SOURCE: Todd, Janet. “May Sarton.” In Women Writers Talking, pp. 3-19. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978.

[In the following essay, based on an interview, Sarton discusses autobiographical aspects of her work, the relationship between art and life, and the role of the female artist in contemporary society.]

I met May Sarton on a clear fresh day in May in a car park in York, Maine. She was immediately welcoming and her warmth cancelled out the fatigue of my eight-hour drive from New York. We drove in her car down lanes of new leaves.

Her house was yellow and three-storied; the grass, colored with daffodils and red tulips, stretched down to the sea. Inside, the views of sun, sea, and flowers seemed part of the walls. It was a home, with a dog, a cat, flowers, knick-knacks, soft toys, and old furniture. A beautiful place. “Rented,” she said quickly as I marvelled. “I could never afford to own anything like this.”

After noisily greeting the dog, we sat in the light living room drinking tea and eating biscuits with orange-flavored butter. The books at eye level on the shelf were not May Sarton's own, handsomely bound below, but those of Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf, both friends from years before.

In Mrs. Stevens Hears the Marmaids Singing (1965) May Sarton tells of an interview in May with a famous woman poet of New England. The two younger interviewers come from New York to perform an “exemplary exercise in tact and persuasion,” but the author nonetheless feels “badgered” at the idea of their arrival.

May Sarton is 69, a writer since the 1930s of novels, poems, diaries, and memoirs. She is famous, though not critically acclaimed; loved and consulted by readers for her exemplary life of solitude, open but unstressed lesbianism, and dedication to art. I too came in May from New York to Maine, and, before I knew the wonderful friendliness of May Sarton, I was made nervous by the analogy of Mrs. Stevens.

I questioned her about her identification with her creation. She laughed heartily. “And of course Mrs. Stevens lives by the sea as I do—but I'm not Mrs. Stevens. There are many things that are different. For example her parents are absolutely not my parents. Secondly I am a much more giving and warm person than she is, but for purposes of art I wanted to make her very much only the writer and the lover, these two which go together of course. One did not feel a person who was very welcoming to the world and I think I have made her more of an austere presence than I am on purpose. Of course I wrote it when I was fifty-five and I made her seventy. Now I'm nearly seventy I'd make her eighty I suppose.”

And yet, I pursued, there is much of yourself in so many of your characters. Mrs Stevens certainly seems close in dedication to art. “In essence it is myself but characters in fiction can never be as complex as real people. You have to simplify and emphasize certain things at the expense of others. So that Mrs. Stevens is less and more than I am—more because more concentrated, a poet purely, and of course she didn't write fiction or journals or memoirs.” She paused, remembering her life. “There's quite a large spectrum I've investigated through my writings.”

May Sarton has written many times of the difficulties of reconciling life and art, of fulfilling oneself in reality and in writing. I asked her to talk on this and she replied volubly—clearly this was a topic still uppermost in her mind. “The conflict of life and poetry every writer has. It is an endless and agonizing conflict; I face it every single day at my desk. I haven't written a word of my own for art for months. I only answer letters. The life that pours in. People say, ‘Why do you answer?’ and I give them examples of the kinds of things people ask of me. I would be an absolute brute if I didn't reply. I'm doing it less now though.” She was obviously on a hobbyhorse and she rode it at speed: “I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time—except when I'm making love. Two things when you forget time, when nothing exists except the moment—the moment of the writing, the moment of love. That perfect concentration is bliss.”

God of the empty room,
Thy will be done. Thy will be done:
Now shine the inward sun,
The beating heart that glows
Within the skeleton,
The magic rose, the purer living gold,
Shine now, grown old.

[Selected Poems of May Sarton; hereafter abbreviated as SP, p. 184]¹

And yet, I questioned, there is much prelude to working and love and may not the two be difficult to reconcile? May Sarton paused a while and then agreed, “Yes, you're right. Yes, I do feel there is perfection of life or art and I used to feel it even more. ‘The intellect of man is forced to choose. …’” I felt this a romantic view and she took up the word: “I would say my whole work is based on the phrase ‘the Romantic impulse, the Classic consideration’ and I think the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence. I don't see any fashioning—or almost none. The craft—as I've said more than once—is not something you paste on; it is organic, and you're discovering what you felt or meant to say by putting it into form. The struggle with the form is the struggle with yourself. Again we come to Yeats.”

