REMEMBERING MAY SARTON, TEN YEARS LATER
1912–1995

By Deborah Straw

Knowing May Sarton was like having a fever, one that takes years to cool down. When people fell in love with her work and with her, she seized them almost completely. She was aware of her powerful effect on others, but what she hoped for was that we would put that passion, that obsession, into our own creative work, as she did for more than sixty years. She was a hard act to follow. If she taught me anything, it was to keep writing, despite all the rejection, and to try to become fully myself. These are not easy tasks.

As I write this, I’m aware of doing exactly what May, my mentor and friend for seven years, would not have wanted me to do—dwell on her writing, her life and put off developing my own themes—nature, relationships, education.

May would have wanted me to spend today, as she spent a large part of all her days, doing my own writing. Writing whatever comes to me—a poem, a short story, the beginnings of a novel, a sketch of someone. Aha, maybe I can justify this if I call it that—a sketch of her, my teacher.

I’ve written many essays and poems about her. She would have preferred I switch topics, as she switched protégés, pushed them out of the nest as she did me, saying, quite literally, “There, you’ve landed. You’re on your own now.” This was only after I had published a few poems, a few essays, a book review or two. I would never have had the courage to write poems, fiction, or serious essays if I hadn’t met her in l988, when she read at a bookstore in Burlington, Vermont, and came to our house for dinner.

Through a bookstore connection, I learned that my favorite writer was scheduled to speak near my home in three months time. As I had written her twice before, I made a leap of faith and invited her to dinner, and she accepted. Luckily for me, she was one of those famous writers who answered letters, who appreciated kindred spirits, who was happy to meet readers who pursued her in a polite, loving way. She was what her books showed her to be—humanist, feminist, and an excellent friend.

As the day of her reading approached, I became increasingly nervous. I had never entertained a famous person before. I was so anxious that I persuaded my husband to cook. But she and I hit it off. We drank Scotch and talked about Europe and some mutual favorite authors. I felt we could form a lasting bond based on similar values and tastes and a few related experiences. We also both had somewhat volatile temperaments. I wanted friendship, but I had no idea how much more I would get.

After that exhilarating first meeting, I saw May many times, some on her suggestion, many on mine. Each time, she was an inspiring conversationalist and enthusiastic about my writing endeavors.

We met each other often for three or four years, generally at her gracious home in York. Sometimes, we just had a glass of sherry and lunch. Then she’d go upstairs for a nap, and I’d drive back to Vermont. Twice, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to spend an entire weekend with her. She read me new poems, we watched a video, and we shared nourishing meals together.

In these intense meetings, no matter their length, we shared books, dinners, and conversation. She reminisced about Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and her many beloved cats. I never barged into her life, I never overstayed my welcome, and she respected that about me, I believe. Sometimes I left her alone for what I considered too long for fear of intruding on her solitude and her work. I called or wrote her less than I wanted to. I knew her energy was waning, becoming crystallized. In her late seventies and early eighties, May’s remaining intensity was spent writing a few hard-won poems, completing her last journals, arranging the flowers in each room, and pampering her long-haired Himalayan cat, Pierrot. I recall his fondness for lobster.

I’m now, once again, writing about May because I still, occasionally, feel compelled to do so, especially since her death at age eighty-three in July 1995. Ten years ago now. That is hard to believe, as she is still the voice in my head telling me to write the best I can. “Revise, revise, revise,” she whispers. “Cut out the repetition.”

That July, a decade ago, my husband and I and another of May’s friends, Michael Sirmons of Austin, Texas, went to her memorial service in Nelson, New Hampshire. The next day, Michael and I attended a Unitarian Universalist service here in Burlington, Vermont, and spoke to a small gathering about our relationship with May and her writing.

It rained in Nelson on the day of her service. It was chilly and damp. Yet people drove and flew in from around the country to celebrate one of the century’s most gifted and wise writers. Of the perhaps three hundred in the huge Congregational Church in tiny Nelson (the most beautiful town I’ve seen in New Hampshire), 50 percent had gray hair, 60 to 70 percent were female. A few were famous writers or editors. All were readers of her work and lovers of what she stood for—friendship, solitude, nature, light, music, art, justice, and peace for all beings in this world.

Many brought along Journal of a Solitude or Plant Dreaming Deep and read as we waited for the service, envisioning May’s life in the house right next door. Some of us took notes; some of us cried. We all appreciated hearing a few of her poems, but we all missed her rich, resonant voice.

After the eloquent ceremony in celebration of her life, we strolled by the now-famous green clapboard house. In the rain, as she had with her friends, we “climb[ed] the long hill to the cemetery/In autumn” to see her stunning grave marker in the shape of a phoenix. Her epitaph reads “May Sarton, Poet, 1912–1995.”

For me, aside from her lyrical and honest writing, what remain are May’s trust and faith in me, as a writer of some small talent, and her commitment to her work and passion for life. In the memorial service, Reverend Richard Henry, a Unitarian, said May’s one word of description of her mother, Mable Sarton, would have been “aware.” I believe that would also aptly describe May’s character. Who could forget her lively, inquisitive eyes? She was an excellent judge of people and understood complex relationships (even marriage which she never experienced). She noticed the slightest shift of light, the smallest insect, the position of “her” ducks and geese on the nearby marsh, or the faintest whiff of a rose in its last stages.

In her poem, “Gestalt at Sixty,” May wrote of the many people from around the world who visited her in her nineteenth-century cape house in New Hampshire. “No one comes to this house / Who is not changed. / I meet no one here who does not change me.” Such was May Sarton’s power—as a writer and as a friend—to change the people who met her in person or in the pages of her more than fifty books. She increased our vision, raised our self-esteem, and gave us a motherly push. She gave us permission to write about our most personal and universal feelings. May wanted us to take the courage, as she had, to “Now I Become Myself” in the deepest sense of those words.

She wanted us writing women (and men) to uncover our individual themes, to find a “room of our own,” and, most importantly, to find time in which to write. How well she understood the struggle, particularly in middle age, to resist becoming someone you don’t like, for the sake of money, family, or society. Using herself as example, she showed us how to pay attention to ourselves and to become “more simply human.”

Since her death, I have been on my own; I’m an orphan of sorts. I may stop writing about May, but I won’t stop writing. I now have a dual responsibility—to keep sharing her work in my classes and workshops and to keep improving my own. I no longer, as Wendell Berry has written, "watch and listen and check my judgment against" her every time I write.

But I do believe she is still watching with those piercing eyes; she remains aware of laziness, procrastination, and dishonesty.

As she wrote in “The Phoenix Again”:

And one cold starry night
Whatever your belief
The phoenix will take flight
Over the seas of grief
To sing her thrilling song
To stars and waves and sky
For neither old nor young
The phoenix does not die.

 

 

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