As We Might Be

May Sarton isn't one of my favorite writers by any means, but I still go back to her work from time to time, and as I transition from paper to e-books, I'm including hers.  Over the past couple of years I've reread all her journals, because they deal with aging, living alone, and the writer's life.  (This time through I also picked up the names of several writers she was reading -- especially Ruth Moore and Robert Francis -- whose work I like a lot.)

But I'm also starting to reread her fiction, and will accumulate all of it as e-books too.  That's harder to explain even to myself.  Sarton's fiction writing has always been problematic for me.   (Her poetry, I confess, I've never been able to get into.)  I've thought of her style as ladylike, too ladylike, though it's difficult to explain what I mean by that.  Style may not be the problem after all, though in the book I'm reading now there are some infelicities, which may be symptomatic.

At one point, for example, the narrator, reflecting on the most important love affair of her life, reflects: "Only the goodbyes when I had to leave to go home each autumn were excruciating.  I felt each time as though I were being asked to cut off an arm or a leg -- an amputee."  "An amputee" dangles there; what she means is presumably was that she felt as though she were being asked to become or make herself an amputee.  But more important, it's redundant: it simply repeats the information we've already been given.  All I can see that it might possibly add is the suggestion of an essence and perhaps a stigma, like someone who's been having sex with a same-sex partner but doesn't want to think of herself as a homosexual; or someone's who's had a lot of birthdays but doesn't want to think of herself as old.  If so, I don't think it works, because the stigma (if there is one) of being an amputee (or old, for that matter) comes from being seen as such by other people.  The narrator's loss by contrast is invisible to others, known only to herself.  What Sarton intended here I don't know: I am only sure that "an amputee" is stylistically flawed in this case.

The novel these sentences come from is As We Are Now, which was first published in 1973.  It was inspired by Sarton's visits to a neighbor who, as his health declined, was put in a nursing home. Sarton herself was spared this fate, thanks to many friends who became caregivers in her later years, but her partner Judy Matlack was not; Sarton's regular visits to Matlack which continued after Matlack no longer recognized her due to dementia, are often mentioned in her journals.  In her journal Sarton discussed her intentions for the book at some length, which is why I decided to reread it first, rather than go through her novels in chronological order.  The narrator of As We Are Now, Caroline Spencer, is a seventy-six-year-old former high-school mathematics teacher.  After a heart attack which left her unable to manage the stairs in her home, she moved in with her older brother and his younger second wife, but it didn't work out due to faults on both sides.  The facility to which she's consigned is relatively small, run by a mother and daughter.  (The mother's name is Harriet Hatfield, which threw me off at first, because Sarton's last novel, written fifteen years after this one, is called The Education of Harriet Hatfield, but I don't think the title character is supposed to be the same person as the caretaker in As We Are Now.)  Caro, as she's called, is the only woman housed there; the rest are men, mostly very aged and decrepit.  One, a farmer dying of cancer, is I think based on Sarton's neighbor.)  The place is not well-kept, and to keep from becoming too disoriented Caro keeps a diary, which is the novel.

As We Are Now, then, is a reflection on old age and bad health.  Caro is about fifteen years older than Sarton was when she wrote it, but Sarton had a fair amount of experience with the elderly, including some distinguished friends.  Still, anyone who has read the journals will recognize Caro as Sarton herself -- it might be that Sarton grew into Caro.  The problems Sarton wanted to write about are real, and vividly described, but the chief fault in the book is formal: there's just not enough distance between author and narrator.  With this novel, like all of Sarton's novels as I recall, what you see is what you get: the story is all surface, and points to nothing beyond itself.

So why am I reading it, and why do I intend to reread all of Sarton's novels?  Because despite her limitations, Sarton wrote about serious matters in a way I find compelling enough that I want to return to it.  She's no Jane Austen, no Kate O'Brien, no Marge Piercy, not even a Doris Lessing (who in her later work became as didactic as Sarton, though heavily encrusted with cant), but she is very definitely and intensely May Sarton, so I still find it worthwhile to experience how she saw the world.  She reminds me of something I've written about artists before: it's not necessary to be the best in a field or genre or art form, only to do well and authentically what you do.  Sarton had a distinctive voice (though it sometimes gets on my nerves) and perspective.  What I get from reading May Sarton, I don't get from any other writer, so I will keep going back to her work.

Around Cape Horn at Seventeen

Last week I read quite a good book.  In fact I think Ruth Moore's The Walk Down Main Street (William Morrow, 1960) is one of the best books I've read this year.

I found out about The Walk Down Main Street from a mention in one of May Sarton's late journals.  Sarton also lived in Maine for many years, but she apparently didn't know Moore or her work until she picked up this one near the end of her life.  Sarton said she "had not been so taken by a novel in ages."  By the time I finally got around to the book, I'd completely forgotten why Sarton's description had appealed to me.  It is, she said,

about the wreckage in a small town when the basketball team in the local high school wins a local championship and goes on to a bigger test, how the boys become arrogant and obsessed, and the men take to betting on the game and become more and more involved, a corrupting process.

