After the Stroke

by May Sarton

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  After the Stroke

  A Journal

  May Sarton

  For Edythe Haddaway

  Nancy Hartley

  Janice Oberacker

  who saw me through

  Foreword

  Until now I have made it a point of honor to add nothing to the daily notations in my journals, and have only revised occasionally for style or to eliminate repetitions. But I was so ill during the writing of the first half of this journal that it became mandatory to enrich it here and there. Bracketed material was written after the given date.

  Wednesday, April 9, 1986

  It may prove impossible because my head feels so queer and the smallest effort, mental or physical, exhausts, but I feel so deprived of my self being unable to write, cut off since early January from all that I mean about my life, that I think I must try to write a few lines every day.

  It is a way of being self-supporting. I long for advice from someone like Larry LeShan who is himself recovering from a severe heart attack with many days in intensive care, yet has had the kindness to phone three times, the blessed man. He says I have no surface energy because reserve energy has to be built back first and that makes sense.

  Meanwhile I lie around most of the afternoon, am in bed by eight, and there in my bed alone the past rises like a tide, over and over, to swamp me with memories I cannot handle. I am as fragile and naked as a newborn babe.

  [I am too vulnerable to all the losses and often the pain connected with personal relationships. I have had too many lives, have attached myself to so many people over the fifty years since I was twenty-five and began my real life after my theater company failed in 1934. It is hard to imagine being able to say “fifty years ago,” but during those fifty years I have lived hard and to the limits of my capacity as a human being and as a writer. So it is a huge bundle of feelings and thoughts that ride on those tides when I lie awake at night. My mother dies again, and again I have to face that I did not have the courage to sit with her, which is what she needed. Perhaps I wrote A Reckoning partly to help readers do what I could not do … and people write me that it did help.

  Then I come back often to Santa Fe where I met Judy on my second visit there when we were paying guests in the same house … what a piece of luck that proved to be! Our joining together, our living together in Cambridge was the good end of a long struggle and doubt on her part as to whether she wanted to accept me as a lover and friend. Judy had kept her personal life entirely apart from her professional life as a distinguished professor of English at Simmons College; she hesitated to be pinned down perhaps in the minds of her associates. She was not entirely prepared for the intensity of feeling on her side as well as mine. She was then forty-five and had had no intimate relationship before. And she had suffered from serious depression which she shared with no one until I came along, and even then in all the years we lived together I did not always know when she was in the valley of the shadow. Judy was as inverted and secretive as I am open and indiscreet. What drew us together was mysterious, as true love always is.

  Basil de Selincourt was often in my thoughts, the first major critic to recognize my poems, and later a true friend. He looked like a hawk and could be quite brutal. But he read my poems with complete attention all through the years, and wrote his queries to me, and those letters with mine to him are now at the Berg collection with so much else, my correspondence with S. S. Koteliansky for one. It has made me aware that it is men not women who have held my work in high regard, with the one great exception of Carol Heilbrun who came into my life after I was forty-five.

  What I see when I think of Basil is his garden in Kingham where he planted hundreds of shirley poppies in a long raised bed, and so made it imperative that I sow some in every garden I have had. I think of his slow walk, the gardener’s walk, never hurrying.

  And now I go back to find his review in the Observer (London) of April 2, 1939, for it was prescient and at the same time and even till now the best present I have ever been given as a poet. Here are two excerpts:

  If her verses deserve notice, it is because the intense experience which underlies and unifies them has engendered an uncompromising determination to forge and refine the tool for its expression, a tool which needed to be, and indeed already is, deep-searching to the point of ruthlessness, and very delicate.

  And further on:

  Anyhow, in work like Miss Sarton’s—she invokes for it herself the analogy of the spire—“the living spine, the soaring tension”—one claims to know the why of everything, since the more familiar it grows, the more aware one is of its unity of purpose, the more one feels in every line the solemn dedication in which all originated: a kind of dedication peculiarly germane to the poetic outlook in our time. For it grounds the ultimate, creative personality on an ultimate renunciation, on an achieved independence, an impassioned solitariness. Nationalism in poetry is dead. A poet’s mind must comprehend all thoughts that visit it, and thoughts pass everywhere today. The poet’s voice today becomes the voice of universal reason, and himself a citizen of the world. To be the world’s he must first stand alone, must be dead to the world, a spiritual centre, radiating love.

  Having been given that at twenty-seven had to sustain me through years of damaging reviews. And of course it did.

  But the disturbing, the unresolved memories that flood me have to do, of course, with love affairs. The fascinating but sometimes deadly Muses who seem to have brought me poetry and rage and grief in almost equal measure. Is it perhaps that I have been a bad lover, but a good friend? Or simply that passionate love at its most romantic and demanding has already the seeds of death in it, the fresh leaves will inevitably fall in time? At best it changes and grows into friendship as I am experiencing now in a kind of epiphany with Juliette Huxley through letters.

