The House by the Sea by May 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.