Where waterfalls in shining folds
Trouble the classic pools,
And always formal green enfolds
And frames the moving grays and golds—
Who breathes on stone, who makes the rules?

[SP, p. 27]

She needed no prompting to go on with this topic, one much explored in her work. “The other thing I feel is that the deeper you go the more universal what you touch is. What is in fashion now is often a personal reference which the reader cannot have any key to—the New York school—you know, what happened on Second Avenue in March at that terrible moment. You have no idea what the terrible moment is and you couldn't care less. But it seems to me, if you really understand what's happened, the more universal it becomes. The poems I've written which I've feared no one could really understand are the poems that people respond to most. ‘That's exactly what I felt and how did you know?’ The strangest poem when it's completely evolved communicates.”

What of this personal all,
The little world these hands have tried to fashion
Using a single theme for their material,
Always a human heart, a human passion?

[SP, p. 187]

May Sarton has written more prose than poetry if one counts novels, memoirs, and journals and yet I suspected that she valued her poetry over her prose. She smiled at a question she had perhaps often been asked, and agreed. “If you're a poet at all, you must value your poetry above anything else. Because it's given. Like mathematics and music, I believe that poets are born, not made. And this sense of the music—which is of course very unfashionable now—you experience when very young. My first book of poems came out when I was twenty-five but I was publishing when I was seventeen.” She laughed, remembering the delight of first acceptance. “Poetry Magazine took five sonnets—I was very thrilled, I remember, and rushed out and bought Katherine Mansfield's letters which had just come out. I'd never made any money before.” She went on more thoughtfully, “If you were in solitary confinement, what would you do if you were a writer? I don't think I'd write a novel but I'm sure I'd write poetry. Because poetry is between you and God—I mean I'm not a believer in the obvious sense but it's something that comes from so deep in the subconscious you can't control it.”

Today, I have learned
That to become
A great, cracked,
Wide-open door
Into nowhere
Is wisdom.

[Halfway to Silence; hereafter abbreviated as HS, p. 61]

“You can say, I'll write a novel next year, I have a good idea. But you can't say ‘I'll write a poem next Wednesday because I have some free time,—you can't. Will doesn't operate. And this is why so many poets commit suicide I think or become alcoholic or take drugs—because that waiting for the muse is so agonizing if you have no other string to your bow. The more famous you are, the more terrible it must be if you dry up. Whereas I have the great advantage of being able to write novels—I hope to write one more—and I can go on with the journal forever which I think is a very minor part of my work, but it is something people seem to enjoy.”

I asked her then about the relationship of art and life, the process of art feeding off life as a kind of cannibal. I wondered if she ever found herself experiencing for the sake of writing. She was emphatic in her reply. “No. If you do that, you're destroying your gift and you find you don't have it. It's got to come, you can't force it. You can't say ‘I'm going to Japan because then I'll write a poem.’”

I felt there was still something here May Sarton had not addressed, that art evolves so often out of the unhappiness of life—especially love—and that this might conceivably make the misery welcome. She began to answer the question but then moved from it. “I've always believed love would be all right though it never has lasted; I did though live with Judy for fifteen years and was devoted to her, someone who has now become senile. I suppose the thing that makes the poetry is the first stages of a love affair where everything is being discovered and you are discovering yourself again under very naked and intense circumstances. Large parts are not there in just ordinary discourse, in gardening or whatever you do. It's the intensity.”

At first the whole world opens into sense:
They learn their lives by looking at the wheat,
And there let fall all that was shy and tense
And be all they have seen.

[SP, p. 46]

“And another thing I believe is that intensity commands form. That is a statement I've made many times, and I believe it. I can write free-verse poems, but for me a poem is never completely satisfying unless it's in form and form is brought to me by intensity of feeling. Without it I can't write in form. That's the sadness for me—what's going to happen when I'm very old?” But, I worried, the intensity does cream off a little of the experience itself. “It gives you a chance of finding out what's happening to you,” she replied. Yet, in that case, poetry would seem a safety valve. She agreed that it was. Poetry burgeons again at the end of the misery. “Yes,” she replied thoughtfully, “… it's very mysterious.”

