SOURCE: Springer, Marlene. “As We Shall Be: May Sarton and Aging.” Frontiers 5, no. 3 (fall 1980): 46-49.

[In the following essay, Springer praises Sarton's dignified and sensitive treatment of the elderly in her work.]

A university recently spent $77,000 to do a survey designed to assess the needs of the elderly in its state.¹ After two years of extensive interviews, the team discovered that the problems of the elderly were (in this order): income, health care, transportation, crime, isolation, nutrition, housing, activity, employment, age discrimination, and education—$77,000 to discover problems that cover most of the ills we all are heir to, with no solutions sought, or offered. Obviously such studies cannot be discounted, and they deserve the respect their ability to effect social change earns. However, I could not help but ruefully observe that a quick reading of Stephen Crane's Maggie, Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Muriel Spark's Memento Mori, and of course Charles Dickens' Bleak House could have exposed all those problems, with a lot less cost and a lot more pleasure.

Yet despite the books just mentioned, and there are of course others, relatively few works of literature explore the aged in depth, much less with sympathy. The antithesis is everywhere: the lecherous old man or woman, the shrew, and the ever-present addle-brained female—the list of stereotypes could go on. The eighteenth century was particularly savage in much of its literary treatment of aging, and especially aging women. Nineteenth-century British literature shows some softening; but though Browning could assert, “Grow old along with me / The best is yet to be,” one hardly believes him. The fact remains that attitudes toward the elderly, held by some of the best and most humane minds the world has known, have been either unrealistic or extremely negative.

A modern exception to this pattern is May Sarton, one of the very few writers, especially in our culture, to explore profoundly both the perils and the possibilities confronted by older people; one of the few writers to treat the aged, and particularly older women with dignity without ignoring the threats of senility, the helplessness of physical decay, the frustrations of waning power.

Sarton's work has been late in gaining recognition and, once recognized, has been justly studied for its treatment of friendship, lesbian relationships, the female muse, and the growth of an artist. Yet Sarton's particular strength, and what she especially can offer to women readers as she develops her characters and explores her own personality in her journals, is an insightful study of the years when the drive for sexual release seeks different channels, when the muse (for Sarton at least) has been identified without being destroyed; the years when autobiography has both past and perspective—in short, the years when the term “middle age” no longer signifies.

Sarton's canon is extensive—over thirty books in all—sixteen novels to date, plus poetry and a series of journals. Obviously intended to present “seemings, or personal impressions,” as Thomas Hardy would say, rather than a factual history, the journals give abundant examples not only of the healthy concern with mortality that enriches the novels, but also of the probable sources of Sarton's empathetic understanding of the difficulty of actually “growing” into old age, rather than accepting the tempting passivity of merely withering.

Sarton was born in 1912 in Belgium. Her mother, an artist, used her talents to design furniture and clothing during financially difficult times. Sarton's father, George, was an internationally famous scholar and author of the multi-volumed Introduction to the History of Science. Driven to America by the advancing German armies, the Sarton family settled into the intellectual community of Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the aid of a grant from the Carnegie Institute. May attended the experimental Shady Hill School and then graduated from the High and Latin School. Accounts of these years, and of the more abstract effect of living with parents deemed “remarkable,” are given in two journals, I Knew a Phoenix (1954), which takes Sarton through her twenty-sixth year, and A World of Light (1976), a series of portraits of her friends and family written twenty years later to fill in the autobiographical gaps created by the publication of Plant Dreaming Deep in 1968.² Remarkable as each parent was, however, her father is captured in A World of Light as a man who “had never been a father in the usual sense.” Totally absorbed in his studies, he required silence in the house, and made it clear to the family that the demands of work “justified rather inhuman behavior.” Sarton confesses that “I did not come to love him as a human being until after my mother's death, when I myself was middle-aged” (pp. 17-19). Of her mother, on the other hand, she writes:

She buried her anger, because, however angry she was—and with reason—she still felt that George Sarton must be protected, never upset by any demands of hers, for the sake of his work. The cost was high, high in ill health, migraine, and I have sometimes wondered whether the cancer of which she died might not have been caused by buried rage. And the cost was high for me because I suffered for and with her, yet could do nothing. But of course I learned from all this, and slowly learned to love my father (as she had done) for what he was, and to forget what he could not be.

