Sermon Style

Things have been hectic lately, and they don't promise to be any less so.  I hope to have some more time to write this week while I'm traveling.

Right now I'm rereading May Sarton's Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year (Norton, 1993).  Sarton's later journals have a certain amount of intrinsic interest insofar as they describe her struggle with bad health and her reflections on aging.  She had a relatively easy time of it nevertheless, with a large and faithful support network, who enabled her to live at home and by herself (more or less, if you overlook the many people passing through with food and entertainment, assisting with cleaning and gardening and transcribing the journals (after her stroke she began dictating them): most never-married old people don't have that.  And even so, the later journals often read like thank-you notes to her friends and helpers and caretakers and other people she interacted with, as if she unconsciously feared that failing to name every benefactor and helper would result in a loss of their support.  But maybe I'm just imagining that.

She also discusses art, politics, and culture, and as often as not I disagree with her.  One of her correspondents

had the kindness to copy out, from a book by Piero Ferrucci called Inevitable Grace, something which goes right to the state of myself, my health and my life, in a marvelous way.  The beginning of the quotation from Ferrucci is "Empathy, however, is no solitary event.  On the contrary, it is that which permits artists to feel and express the most concealed needs, pains and dreams  of a whole society.  The aim of the poet, says Pablo Neruda, is to embody hope for the people, to be one leaf in the great tree of humanity."  Then Ferrucci quotes from Neruda: "'My reward is the momentous occasion when, from the depths of a coal mine, a man came up out of the tunnel into the full sunlight and the fiery nitrate field as if rising out of hell, his face disfigured by his work, his eyes inflamed by the dust and, stretching his rough hands out to me, a hand whose callouses and lines traced the map of the pampas.  He said to me, his eyes shining, "I have known you for a long time, my brother!" That is the laurel crown of my poetry, that opening in the bleak pampas from which a worker emerges, who has been told often by the wind in the night and the stars of Chile: you are not alone, there is a poet whose thoughts are with you in your suffering.'"  And back to Ferrucci: "Empathy then is an expansion of consciousness.  Through the faculty we are able to become one with trees and ants and elephants, birds, rivers and seas, children and old people, men and women, suffering and joyful people, rainbows and galaxies.  Thus we become able to breathe and live in other things or to find them within ourselves, as in a living microcosm in the most unlikely face, in the strangest of situations, in the remotest places, we discover ourselves and once we reach this point there need never again be the feeling that we are strangers in a strange land."  It is a good Sunday sermon, isn't it?  [24-25]

It's a sermon, all right, but I don't think it's a good one.  I suspect the trouble may lie partly in the translation, as I presume Ferrucci writes in Italian.  (He's a philosopher and psychotherapist who's evidently lived all his life in Italy.)  So it might be that "Empathy, however, is no solitary event" should be something like "no isolated event", in the sense of being a process rather than a one-time event.  Whatever.  Of course empathy is a relation between two or more people, so it could hardly be solitary.

I don't believe that writers are necessarily particularly empathetic as writers -- many of us are ferociously egoistic, which is necessary to find the time to be solitary and construct our faery castles of words.  (Sarton herself doesn't seem very empathetic.)  Nor do I believe that the response of their readers has much to do with empathy, from either end.  When a reader feels directly addressed by a work, is that because the author empathized with him or her?  Or did the writer dig into him or herself, and find feelings and traits that he or she turns out to have in common with others?  I vote for the latter.  I'm no Neruda, but my experience is that when I've written most personally and idiosyncratically, that's when other people tell me they felt addressed by my work.  For that reason I don't suppose that when I feel that something could have been written about me, the author must have been thinking about me.  That experience has improved my own capacity for empathy, I think, when it took the next step and realized that feelings that I thought were unique to me, that isolated me, were really feelings I share with much or most of humanity.

Did that miner really know Neruda?  I doubt it.  Is that conviction that a stranger (maybe a long-dead stranger, or one in another country writing in another language) knows you, really about empathy?  Sarton and other writers have had reason to complain about readers who showed up at their doorstep without advance notice, demanding personal attention and mothering, because they felt that the work was about and for them, commanding them to make an appearance.  (A recurring theme in Sarton's journals is her guilt at not being able to answer all the letters she receives from fans.)  Sometimes these fans were indignant when the writer had a schedule of his or her own, needs of his or her own, and couldn't give them what they thought they were entitled to.  Is that knowing?  Is it empathy?  I don't believe so.  It looks like self-absorption to me, and like a child's insistence that his mother give him all her attention.  That's understandable in children, not in adults.  Sarton also complained that many of her readers misunderstand her journals as celebrations of her own strength, self-sufficiency, and tranquility, even though she worked hard to describe her anger, depression, loneliness, and anguish when the Muse failed her.

Can I, as a writer or as a reader, really empathize with rainbows and galaxies?  Not, it seems to me, without doing violence to the word empathy.  A rainbow can't empathize with us; it has no mind.  We have enough to be getting on with just empathizing with other human beings.

