I’m reading May Sarton’s memoirs all out of order, so I’ve got The House By The Sea and Journal of a Solitude under my belt before going back to a slightly older one – Plant Dreaming Deep (1968), which has a bad title and a truly ugly cover. And yet inside – what riches!
There is something of a false start in my mind – a little prologue about her British ancestor and her American ancestor, and how different they are. It is extremely skippable and doesn’t give you a sense for what the book will actually be about, though I know that Americans are notoriously interested in their family trees and connections to previous continents and perhaps Sarton couldn’t resist.
Anyway, that out the way, and we are onto the main part of the book: Sarton finding, buying, doing up and living in a house in Nelson, New Hampshire. She was 46, and moving out to a distant location on her own felt like an understandably significant step for a single woman of her age – particularly one whose living was largely forged in isolation, as a writer (and occasional lecturer). Her decision-making is an example of how often she pinpoints universal emotions, while also applying them to the specifics of her life:
Everything in us presses toward decision, even toward the wrong decision, just to be free of the anxiety that precedes any big step in life. I was not wrong in divining that for me, if I took it, this step would mean radical change and so might be compared to marriage. No woman in her forties can afford to marry the wrong person or the wrong house in the wrong place! So I groaned and teetered and waited for life itself to make some sign.
Off she drives to find the possible home…
We followed an interminable road through lonely woods for four miles, then emerged into a charming brick mill town sitting sedately beside a lake, and again veered off into thick woods. It began to feel like one of those journeys one takes in a dream, a journey that has no end, in search of something that can never be found, where if one wakes at last it is to the accelerated heartbeat of terror. I did not intend to live on the edge of nowhere.
But then, quite suddenly, the long road took an abrupt turn to the left and we found ourselves out in the sunlight of a small village green.
“This,” Mrs Rundlett said, “is Nelson.”
And she quickly falls in love. Through her descriptions, and her eyes, we fall in love too. My edition has photographs along the way, mostly taken by Eleanor Blair, but they are black and white and rather muddy, in the way of ’60s publishing. You have to let your imagination transport you to the world Sarton inhabits.
As I have written many times before, I don’t have a visual imagination. I find it nearly impossible to ‘picture’ the scenes that Sarton describes, and she does her best to tell you the lay-out, colours, materials, and feel of her home and garden – but, as with the best writers in this type of book, somehow I found myself there. I couldn’t visualise the scenes, but I could feel what it would be to live there. As she portrays her rooms, land, and neighbourhood, she is squarely in the midst of them. It is not an objective or distant depiction – she writes firmly as an inhabitant, centring her own experience in a beautiful way.
In that first week I established a rite about supper. When I sit down at the deal table, there are flowers; there is a bottle of wine, and the table has been carefully set as if by a good servant. There is a book open to read, the equivalent for the solitary of civilized conversation. Everything has been prepared as if for a guest, and I am the guest of the house.
The book covers eight years in the house. Along the way, we learn about her neighbours – eccentric and otherwise. But this is not like Beverley Nichols’ delightful Merry Hall books. Though broadly in the same genre, Sarton doesn’t have his mischievous caricatures and darting humour. There is a humour in her book, but it one of companionship, affection and enjoying every mood and season as it comes.
I say ‘enjoying’. She is also not afraid to tell us about her darker times. Perhaps they do not proliferate as intensely as they did in The House By The Sea, but there are some. Sarton feels things deeply, and she shares those feelings generously. Along the way, she also discusses her novels and poetry, but without a consciousness that her non-fiction is the best thing she will write. It is beautiful, poetic, and true.
A place like this is more like a novel than a poem – complex, never quite ‘finished’, operated on extended time, a balancing of many themes against each other. Work on it cannot be finished in one quite push. It must be resumed spring after spring, when black flies and woodchucks come back. It cannot be neglected for long – or you find yourself back where you started. A place like this must be fashioned and re-fashioned inch by inch. You wait and see. You wait and hope. You wait and work.
I absolutely loved Plant Dreaming Deep, and to be honest probably should have read it at a more leisurely pace. I think The House By The Sea is my favourite of the Sarton memoirs I’ve read so far, but there are plenty more to be read. Maybe, once I’m finished, I’ll start again and read them in the correct order.