(pp. 17-19)

Sarton then summarizes:

Being the child of George and Mabel Sarton was an intense experience and an immensely rich one as I look back on it now. … Both had died before I was forty-five. The imprint was deep, and I realized its depth partly because I felt a great relief. When my mother died I felt relief for her (it had been a long hard death from cancer), and relief for myself because I knew that the worst thing that could ever happen to me had happened. … Only my own death would ever take from me as much.

(pp. 20-21)

In other journals she carries her life forward; Plant Dreaming Deep, a book she began when she was forty-five, deals with her life in Nelson, New Hampshire, where she moved after many years in Cambridge. Though the journal does record personal intimacies, and a recognition that “in the last five years I have been learning that middle age is not youth” (p. 117), it deals primarily with her acquaintances and scenes from village life; absent, for example, is any record of the painful internal struggle surrounding her decision to acknowledge her lesbianism in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965). Her next personal record, Journal of a Solitude (1973), covers another year in Nelson, and is largely an interior history of the continuing growth of the poet's mind. The House by the Sea (1977) follows, and tells of her life in York, Maine, where she had moved in 1973 because Nelson was becoming too public. In her sea house she is sixty-four, and in the course of her musings she pictures with patience and sensitivity the senility of Judy, her friend of over thirty years; she also reflects that “after sixty everyone has death in the back of his or her consciousness much of the time” (p. 26). But even with death and old age constantly before her, Sarton has continued to write, at age sixty-six bringing out a new journal, Recovering, where she reveals with new honesty her own pain as an artist, suffered because of damaging reviews, as a woman because of a mastectomy, and as a person because of Judy's now total descent into uncomprehending senility.

The death of her parents, the incremental loss of her old friends, the deterioration of Judy—as well as all the compensatory joys of her life—is the stuff the journals are made of. These events germinate in the many novels she has published since her first, The Single Hound (1938). The world of these novels, as one might expect, given the journals, is a fairly consistent, and admittedly rarified, one. It is a world first of all where few people worry about money. There is no superannuated Grandma Smallweed, who, as in Bleak House, screeches “like a horrible old parrot without any plumage” whenever money is mentioned. “Compound Interest” is not a god, and poverty is not an ever-present threat. Secondly, it is a world where education—if not formal then at least self-imposed—is a given. People talk openly of books, and as with Edith Wharton's work, culture is assumed. It is not the world of John Steinbeck where an old crone likes sleeping in the nice flush toilet and survives only because she is as mean as her husband. It is, in brief, a world of well-kept bodies and cared-for-minds—but where neither keeping nor care can protect against isolation, cancer, a stroke, or most frightening of all—loss of credibility.

Within this fictional milieu, Sarton's picture of the elderly is unusually complete, including both men and women, spinsters and grandfathers, the working class and the wealthy. But Sarton's principal concern is for the women of this eclectic society, women who have lived intensely, and who enter old age cognizant of both what they have had and what they stand to lose—and gain. Of these women, best seen in three of her strongest novels, Kinds of Love, A Reckoning, and As We Are Now, some are in process, are aware that they are on the far side of middle age; others are already “aged,” and death is an immediate reality.³ One, Laura Spellman in A Reckoning, lives in both worlds; she is not really old at just over sixty, but she is dying of cancer.

Through those characters in their late fifties and beyond, Sarton continually reverberates the theme, both explicitly and implicitly, that one of the great mysteries of aging is how little of it actually registers upon us. In one of her finest novels, Kinds of Love, she explores this idea with Christina Chapman, aged seventy, whose once powerful husband has suffered a stroke and is now in a wheelchair. Christina and her husband return to their beautiful summer home in New England and take permanent residency. We watch their relationship develop new depths—even after some forty years of marriage—and we are also involved with Christina's renewal of old friendships and passions. As she examines her past and lives her present, she faces her old age. When her knee acts up, she says, “I feel compassion for this dying carcass of mine that really manages to serve very well, considering. Growing old is so strange because inside one feels just the same” (p. 186). And her “feeling just the same” means that she still is erotically aroused by her old love, Eben, though her devotion to her husband is intact. At seventy Christina still fears meeting him alone, still is excited by the prospect of seeing him, and agrees with Eben when he says, “What is young love compared to this—this incomparable truth of old age—that nothing dies, all is transformed” (p. 452).