The topic lapsed and we returned to the making of poems. “When one's not writing poems—and I'm not at the moment—you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach. That's what makes it so marvelous and is why anyone who writes poetry would put it first.

“People have often said that they like the novels more than the poems, but now I'm glad to say that I get more letters that say the opposite; the poems are what have really spoken to them most. Very simple people. I like it that my poems do reach.”

I set my mind to artful work and craft,
I set my heart on friendship, hard and fast
Against the wild inflaming wink of chance
And all sensations opened in a glance.

[SP, p. 82]

“One of my problems is that my work is extremely clear and this is not fashionable. Clarity is earned. It looks simple but it hasn't been simple arriving at this simplicity. And this is where I haven't had a critical break. Partly because the influences on me were French. For example, Mauriac was my master for the novel—his economy and clarity; there's a great writer who appeals to every kind of person, far more perhaps than some of the famous women like Lessing, and other great writers today. I wanted a very clear style and I've felt that when people say about a writer, ‘It's a wonderful style,’ this is not positive. The reader should not be aware of the style, only fully experience what is being said. Afterwards if they are critics they should say to themselves, ‘Why is this so compelling? Well, for these reasons …’”

I remembered May Sarton's partly European background and asked her if she felt she worked more within a French tradition than an English. She said she did not, but went on, “The strongest prose influence on me was French. In poetry, no. It is a damnable thing that in English it's so difficult to rhyme; it's much easier in French but the danger is of overrhyme and it looks too facile. So on the whole I'm very glad to be writing in English. I think the combination of Latin and Anglo-Saxon makes it a marvelous language for poetry, but in French you get too much of the Latin.”

I asked her more specifically about poetic influences. “When I was young,” she replied, “the people who influenced me most were Edna St. Vincent Millay—who was very much in fashion but I don't think a great poet—and H.D. who was then beginning with free verse to do something very exciting. Then I went back to the Elizabethans. Yeats was the strongest influence. Herbert came later in my life. He is one of the poets I live with and I love the form in his poems, which have been extremely nourishing to me. But Yeats is fascinating because of the change of styles—a person who could change to this marvelous clarity and hardness after that diffuse Romantic sensuality is thrilling to see. And he wrote so well into his old age. Which makes him a very happy person to have as a mentor.

“The saddest thing about American writing in general is that people peter out. So few great writers in America have kept on growing to the end. Faulkner, for instance, I don't think did and Millay didn't. Louise Bogan stopped writing almost entirely and she was an admirable poet, though she only had one subject.”

I was especially impressed with May Sarton's use of the sonnet form and I asked her if it was an especial favorite. “I like the sonnet form,” she responded, “but I've used it to an extent only four times in my life.”

Castrati have pure voices, as we know;
But the mature, who mutilate by choice,
Who cut the heart out so that they may grow,
What sweetness flows from such a tortured voice?

[SP, p. 57]

“Metaphor and music make the poem. The metaphor is given but then you have to explore it and in that is the excitement of the poem. Creating the music and then paring it down.”

Painting features in many of May Sarton's works and I questioned her about the cross-fertilization between the arts. “Piero della Francesca was an enormous influence. He made me rethink my whole theory of art after I saw the Arezzo frescos, because I had to ask myself the question, ‘Why is it so moving when what is involved is such a cold atmosphere?’ There are tremendous distances between the people, immobility, huge silent space surrounding everything he did. It's in the poem.”

O cruel cloudless space,
And pale bare ground where the poor infant lies!
Why do we feel restored
As in a sacramental place?
Here Mystery is artifice
And here a vision of such peace is stored,
Healing flows from it through our eyes …
Poised as a monument,
Thought rests, and in these balanced spaces
Images meditate;
Whatever Piero meant,
The strange impersonal does not relent:
Here is love, naked, lying in great state
On the bare ground, as in all human faces.

