[In the following essay, Stout explores the importance of silent communication in Sarton's novels.]

This voice itself and not the language spoken.

—May Sarton, “A Voice”

The characters in May Sarton's many and various novels are typically engaged in two basic recurrent actions, the effort to shape and to understand their inner selves and the effort to form sustaining relationships with others.¹ Often, the dual task proves too much for them; like Ellen, near the end of Kinds of Love, they can only hope that the future will produce more coherence than the past. Successful or not, the grappling for shared understanding carried on by Sarton's people proceeds, in its crucial moments, tacitly as much as verbally. Her characters tend to communicate with themselves and with each other through a medium of silence, and silence is itself often a concern of her work.

This is not to say, however, that Sarton herself, in her narrative strategies, is one of those novelists, often female, who communicate with readers through what we might call “speaking silences”—who refrain from putting into words what their fictions manage nevertheless to convey and who may use such textual silences for explicit rhetorical ends, ends that are often, indeed, pursued aggressively, in anger.² On the contrary, even when they are very brief, such as As We Are Now, Sarton's novels say what they are getting at. They may be tightly focused as to what precisely that is and tightly restricted in form; like the stories of Katherine Anne Porter, they may operate through a compressed and pithy language; but they do not operate through withholding. To be sure, Sarton did withhold, from the novels preceding Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, any clear revelation of her lesbianism. In this, she might be compared to Willa Cather. But Sarton is not so technically disciplined a writer as Cather, nor is the withholding of her own emotional and erotic nature so implicated in the meaning of the work as is Cather's.

Perhaps this is simply to say that Sarton does not operate through disguise and indirection as Cather does.³ Instead, Sarton's work is characterized by a relative fullness of narrative revelation. With respect to the technical matter of her management of narrative point of view, her work does not always meet a purist's expectations. Carolyn Heilbrun's comment in her introduction to Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing that Sarton has not always “observed the niceties of point of view” (xii) is, indeed, a considerable understatement. Sarton habitually slides from one consciousness to another, taking up whatever viewpoints are available. A single scene, a single paragraph, may begin in one character's mental discourse and shift to a second or even a third before its end, for no apparent structural reason. Such shifts, I believe, are a greater technical flaw than Heilbrun allows. They blur the narrative focus so that it becomes difficult to say what character is really central. At times Sarton slides between the mental vantage of a particular character and pronouncements in her own voice—in Kinds of Love, for example, from John's mental processes directly to an authorial pointer (since it is Sarton, and not yet John, who knows about having to be “more oneself”) and back:

… he found that for almost an hour he had forgotten to be desper ate. And as he sat in this room alone for the first time, it was not only memory that held him so quiet. It was coming to John that when the great people in one's life die, one is forced to be more one-self. One is forced to grow up. All these years, he realized …

(207)

Or, in the same novel, from Hannah's direct discourse to an uncertain or conjectural comment that seems not to be Hannah's, since her comment was obviously based on direct observation, and, oddly enough, not the narrator's either, since the narrator would presumably know without having to conjecture: “Good gracious, your eyes are so bright they're like stars, Mrs. Chapman!’ Hannah said. In the half light where Christina was being helped into her coat, the tears must have shone” (197). Or again, in Faithful Are the Wounds, the narrator steps in to offer a point of clarification that might have been missed both by the reader and by the character whose point of view is presumably being adopted: “For Ivan Goldberg this was a most extraordinary concession, but Isabel did not know that” (195).

My point is not merely to carp at minor technical lapses but to observe that this looseness in point of view results in a relative abundance of mental comment. Because Sarton does not ordinarily restrict herself to a defined point of view, little is withheld, and correspondingly little is left to be conveyed tacitly. Silence, then, does not often enter her work as a stylistic feature or narrative strategy. Instead, it enters as a theme, a topic. Sarton, unlike many women writers, does not communicate with readers by means of her own silence, but concerns herself with silence as a means of communication among her characters and a medium through which they achieve a clearer sense of self.

