January: reading (and defending) May Sarton

15-16 January 2020

Back in the 1990s, I read and loved all of May Sarton’s memoirs, Plant Dreaming Deep (plant is a verb, not a noun!), Journal of a Solitude, The House by the Sea, At Seventy, Recovering, After the Stroke. Endgame, Encore, At Eighty-Two.

I was horrified soon after that to read the truly mean biography of May written by Margot Peters. (I learned this month in May’s letters that May herself had a bad feeling about what Margot was going to write.)

Thus it was a relief to me when I read The Last Gift of Time in December 2019 to find a thoughtfully critical but loving chapter all about May, in which Carolyn Heilbrun mentioned May’s books of letters. I immediately put in an interlibrary loan for the second volume (since her later life interests me the most).

Carolyn’s kind words about May:

And in a footnote:

And…

I loved finding a photo of May and Carolyn…

..and of May and her friend Doris. In the 1990s, May’s journals had led me to the memoirs of Doris Grumbach.

I read both of their journeys into old age when I was in my 40s and must read them again now that I am almost there. I feel an affinity with old age because of my childhood spent with my grandma and her peers.

May quoting Katherine Davis:

The prolific letters took me two days to read (and I have since put in a request for volume one). I also checked out some blog posts about May and felt distressed that some readers had completely gone off re-reading her journals because of the biography. Some felt deceived that she did not have as much solitude as her memoirs described, but I remember May often writing in distress about interruptions and too much company. To me, that says that May was nicer than I have become, in that apparently she found it difficult to be completely clear and strict about non-peopling! She did try: “…finally, I came to see that my loneliness (acute and awful) was loneliness for myself and what I had to do was get back to my blessed solitude. My motto, the opposite of dear Forster’s , has become “only disconnect”.

From the introduction by Susan Sherman:

How I love that! In my 20s and 30s, I felt that I loved difficult people the most. (I seem to have lost that knack in my almost old age, though.)

Another reason some readers have turned away from May is because the biography discussed her turbulent love life. So how many male writers who practice serial monogamy or polyamory are given a pass for their relationship dramas? One blogger lambasted May for having turned away from her long time partner. The letters reveal that May continued to be close to her till the end, visiting her in assisted living and having her home for weekends and holidays even when the former partner had severe memory loss and was incontinent. That’s not neglect or rejection.

The same blogger was angry that May had help with her garden and suggested she probably underpaid her workers. She did not!

Why shouldn’t she have help? And she cared for and assisted her neighbor who helped in the garden. “I persuaded him to go a long way to a doctor he had faith in in a different city–drove him there, and next week will take him to another hospital… But I have now lost two days at my desk and have added a lot of outdoor work to the usual stint…”

So….all that said, here are more takeways from volume two of her letters.

How can I not love a woman who cared so dearly for her cats and dogs?

…….

And about her last cat:

“We have been together for seven years At times of the day our lives intersect but mostly each goes her own way, although always aware of where the significant other is. That is the magic of it, this happy and free dependency.”

Some of her letters are to favourite and familiar authors, one regular correspondent being Katharine White who wrote Onward and Upward in the Garden, the first book of gardening essays that I ever read.

May mourned a lost friendship with Elizabeth Bowen: “…what I cannot believe is that you and I have ceased to be friends. Elizabeth, all around me, friends are dying (I am 53).” I can certainly identify with all aspects of that! Apparently, Bowen was offended by something that May had written about her house.

After the publication of Plant Dreaming Deep, May was hired for “a monthly column about country things” for Family Circle magazine. I’d love to have read those columns, which must have been a continuation of the sort of column that Gladys Taber had written for years.

May was so excited about the job…

Taber’s Butternut Wisdom column (which I loved as a child) ran from 1959-1967 but May’s only ran for one year.

I adore the descriptions of May’s house where she planted her dreaming deep.

And her many descriptions of gardening frustrations, both in Nelson and later at her “house by the sea”.

“The tree peonies are about to flower in fact the white one is out..a godlike flower, really to be worshipped. But the iris has done badly. What a philosopher one has to be to garden at all.”

She moved to the sea because…

Sometimes I imagine a home in an apartment, maybe with a view of a park, where all I have to do is read.

She did move but continued to have a garden. It took her awhile to find a good gardener for her garden by the sea.

In her very old age at her House by the Sea: “We are having a horrible July, wet and cold. The garden is rotting and the deer eat whatever survives..all of 18 English old-fashioned roses I had planted this spring…they ate all the buds. I have a good gardener at last as I can’t garden anymore except laying down.”

May treasured winter for the same reason I do: solitude.

She continued throughout her letters to struggle to balance friendships and solitude.

Jazmin sometimes made the reading a challenge.

However cantankerous May was, she can’t have been worse than me, so I still dote on her. One of these winters I hope to reread her memoirs and those of her dear friend Doris Grumbach and those of my most beloved (and quite possibly not cantankerous at all) Gladys Taber.