[SP, p. 17]

“I had to rethink a great deal. It didn't have as good an effect in the poem as it should have had, but I thought a lot about it, trying to create more silence and more spaces, a more austere atmosphere in which to communicate things that were not austere in themselves. Last year I wrote a poem about Poussin whose landscapes I love, and certain early landscapes of Corot before he got into his vague stage I think are absolutely beautiful. Painting has meant a great deal to me—and music, though I don't play an instrument. I just listen and enjoy.”

I wondered if she saw the muse as passion, another person, or even herself. “The muse is a woman I'm in love with,” she said. “Always. The muse in ‘The Muse as Medusa’ is a woman whom I saw only once alone, though it lasted for six months.” But you are a part of it, I went on, she is your construct and, in a way, you yourself. “Yes, it is me,” she admitted, “Medusa's face turns around and becomes your own face. That's the twist—Medusa forces one to face oneself.”

I turn your face around! It is my face.
That frozen rage is what I must explore—
Oh secret, self-enclosed, and ravaged place!

[SP, p. 160]

“That's what being in love with women has done for me, I think. It's very often not consummated. It's something that goes on in the imagination to some extent—quite ludicrous really, and ridiculous.”

She laughed at herself; then went on, “But there's no point in laughing about something that is so real and has made so much happen to me. I can see that from outside it must seem quite silly.” She laughed again but with no self-pity.

If I can let you go as trees let go
Their leaves, so casually, one by one;
If I can come to know what they do know,
That fall is the release, the consummation,
That fear of time and the uncertain fruit
Would not distemper the great lucid skies
This strangest autumn, mellow and acute.

[SP, p. 51]

“I don't write poems long after the event. I write them at the time. It's like a seizure, you see. I did write the Piero poem long after seeing the Arezzo frescoes, but it had a deep meaning I had to find. Some images haunt me for years after—like the bulbs.”

These bulbs forgotten in a cellar,
Pushing up through the dark their wan white shoots,
Trying to live—their hopeless hope
Has been with me like an illness …

[SP, p. 70]

We turned then to other women poets and I asked her if she felt close to any in particular. “I admire Louise Bogan—I knew her well.” She paused, remembering. “I was a bit in love with her I suppose, but it was never consummated. I was never close. There are a lot of letters. It is an interesting correspondence because there was a lot of tension and some argument. She was against all political poems and I agree that rhetorical poetry is bad, but a political poem can be good. ‘Toussaint L'Ouverture’ is marvelous and that's a political poem.”

Now let us honor with violin and flute
A woman set so deeply in devotion
That three times blasted to the root
Still she grew green and poured strength out.

[SP, p. 33]

What about recent feminist writers? Did she feel in tune with them? “I don't like most of the feminist poets or the lesbian poets who want to force everyone to be lesbians and hate men,” May Sarton declared. “I'm not a joiner and I'm getting a lot of flack because I've said some things that suggest that I don't think being a lesbian is the happiest thing in the world. I wouldn't advise a young girl to go out and find another woman or say, ‘For heaven's sake, why do you bother with men?’ I would never say that to any human being, I can't imagine it. But these people are so militant.”

May Sarton is open about being a lesbian but she is adamant about her poems being about human feelings rather than simply lesbian ones. “Take Olga Broumas's lesbian poetry which uses words like clitoris. I don't like that—I wouldn't like it if a man in love poetry was extremely physical and talked a great deal about his penis. I don't think it would communicate to me. My love poems are metaphysical, where hers are very physical.”

I knew she liked Erica Jong but was not enthusiastic about her novels, and I asked if she felt it possible to like a person but not appreciate her work. “I like Erica Jong's poetry better than her novels,” she replied. “Her poetry has a lot of life in it. It's very ebullient. Muriel Rukeyser was a very dear friend over a long period of years though we didn't see each other much in the last years. I never was a great admirer of her poetry which I think was too diffuse and oracular and somehow doesn't pack a wallop enough for me. But she was an admirable person. So I can make the distinction. But I may be wrong about her poetry—I should reread it. You batter out your own style against other people you see and Muriel was doing something very different from me, much more pretentious, not in a derogatory sense, but including a great deal more of the world. So in order to establish my identity against hers I had to dislike her poetry in a way. Now I don't think I'd feel that way so much. I do think she had greatness at her best. The ‘Children's Elegy’ is marvelous.”

