity, they are linked together by a common theme and thrust. In addition to As We Are Now and The Birth of a Grandfather, The Small Room (1961), Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), and Kinds of Love (1970) will be considered.

The earliest of these novels, The Birth of a Grandfather, deals with the Wyeth family of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and depicts a crisis in the life of a family, a time during which Sprig and Frances must evaluate their marriage in the face of the breaking away of their children, the deaths of the family's older generation, the dissolution of the marriage of a close friend, and the untimely death of another friend. The central character, Sprig Wyeth, must learn to open himself to the proffered love of his wife while accepting the responsibilities that love itself demands.

The Small Room examines the pressures that cause a brilliant student to plagiarize in order to retain her reputation for excellence but demands that responsibility for her action be divided between the girl and her teachers who offered intellectual stimulation and challenge but not love and emotional support. The story is played against the background of protagonist Lucy Winter's coming to terms with a recently terminated love affair, the threatened dissolution of the marriage of a faculty couple, and the destruction of a relationship of many years between a major character, Carryl Cope, and her lover, Olive Hunt. The sustaining factors here are the genuine friendships both in and out of the classroom.

In Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, Hilary Stevens, a novelist-poet who has finally achieved genuine recognition in old age, grants an interview to two young reporters. In preparing herself for that encounter, Hilary remembers the many lovers who have provided the stimulation, often through pain, for her Muse and attempts to define herself, an attempt which is, of course, a lifelong process brought to great intensity during the period of the novel. The process of self-realization is painted against the background of her sustaining friendship for a young man, Mar, who is trying to come to terms with homosexuality.

Kinds of Love is, perhaps, Sarton's finest novel. Here, the intricate family relations of two women, Christian Chapman and Ellen Comstock, who have been extremely close friends for sixty years, are explored. Several generations of both families, the ways they love and fail to love one another, and the insights those loves stimulate form the center of the novel. The preparation for celebration of the two-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Willard, the New England town which is the background and the source of all these relationships, is a unifying element.

The more recent As We Are Now is stunning and powerful. The protagonist, Caroline Spencer, “Caro,” seventy-six years old and confined to a home for the aged, attempts to complete the creation of her “self” in order to prepare for her death. The book is a frightening statement of what happens to the human personality when the potential for creating the self is denied and when love is wrenched away or turned into something diminishing and reprehensible. Denied any sort of sustenance for her spirit, Caro comes to rely on her friendship with the Reverend Thornhill and his daughter, Lisa, and on her deepening love for Anna Close, temporary help at the home. When the proprietress of “Twin Elms” attacks Caro's sense of self by besmirching her love, Caro burns down the home as a final act of despair and self-realization.

Even brief summaries of these novels reveal their diversity of plot. Yet, their underlying unity is also clearly noticeable, even in such curtailed summations. Each book examines the human spirit, and in each the truly mature, truly functioning human being must “create” himself in order, really to be. To achieve that creation, he must learn to cope with the twin drives toward union with others and toward isolation. The element that lends power and strength to Sarton's observations is her profound ability to deal with all kinds of love as valuable, strong, compelling. She sees the ability to handle love as central to the great energy and the deep wounds of the human condition, and she diminishes none of the manifestations of that love. Few contemporary writers have achieved that much.

Sarton's characters who are most sensitive and aware state clearly that the creation of self is the center of life. In her journal Christina Chapman says, “What is interesting, after all, is the making of a self, an act of creation, like any other, that does imply a certain amount of conscious work,”¹² and Cornelius, her husband, trying to work his way back to some kind of physical strength after a serious stroke, is aware that his values are changing, that he is newly sensitive to life—and, importantly, is also ordering himself to prepare for death: “We are in a great adventure, Christina. … we go on making ourselves to the end” (234). The Chapmans not only have each other, but each has a sense of himself, and, very importantly, a sense that love carries responsibility (331-32).