This accurately describes the occasion of the novel, but doesn't really do it justice.  Certainly the novel's criticism of basketball hysteria has a lot to do with why I enjoyed it -- it fit in my comfort zone -- but it has more going on than that.  While Moore is unsparing about Boy Culture, it's not only "the men": the women in the town are also gaga over the team's success.  They're pushed to the sidelines, but they give what support their role allows them.  There are exceptions in both camps, of course: the science teacher, for example, who is more concerned with getting his students into college for academic reasons than because of success in sports; and the chief protagonist, a widow whose son has become the star of the team when he runs a hot streak in one game, along with a knee injury that the local doctor (another booster) treats with novocaine so that the boy can continue to play while aggravating the tissue damage.  It's also not the basketball fever that is responsible for the corruption, arrogance, and betting; rather it's an outlet for them.  Moore shows that they've always been present in the community.

The widow I mentioned, Susie Hoodless, married a sweet but rather feckless Coast Guardsman from Arkansas, who drowned in a pointless accident at sea.   The town, and her father Martin in particular, has never really forgiven her for marrying a "foreigner."  (Ironically, Martin himself had married a real foreigner, a Swedish woman.)  Racism is pervasive among the townspeople: the science teacher, also a "foreigner," is Jewish, and there's a lot of eagerness to classify all "foreigners" as black, either by blood or by mystic essence.  There's an extended flashback about Susie's honeymoon with her husband Brant, when they traveled to Arkansas so she could meet his family.

[Brant's father] said nothing at all.  He stood there, looking at Brant; his hands on the rifle might have been carved out of wood.

Brant said, "I got married.  This here's my wife."

The old man didn't move his head, but the slits of his eyes flicked a little, flicked over Susie, flicked back to Brant.

"Whar she come from?" he said.

"She come from where my Base is," Brant said.

"What to hell kind of foreign country is that to come from?" said Brant's father.  "She white?"

Susie couldn't help it.  It was so exactly like Martin Hoodless, here she and Brant had crossed practically the whole United States to listen to the exact same thing.  Susie laughed.

She said, choking, "When Brant and I got married, Mr. McIntosh, my father said, 'Where's Arkansas?  Who ever heard tell of it?  What to hell kind of foreign country is that to come from?'"

The old man didn't even look at her; he was looking at Brant, and Brant's face was wooden.

"You ma'ied a Yankee," the old man said [90-91].

On the trip back to Maine, Susie realizes that the immiserating poverty that at first shocked her in Arkansas is also present at home, though its familiarity there had kept her from noticing it before.  I noticed that small-town Maine is not importantly different from the small-town Indiana where I was growing up when The Walk Down Main Street was published.

Susan's father Martin is another holdout from the basketball fever, but for different reasons.  He wants to keep his family, including his basketball-playing grandson Carlisle, at home and under his control.  (We're told that all his daughters save Susie married and moved far away from him as soon as they could.)   There's an amusing exchange between Martin and one of the town fathers, who objects to Martin's saying that Carlisle can work his way through college:

"What's the sense of that?  Why put a young kid that far behind the eight-ball?  You work him too hard, you'll warp his whole future.  Why, a young kid, he ain't ready for too much rugged stuff, Mart."

"Hell's pink-whiskered, blistered bells!"  Martin said.  "Carlisle's great-grandfather took a vessel around Cape Horn when he was seventeen."

"Different time, Mart, different times.  Nowadays, thank God, a kid don't have to get out and hustle.  I wouldn't want my boy to have to work the way I did, the way his grandfather did.  It don't make sense.  What I want for him is the best there is, and in this world, Mart, thanks to you and me, there's some pretty good things.  By gum and by gosh, my kid wouldn't take a ship around Cape Horn.  Be damned if I'd let him!"

"Well, another thing," Martin said.  "Your kid couldn't."

A slight flush came into the pale skin over Jed's temples, but he went smoothly on [261].

Moore knows all the cliches of reactionary bullshit, but she plays around with them for her own purposes.  On the next page Martin reflects:

If there was any reason, he thought, for an educated man to talk like a hick, it was just to show you that he was on your side, he was a hick, too.  On jury duty, which Martin had had a good many times, he had run into the same thing, and it had always annoyed him.  The lawyers, addressing the jury, at times would drop so far into countrified speech that the jury themselves had difficulty in understanding them.  Jed was an educated man, a college man.  Why in hell didn't he talk like one? [262]

If he did, Martin would despise him for that, of course.

Moore subtly but clearly depicts school and town politics, and treats all of her large cast of characters with empathy if not sympathy.  The town "eccentrics" provide some comedy, as usual in regional fiction, but they also have some complexity and surprises in store.

To add an extra fillip of pleasure, though I didn't learn this until after I'd finished the book: Moore's longtime companion from 1940 until the latter's death in 1981 was Eleanor Mayo, also a novelist.  Were they lesbians?  I have no idea, but clearly they weren't heterosexuals as we think of them today.  I just got hold of another of Moore's novels, Speak to the Winds, published in 1956, and will probably track down the rest of them. 

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.