Sarton said in her journals and in her interviews that she thought her work had value because it had affected the lives of her readers, and I'll go along with that.  I read her myself, after all, for insights into aging, the single life, and other topics that matter to me personally; not for her prose style or her formal brilliance.  That's true for other writers I'm fond of too.  But I look for other things in art as well.  One of Marge Piercy's characters says in Woman on the Edge of Time that no single work can tell all truth -- that's for the whole culture to try to do.  Some writers I read for the beauty of their sentences, for example, though I'm also glad when those beautiful sentences move me and seem to speak about my life.  As a writer I hope to convey something to my readers, but I don't know what it will be; sometimes they find something in what I've written that I didn't intend, or didn't know I was putting into it.

Declarations of Dependence

I've added May Sarton's journals to my list of reading projects.  Or rather, re-reading projects, since I've already read them all, mostly as they were published.  In my thirties and forties they were interesting primarily for her account of aging; I'm now slightly older than she was when she began writing journals for publication, so it will be interesting to see how my perspective has changed.  Another interesting aspect in the later journals, especially after her 1986 stroke, was how she had to learn to depend on other people.  That made a big impression on me when I first read them, but I expect to learn more now that I'm old myself.

But what got me started this time was something I'd heard about these books, and wanted to check for myself.  Her first journal, Plant Dreaming Deep (1968) describes her move to a house of her own in (or near) the village of Nelson, New Hampshire.  Determined to live alone, she aimed to write honestly about herself, including her anger and temper -- a somewhat daring course for a woman writer.  But she found that most readers didn't notice her anger in that book, it was too well masked.  I think of Sarton as a ladylike writer, and her anger up to this point was expressed in repressed, ladylike ways.  In Journal of a Solitude (1973), which I'm reading now, Sarton resolved to make her anger more explicit.  I wanted to see how well she'd kept that resolution, and if I could tell the difference between the tone of the first book and the tone of the second.

I can see how she worked hard not to censor herself, to mention her anger -- indeed, her rages and tantrums, the words she herself used for certain moods.  This is a good thing, but as the word "tantrums" suggests, she had trouble putting her anger into context.  It doesn't help that she still censored herself in certain areas, not entirely of her own choosing I suspect: for example, she refers often to the woman she was romantically involved with at the time as "X," and is careful not to make it explicit that X was a woman.  Her partner of many years, Judy Matlack, is mentioned several times by her first name only, and their relationship is never specified.  Sarton and Matlack had broken up when Sarton moved to Nelson, but they remained close, and they often spent weekends together until Matlack's death.  (She spent her later years in a nursing home, where Sarton visited her even after Matlack no longer recognized her, as I remember from the later journals.)  This reticence makes it difficult for Sarton to delve into the sources of her anger, at least for print, and makes her outbursts seem isolated and sometimes puzzling.

(I noticed that it was in Journal of a Solitude that Sarton made her famous reference to her 1965 novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing as "a novel about a woman homosexual who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive, to portray a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disgusting, without sentimentality ..."  Geez, what a list of negative virtues!  It has been a long time since I read Mrs. Stevens, and I imagine I'll be rereading Sarton's novels after I get through the journals, but as I recall Mrs. Stevens wasn't all that interesting.  Nor, in fact, was she a novelty: there were quite a few non-sex-maniacal lesbians in fiction before her.  Like Gore Vidal's account of his homosexual novel The City and the Pillar, Sarton toots her own horn a bit too stridently here.)

At the same time, it's clear that her anger often puzzled her: she wrote repeatedly that on some mornings she woke up in tears, for no reason she could name.  I don't judge her for this -- I have my own temper, and I honor her honesty in admitting that she could be difficult to get along with, in ways I recognize in myself -- nor do I try to diagnose her.  As she became older and her health declined she often came across in the journals as merely querulous, but then she had plenty to complain about, and I was always impressed at her determination to keep working and traveling as long as she could.  I hope to do as well myself.

The other thing I notice on this reading is that although Sarton often refers to her solitude, how she has chosen to live alone to dedicate herself to work, and her frequent loneliness, she hardly seems solitary to me.  As I mentioned, she kept in close touch with her ex, she had various love affairs, and she had an extended network of friends both personal and professional.  Her solitary life in these journals is frequently interrupted by visitors, usually but not always on the weekends, and by travels around the country to give readings and lectures.  Sometimes fans come knocking on her door.  She also has neighbors, who helped her get settled into her house, mow her grass, plow the road after snowfall, and look in on her periodically to make sure she's all right; her portraits of these people are often quite touching.  But then she complains regularly that she can't get any work done because of all the interruptions!  It's a fair complaint, but it undermines her protestations of solitude.  Oh well, I experience similar ambivalence about living alone, so I read a lot of this with recognition.  Like Sarton, I live alone, but I'm assuredly no hermit, nor would I want to be.  Maybe the meaning of "solitude" needs to be clarified.  I remember that while Thoreau lived "alone" and solitary at Walden Pond, he still went into town each day to gossip, and he took his laundry home for his mother to wash.  Even the desert hermits of the early Christian church lived in connection with monasteries and churches, and probably passed few days without seeing fellow religious, pilgrims, and servants bringing them their meals.

So, I'm enjoying this renewed acquaintance with the "solitary" May Sarton.  May my own old age be as fulfilling and productive.