Spring Wyeth cannot articulate his needs, and for him the growth toward acceptance of love's responsibilities, toward the creation of a whole person, is hard to endure. Although Sprig loves his wife, he wishes to be free of her and his family, to run away to Japan, a symbol for him of freedom from ties and responsibilities.¹³ No one is more aware of Sprig's thrust toward isolation than his wife, Frances, who articulates that urge very early in the book: “One also wishes to be oneself, unique, solitary, quite unattached and free to make one's soul and find one's joy”; but Frances suffers greatly from Sprig's desire for escape, for isolation.

Frances and Sprig are saved from the loneliness of total isolation by his final growth into maturity, symbolized by his acceptance of the idea of being a grandfather (275). The price of that acceptance, however, has been high; Sprig achieves it through his relationship with a good friend, Bill Waterford, dying of cancer. Sprig is entranced with the man's intense awareness of life and his understanding of its value (178). Even more importantly, Sprig is forced to face the fact that in clinging to Bill, in trying to deny the fact of Bill's coming death, he is committing himself to their friendship in a way unique in his experience. Sprig can be open, loving, and giving with Bill only because the check for that openness will never be picked up; the cost will never be counted, for Bill will not be alive to sustain the relationship or to make demands on it (213). When Sprig can begin to live his own life, not Bill's, when he can begin to create himself, when he can accept the responsibility of loving his wife—and, even more importantly, of accepting her love—he is able to enjoy the thought of his new grandchild and to re-channel his life by undertaking a new work, perfecting some translations from the Greek (271).

The urge to accomplish a piece of consequential work is often, in Sarton's novels, the symbol for the true awareness of self and for the freedom and the responsibility which that mature self can achieve. Hilary Stevens in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, for example, after she has relived her life in the company of the young reporters, feels a new book struggling to the surface of her consciousness,¹⁴ and Lucy Winter in The Small Room, who has come to face the fact that she must be open and personal as well as intellectually stimulating to her students, must, in fact, offer them love as well as respect, faces that complex maturity and responsibility by falling “in love with a profession.”¹⁵

Not every character in Sarton's novels, however, is successful at self-creation. In The Small Room, Olive Hunt cannot truly create herself; she substitutes pride for opennesss and growth and loses the two factors which she, herself, knows to be central to her full happiness and full potential as a human being—Appleton College, whose benefactress she has been, and Carryl Cope, whom she has loved for years (207). Significantly, Olive breaks with the College over its plans to hire a consulting psychiatrist to lend aid, support, and insight to the students who need to find a clearer realization of themselves; Olive disdains that kind of search, finding her answers in a simplistic formula and, of course, in her limiting, destructive pride.

Olive's failure is sad, but she has chosen it herself. Caro Spencer's failure is tragic, for it is forced upon her. At the opening of As We Are Now, Caroline Spencer declares her intention to create herself; she keeps a journal as a means to that end and in it says: “I intend to make myself whole here in this Hell.”¹⁶ Later she writes: “I have the belief that we make our deaths, that we ripen toward death, and only when the fruit is ripe may it drop. I still believe in life as a process and would not wish to end the process by an unnatural means. … I treasure my soul as something given into my keeping, something that I must keep intact—more, keep in a state of growth and awareness whatever the odds” (19).

The odds, however, are too great. The people who run the institution, the “home” for the aged to which Caro has been committed, subdue her by undermining her sense of herself. Her identity is threatened in small and great ways—by the way they call her “Miss Spencer” ironically (17), and ultimately by the way they destroy the final relationship to which she clings. When her love for Anna Close is reduced by Harriet Hatfield, the proprietress, to something dirty and sinful (102), Caro loses all sense of herself. Without that self, she cannot live: “I do not address myself any more as Caro. Caro is dead. I cannot say ‘Pull youself together, Caro,’ for that person has ceased to exist. Someone else, mentally ill, tortured, hopeless, has taken over my body and my mind. I am in the power of evil” (102).