We can observe her concern with this theme of silent communication by examining four novels which represent a substantial portion of May Sarton's writing career: Faithful Are the Wounds (1955), Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), the very popular Kinds of Love (1970), and As We Are Now (1973). All four develop themes characteristic of both her fiction and her non-fiction prose—aging and death, solitude, caring within families and between friends,⁴ and the relation of “life” to art and all four stress, as well, the communicative power of silence.

In the earliest of these, Faithful Are the Wounds, a female protagonist searches for a clearer understanding of her self and the patterns of her own life through understanding of another person with whom she does not and cannot speak, her dead brother.⁵ The book opens as Isabel Ferrier receives a telephone call at her home in California informing her that her brother, noted professor Edward Cavan, has killed himself. She goes to Boston to complete funeral arrangements, attends the funeral, meets with Edward's attorney to discuss his will, and goes home to her husband and children. In these few days she undergoes no decisive change, but does reach an awareness of her similarity to her long-estranged brother, in that both have lived in profound emotional isolation. As a result of achieving this sense of communion, she is able, at least this once, to feel real emotion rather than the emotional deadness that has long plagued and frightened her. It is unclear as she leaves for California whether the experience will have any effect on her subsequent life.

The novel does not end with Isabel's return to her family, however, for the simple reason that it is not just a book about Isabel's search for herself, but also a book about the similar searches of others with whom she becomes entwined. It is about the indissolubly dual theme of communion with others and achievement of selfhood—each character pursuing both goals simultaneously, and all these dual searches going on within a larger socio-political context. In Faithful Are the Wounds that context is 1950s McCarthyism and its attack on liberal and leftist intellectuals. Rather than following Isabel back to her family, the last chapters of the novel remain with a group of Edward Cavan's friends and students, ending at a point five years after his death when memories of what Edward meant in their lives strengthen them, both severally and together, in holding firm through a Dies Committee hearing at Harvard.

Sarton's strategy here serves her theme well. We see at least five separate examples of isolation, outreach to communion, and the value of that communion in helping to further the work of self-formation and self-understanding. The price for such thematic richness, however, is the loss of a clear dramatic center or focus. I have spoken of Isabel (Cavan) Ferrier as the protagonist of the novel, and that would seem to accord with most readers' experience; but at least two critics, Jane S. Bakerman and Mary Bryan, have spoken of Edward Cavan as the protagonist, even though he is dead throughout the entire present time of the novel, and a case could well be made for George Hastings, Edward's student, or for Damon Phillips, the professor who stands up to the Dies Committee in the concluding chapter. All have experienced the struggle to form and to understand themselves, and all have struggled to achieve communion with another person in a loving relationship. As a result, the book is insecurely grounded in reader identification with a central character and becomes somewhat diffuse, even as it is splendidly effective on a more cerebral thematic plane.

The function of silence in the achievement of communion and self-knowledge is less clearly foregrounded in Faithful Are the Wounds than it will be in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, a full decade later. Still, it plays a crucial role. A significant contrast (which we will see again in other novels) is developed between a negative and a positive silence, or what might be called crippling silence and enabling silence. In the opening chapter, labeled Prologue, Isabel is seen in relation to her husband, Henry, with whom she speaks in a “flat voice” (8), expressing little of what she feels. Her limited mode of communication with him reflects the emotional deadness and “black despair” that haunt her. She feels it as “an anxiety which had no name” (1). When she makes an unaccustomed attempt to talk with Henry about her feelings as he drives her to the airport to go to Boston, he tells her, correctly, that there is “no time now” and she realizes she will “never be able to tell Henry” (16-17). The silence between them is not a medium for shared understanding, but a refusal to engage. Surprisingly, after she gets on the plane Isabel finds herself unexpectedly able to talk with the stranger beside her, and in Boston she opens herself to Edward's friends, despite finding them rather odd. With these strangers she shares none of the accumulated tensions that impede communication with those close to her.