  When I get overwhelmed by the past I try to force memory back to rest in landscapes, in places such as the Dordogne river in France which Judy and I and two English friends explored just after World War II before it had become fashionable. We were able to see Lascaux, the prehistoric paintings so fresh they looked as though Picasso might have painted them the day before. Now the government has had to close those caves to preserve them, and tourists see an imitation, a reproduction. The region of the Dordogne resembles the landscapes behind Renaissance paintings. It is rich and gentle and around every turn of the river brings into view another small magical castle as in a fairy tale.

  All of this and so much more—as they say on television—is contained in one person, dreaming it all like a dream and pursued by it sometimes like an inescapable nightmare. No life as rich can ever be perfectly resolved … it can be done only in a poem or two, only through a work of art. It is too complex, too terrible, too astonishing and so the wave of memory dashes itself against rocks.]

  I have been rather smug perhaps about solitude versus loneliness—“loneliness is the poverty of self, solitude the richness of self.” Now I am frightfully lonely because I am not my self. I can’t see a friend for over a half hour without feeling as though my mind were draining away like air rushing from a balloon. So having someone here would not work.

  Nancy is a great help. She comes now every day, keeps the bird feeders filled, and works away next door, a beneficent presence, who makes no demands.

  Ever since the stroke I often repeat a short poem of Robert Louis Stevenson’s which Agnes Hocking taught us at Shady Hill. I learned it when I was eight or nine and did not really understand it. Now I say it at least once a day, and it helps, though it is not a great poem at all:

  If I have fa
ltered more or less

  In my great task of happiness:

  If I have moved among my race

  And shown no glorious morning face;

  If beams from happy human eyes

  Have moved me not; if morning skies,

  Books, and my food, and summer rain

  Knocked on my sullen heart in vain,—

  Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take,

  And stab my spirit broad awake …

  Thursday, April 10

  If I have learned something in these months of not being well it may be to live moment by moment—listening to the tree frogs all night for I couldn’t sleep, waking late to the insistent coos of the wood pigeons—and at this moment the hush-hushing of the ocean. Being alive as far as I am able to the instant.

  But I think it is necessary before coming back to the present to adumbrate briefly where I am coming from.

  First an autumn of poetry readings from September through early December—I was riding a wave. And even if it was a bit too much for me, I have no regrets. Would I have missed the great audience at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., (sold out months in advance) or across the continent the theater full in San Francisco? Or seeing Moscow, Idaho, in November, when the land lay below a small plane in huge fertile folds, rich black earth—like the body of a mythical goddess—so feminine and restorative an earth, I had tears in my eyes? Would I have missed all that?

  [But between readings while I was at home in November, Bramble tried to eat but I realized after a few days that she must have a bad tooth, perhaps an abscess; Nancy and I took her to Dr. Beekman, our vet here in York, an extremely adept and humane man especially where a cat is concerned. I was able to bring her home after a few days, but Dr. Beekman warned me that he had had to take some bone as well as a tooth and the biopsy still to come might, he feared, show cancer of the bone. Her left eye was almost closed.

  Bramble always came in at night by climbing the wisteria vine to my bedroom window, often very late at night when I would see her shadow sitting there patiently, waiting for me to open the door to the porch roof, as I could not take the window screen down. She then ran along and jumped across to the porch roof and in. In spring and fall when the screen was off, she jumped straight from the sill to my bed in a lovely leap.

  I thought a little later, knowing she could never get well, that the time had come to have her put to sleep, but Dr. Beekman examined her carefully and said, “Let her have another week or so.” And so for a last week or two it was a long farewell as she lay full length along my back and purred often half the night. Bramble was always close to the wilderness, the last of the “wild cats” of Nelson, elusive, aloof, but in the end extremely loving.

  But when her eye began to look infected again and was closed tightly I decided that we must put her out of her pain and Dr. Beekman assured me that I was right this time. She was lying on her side, perfectly passive, but the right eye so huge with fear, black to its gold rim, so deep and clear, I felt I had never seen such terrible beauty. Dr. Beekman treated her with tenderness, stroked her, called her by name, and then managed to get the needle in with such expertise that she never moved, and in a few seconds she was gone.

  Nancy and I were crying so hard we had to wait a moment before driving away and coming home to the desolation here. I often heard Nancy talking her special language to Bramble when she walked Tamas, for Bramble went along, dashing up a tree, bounding through the long grasses like a black and gold leopard. Nancy had loved her too.

  Not only the house, but the whole landscape seemed empty, for I often looked out from my study window to see way off down the field that intent black presence waiting for a mouse. Now there was no sign of life. But the worst was going to bed, waking often, thinking she would be at the window, then when I remembered, unable to sleep.]

  The grief never left me for weeks. Suddenly I would start to cry and then not be able to stop. What ran through my head was, “this is the beginning of the end.” We had been, Tamas, Bramble and I, a little family, and now it had been decimated. Who next? Tamas is so very lame these days and I had been feeling exhausted and ill.

  On December twenty-eighth the Christmas tree caught fire—in one second a towering blazing holocaust, black smoke so thick it stifled me as I grabbed a fire extinguisher, calling out to my guest, Judy Burrowes, “Call the fire department! I must stay here and put it out.” And that I did, running upstairs to get the second extinguisher when the flames flared up again. Finally when the fire was out the volunteer fire department roared up with an ambulance all ready to take me to the hospital! They were astonished.