I moved the talk to May Sarton's own work, wondering whether she felt she inhabited her fictive world when she wrote. she agreed that she did, for she found it more real than the real world. But, when I asked her if she looked back on her works as if they were her past, she implied that she did not, that there was a break. “You know I'm awfully surprised when I reread anything of mine and dismayed because I feel I could never do that now. I feel very much weaker than my best work. Whenever I start a novel, I think I know nothing—and after all there are twelve or so novels—and I think, ‘Well how do you get someone into the room’ or ‘what is dialogue all about?’ I go through the whole process of discovering the form again and of how to do it. It's terrifying. I'm trying to do a novel now and I'm absolutely terrified. So when I go back, I'm sometimes pleasantly surprised, although I wouldn't do it that way now.”

Yet, I noted, there are definite continuities of subjects in the fiction, for example the relationship of an older woman and a young man or woman. She agreed this was so. “All my best friends were much older and all the people I was in love with,” she pointed out. Did the fiction sometimes come first? “Well maybe so. I did write a novel about a woman dying of cancer and then I got cancer. But it wasn't terminal. I did feel that here was life imitating art.”

I found this an interesting point, worth pursuing. It seemed to me that May Sarton had in her novels long been preparing in fiction for her own famed old age as a wise woman. The theme was there when she was quite young—in The Single Hound (1938) and The Shadow of a Man (1950). She seemed surprised, then agreed. “Yes, that's right. I hadn't realized that. But there are other continuities. Being an only child and an exile and all the rest of it, I was in love with families. People like Carolyn Heilbrun blame me for this and think I'm much too romantic about family life and marriage. There is a great deal about marriage in my books, from young marriage all the way through to Kinds of Love (1970), where you get the old people who are learning to die together. I think there hasn't been enough written about marriage.

“The other thing is that very little has been written about friendship between women, not lesbianism, but friendship. In Kinds of Love the friendship between the city woman and the local person is important to me and, I think, successful in that book. There are other places, especially in a novel which I wish were better, but which I still like—Birth of Grandfather (1957). What interested me was the middle age of a marriage when people according to Jung begin to turn to their own sex, not sexually. The man is completely absorbed in the death of his friend and the wife turns to a woman confidante. Very little is written on this.

“Now what people want in fiction has to be so obvious and violent. It's all these nuances and delicacies of relationships which interest me, which I wish to write about, but it's not the fashion. Sexuality I'm very bad at doing. I don't want to do it and I don't like it in fiction. I don't think that physical descriptions of sex have to do with literature. The only place where they fit is in the grotesque like Pantagruel. This may be a weakness of mine or to do with my generation. So much has happened in the last twenty years talking about sex. A young woman of twenty now could never be as ignorant as we were. So there are certain reticences that have to do with the generation. I've been very open about being a lesbian but I don't want to talk about it in sexual terms.”

This tapestry will unweave itself,
Nor I spend what is left of me to tear
Your bright thread out: let unfulfilled design
Stand as your tragic epitaph, and mine.

[SP, p. 56]

“I have always been fond of old people and I've always wanted to be old. But the trouble is it's not only a matter of being wise and above the melée but it's physical—I now have a sore knee which I wouldn't have had even a year ago. The fact that you're decaying gets to you. No one can freeze that. But here I have an advantage. When I think that Jean Dominique, the great woman who influenced me so much, Marie Closset, the poet in Belgium (she used the name Jean Dominique for her poetry), when she was sixty-eight behaved as if she were ninety and everyone surrounded her and coddled her; she was in cottonwool. When I first knew her she was sixty I suppose and an old woman. Now no one expects you to collapse, which is a good thing.”