A characteristic device which appears here and will appear much more insistently in later novels is a frequent use of the ellipsis (three spaced dots) either within dialogue or within introspective passages to convey unexpressed or unverbalized thoughts. The device appears only three times in the scene between Isabel and her husband: very little is being understood. It occurs once in her conversation with the stranger on the airplane, bringing Isabel an insight into her own emotional associations with the word “outside,” which she has just spoken; then occurs with increasing frequency as she talks, with unexpected freedom, with Edward's friends.

The culminating silence of Faithful Are the Wounds, for Isabel, is not a pause in conversation but an absolute silence framed by all her conversations with her brother's friends and by the memories these have evoked. Standing alone in Edward's apartment after his funeral, she reaches a new understanding of the intensity of his isolation and of the way in which the beautiful objects and books with which he had surrounded himself represented efforts to stave off desolation. She realizes his sense of his own life, for the first time, by feeling herself in his place. “The apartment was full of presence, of intimation, of some silent communication. And suddenly she knew” (244). She realizes, too, how like his situation her own has been; she has immersed herself in decorating her house as a defense against human absence. Through a series of long-buried associations she reaches what she had lacked for so long, “an emotional response” (247). By means of her silent communion with her dead brother, she has reached a measure of self-knowledge and revitalization.

What Faithful Are the Wounds tells us, then, is that silence within a context of personal communion is a medium of conveying the ineffable and so of reaching the fullest awareness and the fullest sharing, but that silence without that context is a barrier of emptiness. Edward Cavan's friend Julia makes this distinction explicit as she reflects on the extent to which, in the days leading up to his suicide, Edward had estranged himself from his friends: “The intangible bond which had made silence another form of communication was no longer there. Silence had become dangerous” (128). At the end, the power of friendship to overcome what had seemed to be absolute divisions is demonstrated in the continuing, strengthening presence of Edward Cavan for his friends, even though he is five years dead. But their sense of Edward, empowering as it is, is nonetheless melancholic, since it so obviously proved inadequate to his own need while he was alive. The end of the book is healing, but not cheering.

In Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, silent communication is emphatically foregrounded, even in the title, which directs our attention to hearing and at the same time, paradoxically, to silence, since mermaids do not exist and therefore cannot be heard.⁶ It is an important point. Throughout this short, focused novel of an aging writer struggling to understand the wellsprings of her art and, simultaneously, to open a young friend to the well-springs of his own, Sarton emphasizes the unheard, the unhearable. The two chief present-time actions of the book are an interview (an occasion for purposeful speech) and a pair of visits (occasions for conversation) by the young friend, an aspiring poet called Mar. Yet the moments of greatest discovery come in the intervals between conversation, in the silences.

Not all the silences are fertile ones. At times, in frustration, when he is “all knotted up,” Mar will “shut up like a clam”⁷ and not speak again all morning (22). At such times Hilary Stevens, the older poet, learns to “h[o]ld her peace” and wait (23). But she also “reads” such moments, judging from them her young friend's state of mind or his problems, such as sleeping badly. She learns that she “must be very quiet, not let her enormously articulate person overwhelm or break the small thread that was between them, the thread of communion” (27). The thread image is repeated late in the book, in Hilary's second long conversation with Mar, when they “walked side by side in a companionable silence, as if that necessary silence were reknitting all the little delicate threads that bound them together” (201). It is in these conversational silences or pauses, open rather than “clammed up,” that the “threads” of sympathetic understanding are knitted up.

Sarton indicates such pauses through frequent ellipses, a usage that in this book becomes insistent. The use of the ellipsis to indicate a pause is not, of course, peculiar to Sarton, but the extent of her use of it is. She uses the ellipsis to convey what might be called the tone of those pregnant pauses when, plainly, more is meant than is said. In the first of the two long talks between Hilary and Mar, for instance, we have this:

“I'll tell you the truth. I loved my husband, but …, others touched the poet as he did not. It's mysterious.”