She comes to the decision “to end this whole business in a cleansing burst of flame,” and instead of struggling to fend off madness, she considers that “It doesn't matter. It is what is required” (126). She clings to her sense of requirement, even though she really does not want to die (123), for she knows that she is not whole, not ready. She is finally forced into the action when Harriet finds and reads her journal; that last stronghold of self has now been breached, and Caro strikes back, affirming herself in the suicide and devastation she had earlier denounced: she burns “Twin Elms,” destroying all who live there.

A close reading of the novels, then, reveals the crucial importance of the search for self. That search cannot be complete until the balance has been struck between the thrust to love, to join with others, and the thrust toward isolation, a balance which is central to that search. The one motif cannot be separated from the other. In Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, Hilary Stevens recognizes that vital connection:

Old, young, male, female—her capacity to be touched, to be involved, to care was, she realized, that still of a young girl. How did one keep growing otherwise? What was life all about otherwise? What separates us from animals except just this—that we can be moved by each other, and not primarily for sexual purposes? Granted, of course, that any deep collision, any relationship which profoundly affects one comes from the whole person, and can almost instantaneously shift from one phase to another, so that sex is never wholly absent and may come into play. … then there is conflict. Someone gets hurt. And it was no use remembering that often she had been the hurt one; the fact remained that she had inevitably hurt others. “But I regret nothing,” she said aloud and firmly. For it hurts to be alive, and that's a fact, but who can regret being alive and being for others, life-enhancing?

(55)

Hilary, however, is both a success and a failure at handling self-awareness and love. She is successful in that she is one of Sarton's best examples of a character who is aware of the importance and value of all loves. Several of the lovers she recalls so powerfully during the span of the story are women, and they have moved her profoundly: spiritually, intellectually, and physically; others are men, and she says, “Women have moved and shaken me, but I have been nourished by men” (180). The power and the physical joy of those relationships is depicted explicitly, though not in detail, but their contribution to her poetry is excitingly clear. Here one of Sarton's clearest insights is evident: love itself is of value—love and the characters, rather than the sex, of the lovers.

In Hilary's transformation of her loves into poetry, her success falls into question. She recognizes that when she loves someone deeply and powerfully, she can begin to write and often, she has thought, to write well. She calls these encounters “epiphanies” (113), and she says that her lovers are her Muse: “One begins to talk to someone [in the poems], about oneself.” Hilary believes that the woman artist writes from the “whole” of herself; “the feminine genius is the genius of self-creation” (196), but she also believes that when “the artist is a woman,” she fulfills her inner drive toward balance, “to make herself whole … at the expense of herself as a woman” (191). For Hilary, the act of creation is always associated with her immature self, “the boy she had dreamed of being” (214).

She repudiates her way of life by wishing for Mar, her young friend, that he “live out his life to the full, as a man,” not as a boy, like Hilary, who had lived as “boy and woman and the two married within her to make the poems” (215). She wants him to “have a whole life, grow up, marry,” and in doing so she seems to denounce her own use of the tensions of love to create all the books she has already written. She comes to know that she has, as yet, failed wholly to create herself, to deal with and accept love. Instead, she has used love to make her poetry and to create a kind of isolation. But the book ends on an open note—Hilary is planning another book, and she points out to Mar that “every end is a beginning” (220).

In Sarton's novels, however, all who love are not lovers. One of her most brilliant achievements is to picture friendship as a redeeming, sustaining force; Sarton is one of the very few American writers to present a vivid picture of the importance and the nourishment of friendship between women. Such nourishment is clearly stated early in the development of the relationship between Caro Spencer and Anna Close in As We Are Now; Caro writes, “we exchanged a look, the look between two women who understand each other. The relief of that! … It affirmed our humanity and regard for each other” (83).