I remarked that death in her later books seemed less of an epiphany than a release, but she disagreed. “No there's an epiphany in A Reckoning (1978); the book is used in hospices and I get letters every week from people who say I've covered up all the horrors. But it's not true. My mother died of cancer and I watched it and in some ways the book was a way of exorcising my guilt because I wouldn't sit with her. I couldn't. I mention this in Recovering (1980) and I'm so glad—I've paid my debt and it means that some people will go and sit with their mothers who might not otherwise. That's not a reason for art. But all one can say I suppose is that everything is autobiographical but transposed and art comes in the transposition.”

Some people were disturbed at the treatment of senility in A Reckoning and As We Are Now (1973). It almost seems as though senility, not sex, is the taboo of our times. “I think you're right,” May Sarton agreed. “I felt this when I wrote about Judy. So many people face this and can't talk about it. It is terrifying. I now forget names and I wonder if I'm going to end like that—wondering where I am. This is Judy's state now. She doesn't even know me when I go to see her. I go very rarely because it's only a punishment.

“The fundamental thing which I knew when I was young and which I know now is that the person inside is exactly the same as they ever were.”

We sat smoking at a table by the river
And then suddenly in the silence someone said
“Look at the sunlight on the apple tree there shiver
I shall remember that long after I am dead.”

[SP, p. 48]

“It's only that something is disintegrating which is beyond your control. I am just as passionate about flowers as I was when I was five years old. Think of Bertrand Russell at ninety. The English seem to grow old very well.”

I raised the issue of therapy, described in her more recent poems, and asked about her attitude to the analysis movement that seems to have swept America. “I have three times been helped by therapy. I think I would be against psychoanalysis, going for six years twice a week; the people I know who have been through it have not come out any better off. But therapy is just like an emergency operation. It can make you better able to deal with the reality situation. You need an objective view.”

Speak to me
Of the communion of saints
On earth.

[SP, p. 201]

“Writing as therapy makes me cross. I hate this teaching of journals. People don't know how hard it is to write a good journal and, mind you, I don't keep a journal except for publication. It's only at certain times when I felt it would help me to deal with a difficult situation—to be thinking about it and keeping a journal and, if it were so universal a thing as, say, the fear of death, then it's possible it would mean something to other people. I get a great many letters saying, ‘This is what I have always felt and couldn't express; now you've said it I feel a great deal better.’ I think a journal is extremely easy compared with a novel. I resent that the journals are so popular. It is a lesser form of art, but I don't minimize the fact that I'm pretty good at it. This is because I'm aware of the world outside—the flowers as well as the people.”

Fidelity to what? To a gnarled tree, a root
To the necessity for growth and discipline.

[HS, p. 56]

“It's not just someone sitting and looking at their navel and saying, ‘I'm feeling worse today,’ though that comes in of course. I hate Anais Nin's diaries because they're so narcissistic and she always has to be perfect. The Journal of Solitude (1973) appealed because I admitted I had anger and so on. Everything in the journals comes from some painful experience which I then analyze and put into philosophical terms. It's the combination of the concrete detail and thinking about feeling that is my strength.

“You must give yourself away if you're going to be a professional writer. It's the price. Look at someone like Philip Roth in Portony's Complaint; it's obvious that everything is himself though he's not saying ‘I.’ I had a letter from Willa Cather where she says that every one of her books is written out of a personal and usually painful experience—she who seems so classic and uninvolved.”

I am the unicorn and bow my head
You are the lady woven into history …
Our wine, Imagination, and our bread,
And I the unicorn who bows his head.

[SP, p. 16]

“I was very touched when the Methodist ministers asked me to come and be a guru for their summer session. The other two were holy people, and I said, ‘Why do you want me? I'm not a Methodist.’ They said, ‘We want you to talk about vulnerability and self-healing. And read poems.’”

May Sarton has become in her late sixties a kind of seer or wise woman. She has done so in two main areas: lesbianism and solitude. I asked her how she responded to her position as model and how she thought it had come about. “I think I've been able to project a human being in its agonies and joys,” she replied after a pause.

“I wish I could find a better word for lesbian. I liked Virginia Woolf's sapphic but I use lesbian because now everyone does. But it is a sexual word and people hearing it think immediately of intercourse between two women, whereas that's the last thing in a way that interests me—it's so much more than that.