“Yes. …”

(27)

Exchanges such as this are not so overstructured that we readers can fill in what is unsaid. Rather, they are ways of extending the timbre of the voice, of indicating its potential for speech. One might even argue that the punctuation mark following the ellipsis, the comma, indicates completion, not of just an emptiness, but of a tacit syntactic unit. At any rate, Hilary and Mar manage, by way of such substantive silences, to win through to understanding. At the end, Mrs. Stevens is able to use speech to compensate for the poverty of speech and to show her young friend what he needs to know: “‘All I meant to say, Mar, is that every end is a beginning’” (220).

The elliptical style is used, as well, in Hilary Stevens's interior reflections to indicate those impulses and feelings that lie beyond thought but are nevertheless of weight or force in her inward searching. In the opening section of the novel, for example, which shows Hilary waking up in the morning, we find “Too many people … landscapes … fading in and out of each others” and “The past had been extraordinarily present all night …, she was preparing herself” (11, 12). The point of her conversations with Mar and with the interviewers is not only to communicate with them, but to reach a clearer understanding of her self and the source of her art, her Muse. Hilary's life as an artist, like Sarton's, has been a life of productive solitudes surrounding important relationships.⁸ Throughout, she learns as much by thinking in solitude as by listening and speaking, but in both realms the impulse reaches beyond language to unspoken, or unverbalized, senses. It is when understanding is near that she reaches beyond what can be formulated in words to what cannot be, and silence then becomes the medium through which she reaches others and her self. In the long interview at the center of the book, for example, silence plays a significant role as Hilary both achieves substantive communication with her two interviewers, Jenny and Peter, and reaches an understanding of the nature of her Muse. Repeatedly during the interview she leaves the room to lie on her bed or sit outside, alone, to think. Chiefly what she is working toward is an answer to the question, from whom or from what source has her poetic creativity sprung? It is a mystery, of course, and one which she, or we as readers, can scarcely expect to clear up completely. But a part of the answer, at least, is that the Muse is a composite of all of Hilary's love relationships, all of which affected her work in one way or another, and to reach that answer she must resurrect a series of intense personal memories.

Throughout these introspections and in Hilary's conversation with her interviewers, the language falls into frequent ellipses, indicating the presence of the unverbalized. Silence becomes “charged enough to impose itself,” leading Jenny to comment, “‘It's amazing … how aware one is of what is not uttered. I feel it a great strain. I feel I am listening all the time to something way below—unspoken’” (161; ellipsis added). And silence becomes, in fact, one aspect of the Muse. The breakthrough point in the interview comes when Hilary remembers living in a house in France in which the presence of a woman who had lived there before was so palpable that Hilary felt herself communing with her spirit. The dead woman had been a singer, and through playing a few notes on the piano and intuitively sensing the quality of the woman's voice, Hilary comes to feel her music “just on the threshold”: “the silence itself was the music” (181). She began, she says, to “listen to the silence,” so that her poems written in that house became a “dialogue” even though only one voice was present. The Muse, she realizes, “never answers” but “opens up the dialogue with oneself and goes her way” (181). Through silences within speech, Hilary has found a deeper meaning of her own experience, and the meaning she finds is the value, in the search for self-understanding, of a kind of silence which somehow includes another presence. This culmination represents that “solitude within a context of human relations” which Renee Creange accurately identifies as Sarton's “ideal” (97). At the end of the novel Hilary will herself become Muse to young Mar through an interplay of speech and weighted silence.