That at seventy all eroticism, possibly all emotion, has not mellowed into what is euphemistically called peace is one of the positive possibilities of aging that Sarton offers. Another recompense is that we have the time to renew all types of friendships with impunity—and to learn from them. Christina returns to Ellen, an old friend who has not had the shelter of Christina's wealth, and finds her need for this woman to be even stronger than in her youth. Through Ellen, one of the few poor people in the novels, Christina discovers that it is a gentle luxury to worry about subtleties when others are worried about survival. And Christina also learns the value of pride—which keeps Ellen alive and protects her from the sordidness of her life.

This freedom to return to the past without harming the present or considering the future is also central to Sarton's latest novel, A Reckoning. Here Laura Spellman, bedridden and dying of cancer, engages in a furious mental struggle, against those who love her, against the AMA, and even sometimes against herself, to die on her own terms, in her own way. Like Christina before her, Laura muses, “How little, deep down inside, one is aware of aging: only the body knows it, and God knows it is there to remind us. The things that happened to me long ago are what seem most real to me now. It's strange” (p. 171). As Laura's body goes, one of the conditions she exacts of her dying is to return to her old love for Ella, a passion of the years before her marriage. Laura is successful here; Ella arrives in time to share her dying and to help Laura explore the past with its guilty recriminations from her mother, Sybille, who had forced their earlier separation. Sybille is now in a nursing home; the women's movement, Laura acknowledges, has dispelled much of the atmosphere of guilt and fear that distorted such relationships in the past. Laura, through her introspection and her intimate conversations with Ella, at last understands, even if she cannot control or change, one of the most important relationships of her life. Age, says Sarton, gives us the leisure and the freedom to venture into such fragile, unexplained areas of our history, to return to missed possibilities, and, if we are fortunate, to order the present.

Positively, then, aging can offer new freedoms without the loss of old intensities. In Laura's case, the process of dying offers the same reward. With Laura and Christina, the mind grows even while the body deteriorates. Yet Laura's condition and the presence of her mother in a nursing home are reminders that age brings illness and, even without illness, a return to helplessness. This step in aging is another that Sarton explores with frightening insight through a range of characters who are forced merely by living so long to learn once again how it feels to be a child. These people, the very old, lose a part of the protective patina that Freud calls our “childhood amnesia,” the trick of the mind that allows us through our adulthood to recreate reality and repress the stultifying helplessness of our childhood. And this revival of childhood has one more cruel difference—the aged can no longer nourish the hope that things will get better.

To cope with this reawakening of helplessness on the one hand and the lack of the long term on the other, Sarton's strong characters, and especially her women, find relief from reality by going, almost through sheer force of will, cogently into that good night. They maintain control by accepting dependence—and thereby keep their dignity. They are aided in this process by reviving their sense of self through what Sarton calls “floating,” allowing the mind momentarily to range freely over the past and in so doing to integrate the present. Jane Tuttle, botanist, age ninety, in Kinds of Love does it, and sees dying as a great, though admittedly frightening, adventure; Aunt Jane, in another novel, The Birth of a Grandfather, uses it to pull herself together to give a younger friend, Lucy, “a proper welcome,” and dies on a Fourth of July picnic as the fireworks go off.⁴ Laura does it, and is consequently able to keep her mind clear and to “have her own death”—peacefully in the company of the woman she has loved for a lifetime. These characters all die well, sharing the one thing that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross argues is of prime importance: they are allowed to spend their last days at home, with friends. The alternative is seen in Sarton's most powerful novel, As We Are Now.

