Sarton

There is always something rather fun about spontaneously choosing a book to read next. You can forget the urgent pile of books that should logically be the next on the list and go, instead, for something that absolutely meets the mood of the moment. And so it was the other night when I was walking along my bookcases, pulling off various titles and deciding they weren’t quite right, that I decided to read Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton. Until I got to the ‘S’ section of my autobiographies/biographies bookcases and discovered that… apparently I didn’t own it. But I did have a later volume, The House by the Sea (1977) and so I chose that instead.

The journal takes place a couple of years after she has moved to the house of the title. The previous house saw an extremely difficult and sad period of her life – she doesn’t go into detail about this, and I assume it is the topic of earlier journals.

If there is one irresistible piece of magic here among many others, it is the slightly curving path down to the sea that begins in flagstones on the lawn, cuts through two huge junipers, and proceeds, winding its way down to Surf Point, through the wood lilies in June, to tall grasses in summer, the goldenrod and asters in September, leading the eye on, creating the atmosphere of a fairy tale, something open yet mysterious that every single person who comes here is led to explore.

I am drawn to any fiction or non-fiction about houses, and Sarton certainly gives us a sense of the idyllic remoteness of this home. She is still in touch with the world, still travelling for lecture series and communicating with a wide number of friends, but has this place to retreat to. But the beautiful place is not treated like a fairytale escape. In this volume, Sarton details her anxieties – about ailing friends, about her legacy, and often about the encroaching signs of old age.

Growing old… what is the opposite of ‘growing’? I ask myself. ‘Withering’ perhaps? It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it. 

Sarton was only in her early 60s when she wrote the journal, and would live for another two decades, but she writes often about her fears of losing faculties – and, more than once, worries about falling and not being found. This is a precise honesty to the way she writes about fears that so many people must have, particularly if they live alone. It is not written with self-indulgence or false attempts to cheer herself up – rather, she documents her experiences and reflections with the emotion of a memoirist and the rigour of a historian.

But this is not a sad book by any means. The reflections are often more content, and nowhere more enjoyable than when Sarton is writing about the natural world around her. I loved this beautiful paragraph on snowfall:

I woke late … it was nearly seven when Tamas began licking his paws, his gentle way of saying, “It’s time to get up.” I woke to a world thickly enclosed in walls of big-flaked snow falling very fast. Now it is thinner, there is more wind, and it looks as though for the first time in this house I’m to be snowed in for the day. How exciting and moving that is, the exact opposite of an outgoing adventure or expedition! Here the excitement is to be suddenly a self-reliant prisoner, and what opens out is the inner world, the timeless world when my compulsion to go out and get the mail at eleven must be forgotten. How beautiful the white field is in its blur of falling snow, with the delicate black pencil strokes of trees and bushes seen through it! And, of course, the silence, the snow silence, becomes hypnotic if one stops to listen.

Sarton makes clear that she was writing the journal for publication, and so it doesn’t feel intrusive to read her day-by-day experiences. I’ve only read her novels before, and have now built up a much closer portrait of their author. She can be cross, particularly with fans who arrive at her door without warning and disrupt her day. She can go to great lengths to do kindnesses for others, and think little of it. She warmly appreciates the fine work of other artists and writers, and feels guilt when she has to censure any work that is sent to her – and values creativity too highly to ever lie or even prevaricate.

I really warmed to Sarton, and I loved reading The House by the Sea. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it on my favourite reads of 2023. She generously invites the reader into a fully realised world, without artifice or exaggeration, and I think it is that thorough reality that makes the book so beautiful to read. It felt like time spent with a friend.

When I bought The Small Room (1961), it was because I thought it might be about a house. I’m a simple man: I love books about houses, particularly if this would end up being about a hitherto undiscovered small room in a house. If anybody knows any books like that, lemme know. Well, The Small Room isn’t that, but I found an awful lot to like in it anyway.

I bought the novel on my first trip to the United States in 2013 – more specifically, in a lovely bookshop in Charlottesville, Virginia. Sadly, since then the little town has become renowned for the appalling far-right rally that ended in a woman’s death. At the time, it was simply a day out from DC.

I don’t think I’d read any May Sarton books at the time, but it is now my third – after The Magnificent Spinster and The Education of Harriet Hatfield. While I enjoyed both of them, I found the former less memorable than I’d hoped, and the latter very patchy. The Small Room takes us to a setting that is very distinct and probably a recommendation to many of us: a women’s college in New England.

Lucy Winter – surely a coy nod to Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette? – has just started there, and it is her first teaching job. She is young, idealistic, and keen to make a good impression. More than that, she is keen to be a good teacher – in every sense of the word ‘good’.

The girls arrived, and settled like flocks of garrulous starlings, perpetual chatter and perpetual motion. Lucy, looking down from her office on the fourth floor of one of the oldest buildings, compared the campus to a stage where a complicated ballet was being rehearsed. Small groups flowed together and parted; a girl in a blue blazer ran from one building to another; five or six others arranged themselves under an elm, in unconsciously romantic attitudes, a chorus of nymphs. The effect was enhanced by the freshmen’s required red Eton caps, and by the unrequired but almost universal uniform of short pleated skirts and blazers. Looking down on all this casual, yet intimate life from above, Lucy felt lonely and a little scared.

At the centre of the novel are the actions of one student. She is exemplary and feted, and widely regarded as having a promising future that would reflect well on the college. But when Lucy is marking one of her essays, she discovers that it is plagiarised. She feels she has to inform other members of the faculty – and sets in motion a series of actions that affect everybody in the college.

Lucy is a well-drawn and interesting character, partly because Sarton uses her to show that there are not simple choices between wrong and right, and that people might do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and vice versa. The girl who plagiarises is also written really interestingly, and reacts in a way that is both believable and unexpected. What stopped me wholeheartedly loving The Small Room is that these two, and perhaps one or two others, are the only nuanced characters in the novel. It’s not that the others are stereotypes, it’s just that Sarton doesn’t spend enough time delineating them and they all (particularly the other teachers and board members) blur into one amorphous mass.

Sarton does make up for this with beautiful, unpredictable writing. Here is one bit I noted down:

Lucy opened the window and knelt beside it, tasting the cool freshness, the stately, suspended, hypnotic fall, drank in the silence, and finally fell onto her bed as if she had been drugged, to sleep a dreamless sleep.

At the heart of The Small Room is a fascinating dilemma, done well and interestingly – with only a few flaws in the way the cast is put together. I don’t think I’ve yet found my perfect Sarton novel, but I think this is my favourite of the three I’ve read so far.