In Kinds of Love, published five years after Mrs. Stevens and separated from it by the two fable-like novels Miss Pickthorn and Mr. Hare and The Poet and the Donkey, Sarton treats her themes of communion and self-understanding in a happier vein, as the major characters fulfill themselves in their love relationships and their relationships to their deeper selves. Kinds of Love is by no means, however, a Pollyannish book. It faces clearly the fact that not everyone will form such relationships, not everyone can be saved. Nick, an intense, admirable young man who has come home from military service “damaged,” is doomed to loneliness and confinement in a mental hospital; Old Pete, the town derelict, is unable to care for himself and equally unable to face reality; John, in some ways the finest and most appealing of Christina and Cornelius Chapman's offspring, cannot conquer his depression. Sweethearts grow apart, marriages settle into uneasy tolerance, time and death are inexorable. Despite all this, the overall tone of the book is affirming and hopeful. As Cornelius, aging and impaired by a stroke, says, “‘We are in a great adventure, Christina. … we go on making ourselves to the end’” (178; ellipsis added). The language here is not accidental; the adventure of which he speaks is conceived as being at once solitary and reciprocal.

Sarton has found in this novel a fitting structural device to convey the dialogue with the self that she refers to in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing and Faithful Are the Wounds. Each chapter closes with a passage from Christina's journal, her unspoken musings, so that we follow the course of her adventure in self-making through the cycle of a year (actually, slightly less than a year), from anxiety about coping with Cornelius's recovery and ten-tativeness about remaining at their New Hampshire “summer home” through the winter, to the sense of celebration and personal gain with which she closes. Throughout the year as she deals with her husband's or her own periods of discouragement, with the difficulties of severe winter weather, with the maturation problems of her granddaughter Cathy, Christina has recourse to her journal.

Often what she chooses to comment on, corroborating the third-person account presented in the main portion of each chapter, is her new-found closeness to Cornelius, a closeness sometimes expressed in words but more often understood in silence. But the theme of silent communication is not restricted to Christina and Cornelius. Moments of silent communion are given to many of the characters. Cathy and her young sweetheart Joel “just had to be silent to find out what was happening” when they walk in the woods together. When they stop to “listen” to the silence, it seems to them “huge,” absorbing “love and grief and parting into some great whole” (305). Their ability to share the perception measures their momentary closenes. More knowingly, Christina observes in her journal that Cathy sometimes “comes in, her cheeks flushed pink, and just hugs me without saying a word. That is our best form of communication at the present” (230). John, the son who struggles against depression, recalls of an elderly friend, now dead, that “one thing he had loved about her was that she could be silent. Twice, when he himself was close to despair and felt utterly useless, a prolonged silence between them had seemed to be a kind of wordless balm” (206). Christina and her best friend, Ellen, can share a “good warm silence” even when they disagree (142), and when Christina and her troubled daughter Marianne share a quiet time in front of the fireplace they sink into a “companionable, comforting silence” (136).

Most emphatically, though, silence is a medium of communication between the two elderly lovers, Christina and Cornelius. It is not that their marriage has reached a state of perfection. They have moments of irritation and sharp disagreement. As Christina notes in her journal, “there is still so much we can't talk about, so much that each of us must come to terms with alone” (173). But their marriage moves, in the course of the year, from being a conventionally sound one to being a relationship of extraordinary closeness and mutual sustenance. Moments when they first wake up in the morning and rest together, looking out the window and feeling their shared gladness, convey a rare, uncloying beatitude. Their speech at these times is especially marked by ellipses, conveying a tone or quality of unspoken feeling amplifying their actual words.

A passage of Christina's inner reflection makes explicit (Sarton frequently makes things explicit) the value of tacit communication in marriage:

Christina was conscious of the way it is, when two people have shared a life for many years, that the most important things never get said in words. They are communicated through some sort of current, sensed rather than explicit. We are rather than saying, she thought, and this morning we are loving, and without even saying the words Cornelius has made it clear that he is over his anger. This was the root of marriage, really—just the opposite of the excitement of discovering another person through words.

(94-95)

So positive an account of marriage is uncommon in recent fiction. Sarton has always tended to take a pro-marriage stance—really a pro-relationship stance, but marriage is the readiest type for her use.⁹ But she is especially affirming in Kinds of Love and especially hopeful about the possibility of achieving such relationships. If she avoids saccharinity—and I think she does—it is because her moments of ineffable communion are so well balanced by counterevidence and by the gritty realities of life in a place like Willard, New Hampshire.