“I was very upset by the New York Times review of A Reckoning—so much so I thought I'd never write another book. I felt that whatever I wrote now people would be looking for lesbianism. In A Reckoning it was not a lesbian relationship; yet I was accused of hiding something! But why would I hide it? If I had wanted to make it a lesbian relationship I would have done so. I have a friend whom I never see and who is married to an Englishman. If I were dying I would want her to come at the end and nobody else, but we were never lovers—this goes back to school and we have a psychic communication. She's a very upset, terribly neurotic, adorable woman but I would say ‘I want to see Barbara before I die.’

“What was so enraging was to have that emotion labeled and also to take a poem that wasn't lesbian and label it so. The reviewer couldn't find a lesbian love poem. All my love poems are written to women but not in sexual terms. So she couldn't take an example from ‘Divorce of Lovers’ and say this is a lesbian love poem because it could be applied to any divorce.”

There is no poetry in lies
But in crude honesty
There is hope for poetry.

[HS, p. 61]

“I'm very aware of being dangerous as a model for solitude. I didn't live alone until I was forty-five and even after that I had many love affairs. It's not a solitude of having closed the door on life. It's simply, partly, because I am a lesbian and I have not found after Judy anyone I could live with. I would gladly live with someone—but the trouble is that now I guess I wouldn't, because you get to be rather selfish when you live alone.”

I can tell you that solitude
Is not all exaltation, inner space
Where the soul breathes and work can be done.
Solitude exposes the nerve,
Raises up ghosts.
The past, never at rest, flows through it.

[SP, p. 83]

As a foreigner in America I was very interested in May Sarton's adjustment to the United States and her divided European-American heritage. I noted she felt less disquiet over this in later years. “I came to America when I bought my farm in Nelson when I was forty-five,” she said. “Until then Europe had been home. I went to Europe every year until World War II and I just had to go back. It was the air, the old stones, something indefinable—the emotional loam is richer in Europe, relationships are deeper. There's less talk about them, less fuss made about lesbians or what not, but much more is accepted. I feel more at home. I can be more excitable, especially in French which is a volatile language and I'm a volatile person. Here in America I always feel that people are looking askance—there goes May in one of her fugues again.”

To me her house was a mingling of Europe and America, a kind of escape from the peculiar harshness of each. May Sarton agreed it represented an escape. “Everything in my house is old, comes from my family, and has a meaning. It's not a matter of having the right things on the walls. It's all connected with my parents' life or with people who come to the house, all woven together. That's why this house is very alive.”

What has been plaited cannot be unplaited—
Only the strands grow richer with each loss
And memory makes kings and queens of us.

[SP, p. 73]

I have always enjoyed May Sarton's memoirs—almost more than her other works. In them her parents and their generation seem so vital, so magic as the world must seem in childhood. I asked her about the Belgium and England of her earlier years and later youth. “My mother's family is from England and I was adopted so warmly there—by the Huxleys and Elizabeth Bowen. I don't admire Belgium; I hate the materialism—the food and all that. But the people I knew were not like that. When you say Belgium, what you think of is chocolate and pigs made of marzipan. But the landscape and the winds and the clouds skimming over the low lands is the thing that moves me to tears. And no other landscape does that to me. It's atavistic. We left when I was two, but when we went back in 1918 or 1919 and I was seven, the boat went up the river—I had no memory of it but I started to cry.”

These images remain, these classic landscapes
That lie, immense and quiet behind eyes
Enlarged by love to think only in shapes
That compass time and frame the changing skies.
Triumph of arch, of spire, triumph of trees,
The pure perspective, the poignant formal scene.

[SP, p. 40]

“I've made roots here, but not with people.”

Pain can make a whole winter bright,
Like fever, force us to live deep and hard,
Betrayal focus in a peculiar light
All we have ever dreamed or known or heard,
And from great shocks we do recover.

[SP, p. 92]

Note

1. The poems in the text are taken from Selected Poems of May Sarton (New York: Norton, 1978) and Halfway to Silence (New York: Norton, 1980). These collections are referred to in the text as SP and HS.