Dostoevsky in his fine short story “The Peasant Marey” demonstrates that a measure of a culture's humanity is how it treats its children. Sarton, in this novel especially, shows us that how society treats its older children is equally revealing. Sarton called As We Are Now her “J'accuse”—and it truly has a “necessary fierceness.” It is her nursing home novel, told in the first person by Miss Caroline (Caro) Spencer, who, at seventy-six, has lost her ability to live alone and goes to live with her brother, John. In what is a rare example in Sarton of Susan Sontag's “double standard of aging,” John has married a much younger wife, who justifiably resents Caro's possessiveness.⁵ Caro does not get along in the household and is put in a nursing home—a rather bad one, for, among its other deficits, there are no other women patients. Moreover, the place is managed by two tyrants, a mother and daughter. In the home Caro acts out what Christina in Kinds of Love before her has learned: “The real ordeal of very old age [is] consciousness without power, the cruel truth about life, that we suffer most from seeing without being able to do, carried to the highest magnitude” (pp. 256-57). We follow Caroline through her ordeal as she becomes the classic abused child: she protests her treatment in the home and is locked in a dark room; she forms secret alliances with a patient, only to see his institutional parents deny his last wish; her sense of reality is constantly threatened; and she mentally declines in response to the matrons' machinations. She finds love again in the form of a woman who comes to clean, only to have her privacy violated and her sense of decency assaulted when her keeper-parents accuse her of filthy writing and suspect her of what they can only view as perverted lust. Caro fights all of this, although she has no hope of winning. She knows she will never leave the home. Christina has said this for her, too: “The young cannot imagine what it is to be fighting a battle that cannot be won. One keeps death at bay, but it is always there …” (p. 71). Sarton does allow Caro some victory, however, for she controls her future by placing her manuscript diary in the refrigerator and then burning the place, and herself, down.

The epigraph of this book is a quotation from a New England tombstone: “As you are now, so once was I / Prepare for death and follow me.” How to prepare? First for aging—the inevitable debilitation, the occasional loss of memory, the return to the helplessness of childhood and the time when, as Muriel Spark says in Memento Mori, you live to see your children cease to take you seriously.⁶ For one, says Sarton, you cultivate the young so that the return is in reality a rejuvenation. Secondly, you work, just as Sarton and her gardener Perley Cole do. Then, as she says in Plant Dreaming Deep, “for a few hours anyway we are neither old nor young. We are outside time” (p. 117). And above all, you nurture relationships with people who can someday protect you from being totally dehumanized by institutions, even if they cannot keep you out of them. We all hope to be a Jane Tuttle, to “grow old mighty well,” to learn to give up “one thing after another with grace” (p. 258), and to die in our sleep, as she does, “in perfect gentleness” (p. 266). But Sarton also makes us face the possibility that we too, like Judy, so vividly described in The House by the Sea, will someday put our nightgowns on five times in one morning, or go into “a kind of fugue of near madness, babbling on but making no sense” (pp. 172, 176). The only stays against this confusion are friends who are willing to tolerate irrationality and break into the inevitable solitude of very old age. With an optimism rare in modern fiction, Sarton's novels repeatedly attest to the multiple probabilities of finding such people, ones who can reduce, if not remove, those $77,000 problems.

Notes

1. “Comprehensive Needs Assessment Survey of Elderly in Missouri,” April, 1979. Conducted by The Center for Aging Studies, University of Missouri-Columbia.

2. May Sarton's journals, all published by W. W. Norton & Company (New York), include: I Knew a Phoenix (1954); Plant Dreaming Deep (1968); Journal of a Solitude (1973); A World of Light (1976); The House by the Sea (1977); and Recovering: A Journal (1980). All subsequent page references are to these editions and will be cited by page number in the text.

3. May Sarton, Kinds of Love (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1970); A Reckoning (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978); As We Are Now (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1973). All subsequent page references are to these editions and will be cited by page number in the text.

4. May Sarton, The Birth of a Grandfather (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1957), p. 42.

5. See Susan Sontag's “The Double Standard of Aging,” Saturday Review, September 23, 1972, pp. 29-38.

6. Muriel Spark, A Muriel Spark Trio (New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1962), p. 528.