Sarton's next novel, As We Are Now, published only three years after Kinds of Love, is a very different book. Minimal rather than full, narrowed to a single character's struggle for self-completion¹⁰ and for communion rather than the interactive struggles of multiple characters, it is also emphatically bleak rather than reassuring and fulfilled. Once again Sarton employs the device of a journal, but unlike Christina's journal in Kinds of Love, which conveys her silent dialogue with self within the context of multiple relationships, Caro's diary comprises the entire novel. We are shut as claustrophobically in Caro's failing mind as she is in the crowded, inescapable “home” in which she has been placed by her brother. The concern with aging that we have seen in Mrs. Stevens and Kinds of Love (and which is present as well in Faithful Are the Wounds) is in this novel raised to a pitch of urgency. Caroline, or Caro, Spencer is quite old and ill. Her creation of self, as Bakerman correctly observes, must be “intense and quick” (“Perimeters” 146) because both time and means are short.

Once again, Sarton contrasts nurturing silences with destructive ones. Caro is virtually held incommunicado at the poorly-run, isolated nursing home. Rarely receiving any word from the outside world, she is almost without means to send out messages. Ordinary conversation among residents of the home is practically nonexistent, since most are either incompetent or too dispirited to care to talk. They pass their time staring at a television set day after day. The lack of human interaction is so pronounced that it is an event worthy of recording in her diary when Caro is allowed to go into the kitchen and have a cup of coffee in the company of her uncaring caretakers. This effectual isolation, the denial of friendly human contact, is of course a figurative silence, and a crippling one.

By contrast, Caro's one friendship among the inmates of the home is carried on through the medium of a literal silence. The resident with whom she strikes up a caring relationship, Standish Flint, is so deaf that there is no possibility of even minimal conversation. Even so, despite their multiple limitations and impediments, the two manage to communicate their friendship, mainly by handclasp. Unable to help Standish in any material way (though she does manage to get the home inspected), Caro conveys her caring merely by being with him, sitting by his bed. She is well aware of the meaning of such a silent vigil or a gesture like Standish's firm grasp of her hand. She imagines at one point that “true caring” on the part of her keeper would “show itself in silence, by the quality of listening or some shy gesture” (80). That quality of caring is what she gives Standish. But his death leaves her with no outlet.

Into this extreme state of isolation come three people with whom Caro manages to achieve effective and caring communication. The local Methodist minister, Mr. Thornhill, begins to make regular visits, and his daughter Lisa comes sometimes in his stead. With both, Caro is able to speak candidly. Indeed, Mr. Thornhill gives her the added and sorely needed gifts of eye contact, smiles, and refusal to mouth empty platitudes. For that, she says, she “admired him,” finding his honest silence “far more consoling than words of false comfort” (55). The third, Anna Close, becomes the last love of Caro's life.

Anna is a temporary stand-in for the operator of the home during her vacation. She is a simple and, as Caro admits, “inarticulate” person, but she cares enough for her wards to want to provide them cleanliness and simple pleasures such as a flower on Caro's tray. Quickly comprehending the shabby state of affairs at the home and understanding Caro's misery there, she conveys her sympathetic understanding in the way Caro had earlier conjectured a caring person would, by a silent gesture:

“I know,” [she said] and we exchanged a look, the look between two women who understand each other. The relief of that! Indescribable relief. I was too moved to speak, but she saw the tears in my eyes, took my hand in both of hers, and gave it a squeeze. It was not a sentimental gesture at all. It affirmed our humanity and regard for each other.