  The miracle was that the books which are in recessed bookcases in the library, all my own books bound in leather among them, were not damaged except by smoke—but of course it made a frightful mess and took weeks of work to set right—workmen washing the walls, wiping down everywhere: the painters repainting, a new wall-to-wall carpet put down. I couldn’t get the saffron yellow of the old one; the new one is rather tame by comparison! Luckily insurance covered most of the damage, including twenty-three hundred dollars to bring the bahut back to life.

  On December thirtieth I saw my doctor, hoping to get help on the constant intestinal cramps I had suffered on the tour. Instead he discovered congestive heart failure, a fibrillating heart, and put me on drugs to try to get the heartbeat back to normal. The drugs made me really ill—impossible to work—and I had to cancel a spring tour altogether. The cramps became so painful I lay down most of the day, but Dr. Chayka paid no attention to that when I complained.

  Then on February twentieth I woke in the middle of the night terrified as I felt as though a numb, perhaps dead, arm were strangling me. It was actually my own left arm. I could not extricate myself. Finally I did manage to and got up—with great difficulty, and staggered about. I knew something was wrong, but went back to bed. At six I called Nancy and asked her to come, went down to let Tamas out as usual, forced myself to make breakfast, carried the tray up to bed, but couldn’t eat it. Then I called Janice, my dear friend who is an R.N., and said, “I think I have had a small stroke.” She was very firm. “Call your doctor. Get the ambulance—I’ll be right over.”

  It was a great relief when I knew help was on the way. I even managed to pack a small suitcase to be ready, but I could not dress. My left side felt very queer and dead.

  Nancy and Janice were both here by the time the ambulance and its two sleepy attendants arrived, and they followed us to the hospital.

  What a relief to know I would be taken care of! It had been a hard night’s journey into day.

  Then followed six days of tests and confabulations. The CAT scan showed a small hemorrhage of the brain—perhaps a clot thrown out by the irregular heartbeat. Then I came home, lucky indeed to be able to speak and take care of myself—the telephone my lifeline. Janice came for one week to get supper and stay the night. Maggie Vaughan came for one week and got all the meals—and then I was alone here again.

  It was a mild stroke, thank heavens. But what neither I nor my supportive friends could quite realize is how strange one feels—and how depressed—after even a slight stroke—that is what I have been learning slowly for seven weeks.

  The absence of psychic energy is staggering. I realize how much it takes to write one line. And I have tried in vain, over and over, to write a poem for Bramble and wept with frustration because poetry is not in me. Will it ever come back? Shall I ever feel whole again?

  [Two weeks ago something extraordinary and wonderful happened. I must have mentioned to Carol Heilbrun that if I ever could choose a cat—all of mine have been strays—it would be a Himalayan. She had inquired around and found a four-month-old male kitten and had brought him to me, all the way from New York City. Of course when he finally got here far from his mother and brothers, having been penned up for hours, his one idea was to get away as fast as possible and hide. But before he did so I had picked him up and nuzzled the soft fur on his tummy, and had seen hi
s snub nose, his huge blue eyes and his coloring, slate blue face, ears and paws and the rest a creamy white. His paws are huge and very soft. Well, he was indeed a great beauty, but when I went to bed he was nowhere to be found and I wondered and waited and must have finally fallen asleep, for when I woke up before light, I found he was lying on my head and had been there no doubt for most of the night. That was a good sign.

  A kitten? At first a hurricane would have been the word. For the first two weeks I was woken at dawn by the sound of a large life-sized stuffed lamb in my bedroom being knocked over, and strange raucous miaows from deep in the kitten’s throat as he attacked the beast with claw and tooth, tearing at its tail and ears, then suddenly flinging himself downstairs and racing around the house.

  Before he came I had decided to name him Pierrot, “mon ami Pierrot,” as he is called in the old song my mother sang to me when I was a baby:

  Au clair de la lune,

  Mon ami Pierrot,

  Prête-moi ta plume

  Pour écrire un mot.

  Ma chandelle est morte

  Je n’ai plus de feu.

  Ouvre-moi ta porte

  Pour l’amour de Dieu.

  He had certainly come into my life at a desolate time, when “my candle was out.” But at first he did seem in his violence a little too much for me, especially the day after Carol brought him and she had left. For he simply vanished for seven hours, and I did not dare call Carol to see she was safely home until after dark when he suddenly appeared from nowhere and gave a plaintive mew.

  That was the beginning and now after two weeks we are semi-friends, routines have been established, and perhaps he and Carol are responsible for my turning the corner at last, and able to begin a new journal.]

  Friday, April 11

  It is still cold and dreary here, although treasures are humping up under the salt hay on the flower beds and maybe by next week I can release them into sunlight. The more miraculous it was, then, in the cold rain, to find yesterday in the mail a tiny box from Duffy in Connecticut containing four sprigs of arbutus, the waxy perfect pink flowers sending out a whiff of that nonesuch perfume—my nose could hardly believe it!