In The Birth of a Grandfather, during the months in which Frances Wyeth is seeking to create herself, she is supported by her close friend, Lucy, who is herself in a state of crisis—her husband is obtaining a divorce to marry another woman. Frances is wise enough to know that as Lucy sustains her, so Bill Waterford sustains Sprig (144), and she fully recognizes the value of such a relationship:

As always when she was with Lucy, Frances found all kinds of ideas and sensations opening up inside her. … There were no barriers. The exchange was everything—it was not the way into love or the way anywhere at all. For this reason their hours together had the taste of eternity, were consoling like pure poetry.

(74)

For Lucy and Frances, the friendship is an acceptance of each woman by the other, an acceptance that can flower at various stages in their lives and remain unchanged; Frances is even able to talk to Lucy about her hard-won sense of independence, of being herself within her love for Sprig (221), while she would not have been able, at that point, to talk so personally with Sprig, her husband.

The friendship between Christian Chapman and Ellen Comstock in Kinds of Love is less easy and peaceful than that between Lucy and Frances, but they, too, communicate on a very special level: “They knew things about each other that no one else in the world knew—the moments of failure of nerve, the secret wounds” (27). Their loving fellowship is even able to survive extremely strained relations between Ellen's son and Christina's husband. They do not demand that their friendship solve all problems, wipe away all differences between them—of class, of point of view; instead, they ask more—they ask acceptance of the growing, evolving, self-creating beings that they are, and they get that acceptance (128). In this novel, too, pure friendship is defined; Christina's son, John, in thinking of Jane Tuttle, who has served as the landmark friend for him and for many others in the village, comes to understand that she symbolizes the pure love in friendship, for she “never asked anything—never expected more of people than they could give, and wanted of them only what they could be, not what she herself might need” (270).

Acceptance, then, of others and of one's self is close to the central purpose of human life, according to May Sarton. It is the aim of the creation of the self and the goal of all the kinds of friendship and all the kinds of love so vitally portrayed in her novels. That vitality is beautifully orchestrated by a cool, quiet tone: Sarton explores human emotions, never preaches about them, and her authorial voice is never strident. Sprig Wyeth complains in The Birth of a Grandfather that “People don't write enough about friendship”; the response is that “Perhaps they don't know very much about it” (210). May Sarton knows about it; she writes about friendship and love with an authority born of insight—the profit is, of course, the reader's.

Notes

1. Richard McLaughlin, rev. of The Small Room, Springfield Republican, 1 October 1961, p. 4.

2. Richard Rhodes, “How the Summer People Learned to Pass the Winter” [rev. of Kinds of Love], New York Times Book Review, 29 November 1970, p. 56.

3. Elizabeth Janeway, “Shifting the Gears” [rev. of The Birth of a Grandfather], New York Times Book Review, 8 September 1957, p. 4.

4. Francis Keene, “Boston Excursion” [rev. of The Birth of a Grandfather], Saturday Review, 14 September 1957, p. 50.

5. Keene, p. 49.

6. Mary McNiff, rev. of The Small Room, America, 19 August 1961, p. 638.

7. Sylvia Stallings, “A Marriage That Survived Age and Crisis” [rev. of The Birth of a Grandfather], New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 8 September 1957, p. 8.

8. James M. Murphy, S. J., rev. of Kinds of Love, Best Sellers, 1 December 1970, p. 371.

9. J. V., rev. of The Birth of a Grandfather, San Francisco Chronicle, 13 October 1957, p. 22.

10. Stallings, p. 8.

11. Keene, p. 50.

12. May Sarton, Kinds of Love (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 32. Subsequent references are to this edition.

13. May Sarton, The Birth of a Grandfather (New York: Rinehart, 1957), p. 31. Subsequent references are to this edition.

14. May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (New York: Norton, 1965), p. 202. Subsequent references are to this edition.

15. May Sarton, The Small Room (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 249. Subsequent references are to this edition.

16. May Sarton, As We Are Now (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 10. Subsequent references are to this edition.