(83)

Unfortunately, Caro is so hampered by her own weakness and the hostility of her keepers that she cannot sustain this new love for the purpose it should rightly, in Sarton's structure of meaning, serve, the purpose of soulmaking. Denied any power to affect the course of her own life, which for Caro means the preparation for her own death, denied even the wholesomeness of her love for Anna by her keeper's insinuations that it is somehow unnatural, she loses her ability to feel emotion at all. (That is, she suffers precisely the plight Isabel fears in Faithful Are the Wounds.) The last time Caro sees Anna, the silence between them is no longer a medium of communion but a “wall” (119). Lacking the ability to love, lacking the ability to prepare for death as a fulfilled self, Caro nevertheless achieves a final victory over her oppressors in the only way she can: through self-destruction. The final reference to silence in the book is to the silence she listens for to indicate that everyone has gone to sleep, at which point she will set the place on fire, killing herself and the other residents as well.

Critical commentary on the ending of the novel has generally focused on Caro's heroism. And indeed her act is clearly a victory of sorts, demonstrating the strength of her resistance to dehumanizing forces besetting her. She and her friend Standish Flint have been, in Kathleen Gregory Klein's words, subjected to “the most ignominious circumstances to which old age can lead,” with the result that they have come to regard their “continued existence” as a betrayal of their essential selfhood (152). In the face of overwhelming circumstances tending to deny her the least personal autonomy, Caro manages to achieve a measure of control. Her determination and courage are undeniable. Still, they do not mitigate the horror of the act itself. It is not her own death alone that she plans and presumably executes in setting fire to the nursing home, but the painful, terrifying deaths of others as well. Her achievement of control over her own death denies others control over theirs. Part of the solemnity of the book, then, part of what gives it a quality of real tragedy, is that so splendid a hero is constrained—by pressures great indeed—to so horrible an act. Klein says that Caro completes “her own emotional salvation.” I disagree. She does achieve a kind of transcendence, but in doing so, she becomes a monster, waiting in the dark for her opportunity to burn people alive. She loses, in the vale of soulmaking, even as she wins.

As We Are Now is radically different from other works by Sarton in the extreme bleakness and even bitterness of its tone, though its concerns are very much those we see in her other novels. Continuing the belief that silence can be a medium of communication complementing or even transcending communication by way of speech and touch, Sarton here charts the failure of that hope. She makes clear what she has before implied, that the dual movements toward communion and toward self-completion are inseparable. Caro Spencer, remarkable and purposeful as she is, is not strong enough to persist in self-completion without the sustenance of loving relationships. Lacking that sustenance and subjected to overwhelming and dehumanizing pressures, she reaches a state of self-distortion instead. The book thus takes an important place in Sarton's canon, proving her as fully capable of the dark as of the bright view.

As We Are Now represents another kind of departure as well, in that Sarton here attempts to use, rather than merely assert, silence. Particularly in the later sections of the work, she employs gaps of blank space on the page to represent periods of unawareness, lapses between Caro's increasingly fragmentary entries in her journal. This is an important technical innovation for Sarton (one that had earlier been used, of course, by others, such as Cather and Didion), but not, I would say, a device that works well as she has used it. And here we face the inherent limitations of the diary mode. A consistent first-person narrative is always limiting, but when it is used in a freely interiorized mode it can transcend its limitations without sacrificing intensity. When yoked to the rigidity of a pretended diary, it becomes a straitjacket. The author foregoes the rich possibilities of interior monologue and risks something like the improbability of Richardson's Pamela, which has the heroine seemingly rush from the most harrowing experiences straight to her letter writing. As We Are Now scarcely reaches that degree of improbability, but the similarity is closer than one would wish.

Ultimately, Sarton's celebration of silence as a medium of loving communication rests on the reader's willingness to accept an assertion of ineffability. Yet the ineffable is not easily made to take on novelistic force. Indeed, Sarton's reliance on assertion of ineffable meaning may have been part of the reason why her work has sometimes been regarded as bloodless or lacking in impact. Had her concern for silence become a rhetorical tool, rather than an abstract value to be praised or lamented, her fiction might have gained in energy. Even so, having noted these technical limitations, one comes back to the seriousness and the human understanding which impels Sarton's work and in particular to the impressiveness, in novel after novel, of her penetration of character. One reads her books not so much for technical artistry as for something that can only be called wisdom. Sarton's grasp of the power of silent communication in the achievement of sustaining human relationships and her success in realizing that power in the reader's experience of her novels are achievements of significance and value.

Notes

1. Bakerman sees the two impulses as comprising a single conflict in Sarton's work: “the difficult and sometimes destructive thrust of each human being to unite with others in friendship and love at the same time that he [sic] is dealing with an equally strong urge to remain aloof and inward, … to preserve an ‘easier’ sense of self” (“Patterns” 113).

2. Sarton does not, that is, employ narrative silences in the way of those writers treated in my study of women's rhetoric of silence, Strategies of Reticence: Silence and Meaning in the Work of Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1990).

3. Sarton's own clear understanding and appreciation of Cather's art, and specifically of the role of unexpressed presences in that art, is conveyed in comments made by one of her characters, Edward Cavan, in Faithful Are the Wounds. Professor Cavan, teaching a seminar in American literature, praises the “intrinsic” background in Cather's work and her power of “intense distillation” (98).

4. Sarton herself comments,

   “I have hoped to provide the bridge between women of all ages and kinds, between mothers and daughters, between sisters, between women as friends”

   (Recovering 81).

5. Thyng is curiously reductive, it seems to me, in asserting that Faithful Are the Wounds “deals with the discouraging abyss often found between academics and politics” (82).

6. Eder writes that the title stresses “a woman writer's internal voyaging” (157).

7. The image of the clam recalls Sarton's poem “Of Molluscs,” where she notes the closed mollusc's opening

   “a fraction to the ocean's food” and the need for “lovers” who have “held” themselves “colsed hard / Against warm sun and wind, shelled up in fears / And hostile to a touch or tender word” to open themselves and “be nourished on the tide of love”

   (Halfway to Silence 44).

8. Eder attributes the “narrow, intense, highly subjective and self-enclosed quality” of much of Sarton's work to the “burden of solitude,” but observes that for Sarton, solitude can be either “the wealth of being on one's own” or “the poverty of being alone” (157, 153).

9. The marriage of Anna Lindstrom and Ned Fraser in Anger (1982), is clearly an exception. Most of their silences are of the negative, rather than communal, kind.

10. Bakerman calls it “the conscious creation of the self” (“Perimeters” 145).

Works Cited

Bakerman, Janet S. “Patterns of Love and Friendship: Five Novels by May Sarton.” In May Sarton: Woman and Poet, ed. Constance Hunting. Orono: University of Maine, 1982. 113-22.

———. “Perimeters of Power: An Examination of As We Are Now.” In May Sarton: Woman and Poet, ed. Constance Hunting. Orono: University of Maine, 1982. 145-56.

Creange, Renee. “The Country of the Imagination.” In May Sarton: Woman and Poet, ed. Constance Hunting. Orono: University of Maine, 1982. 85-99.

Eder, Doris L. “Woman Writer: May Sarton's Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing.” International Journal of Women's Studies 1 (1978): 150-58.

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. “Introduction” to May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. New York: Norton, 1965.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory. “Aging and Dying in the Novels of May Sarton.” Critique 24 (1983): 150-57.

Sarton, May. As We Are Now. New York: Norton, 1973.

———. Faithful Are the Wounds. New York: Norton, 1955.

———. Halfway to Silence. New York: Norton, 1980.

———. Kinds of Love. New York: Norton, 1970.

———. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. New York: Norton, 1965.

———. Recovering: A Journal. New York: Norton, 1980.

Thyng, Deborah. “The Action of the Beautiful: The Concept of Balance in the Writings of May Sarton.” In May Sarton: Woman and Poet, ed. Constance Hunting. Orono: University of Maine, 1982. 79-84.