After the Stroke

by May Sarton

  So, South Africa, Peru, Chile, etc.

  * Thoughts in Solitude, by Thomas Merton. Image Bks., 1968.

  Thursday, December 4

  I got home at one in the morning yesterday—heroic Edythe having driven through a deluge to the airport, brought me home and then drove back to Boxford.

  Pierrot was truly glad to see me and, while Edythe and I drank some milk and ate a brownie she had made, he sat on a chair at the table and never took his eyes off me. Then when I finally climbed the stairs to bed, he followed me up and lay on his back beside me purring for a long time before he went down to the end of the bed. Outside it sounded like a hurricane. Wind shook the walls, while rain battered the windows all night. It was so comforting to have Pierrot with me!

  But as usual the enormity of what lies in wait for me when I have been away for ten days does depress and yesterday I felt like a mouse under a haystack. Among other things I had two recommendations to write for the Guggenheim Foundation. It took me most of an hour this morning. There are twenty or more dear people to thank for various kindnesses on the trip. I packed and mailed off eight books yesterday to some of them. A beautiful purple suede jacket I had ordered months ago came and proved much too big. Now that I have lost thirty-five pounds I do not intend to look like a purple elephant! But what a chore to repack and send it back.

  I wonder when I shall resume playing records—it has seemed impossible. I fear the opening of that door so I allow myself to live in a clutter of the undone.

  Today the sun was out—I never saw it in Nashville—but the wind is icy, wind chill below zero is my guess. Nevertheless Pierrot in his luxurious white fur suit was happy to go out.

  Saturday, December 6

  The problem with my desk is the constant fragmentation—that my mind is a merry-go-round of disparate things I have to do and answer. One is to answer daily requests: “Where can I get a bound copy of The Fur Person?” “Do you think keeping a journal is selfish?”—this from a freshman writing on The House By the Sea. Planning Christmas. Wrapping presents. I did one for Catherine Claytor this morning.

  Yesterday the charming living tree that Huldah sent arrived like a corpse in a long box. But it proved to be a perfect shape, and very much alive, and is now drinking water and seems quite frisky this morning. Also a beautiful wreath came from H.O.M.E.

  The sun is shining, Venus very bright in the east when I get up at five in the dark and Pierrot darts out into the dawn, full of energy.

  Sunday, December 7

  The Times Literary Supplement sometimes provides an essay that I can ponder for days. This is true of John Bayley’s “An Involuntary Witness” in the November 21, 1986 issue—a review of Donald Davie’s Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric and Henry Gilford’s Poetry in a Divided World. The review concerns what the poet’s responsibility is. Louise Bogan believed that the poet can’t be “political.” We had an argument about this in letters which I presume will be published eventually. I have been torn myself. Perhaps the political poem only succeeds when it comes from deep enough to go beyond rhetoric—the danger. I have been steeped in the personal. For the universal in poetry springs from the archetype within the ultrapersonal. I could not write about torture under the Nazis, for instance, until a cousin died as a result of Gestapo beatings—Jean Sarton. Finally I was able to write “The Tortured.”

  Bayley quotes Montale who said that “no writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet “few have achieved communication as well as he did.” Marina Tsvetaeva said the same thing more epigrammatically: “Art is an undertaking in common, performed by solitary people.”

  That is what struck me and what I have wanted to think about.

  Later Bayley writes: “As with ‘bearing witness’, so with ‘isolation’. Both are matters of result rather than intention. Emily Dickinson or Tsvetaeva—or Philip Larkin, come to that—are all examples of the solitary poet, and yet, as Gilford admirably shows about the first two in his chapter on Isolation and Community’, they are also poets who create and symbolize the idea of a community, and with whom a community of some sort comes strongly to identify.”

  Later

  When Tamas died I thought I had seen the end of disasters this year, but now Barbara’s sculpture of Persophone rising from the ocean and its curling waves has been blown off the terrace wall and lies in awful shards and pieces on the other side—like some broken corpse. Could it have been done by a frightened deer come to eat branches of the yew to the right of it round the corner? I can’t believe this has happened. The destruction of a work of art, new in my experience, is extremely painful I am discovering, for art outlives us—and so it is an attack on the future as well as the present to witness it.

  Tuesday, December 9

  I was so stirred that I spent three hours writing a poem about the death of Persephone—“Death of the Work of Art”—yesterday morning.

  Now it is raining, after snow and freezing rain when I woke up, a rather soothing afternoon. Perhaps it is a peaceful day because I steeped myself in the essay oh Fra Angelico in this month’s Smithsonian—it was a perfect opening to a day. The brilliance of his serenity which shines with such a special light through the blues, vermilions, fresh greens of his palette. I had not realized how marvelously he drew landscapes—Jerusalem in one painting.

  Yesterday I played Mozart’s Concerto in C Major while I wrote the poem.

  Thursday, December 11

  Foolishly, no doubt, I agreed to read the bound proof of a book by Stuart Miller called Painted In Blood—Understanding Europeans (Atheneum). I had plunged into Halperin’s The Life of Jane Austen like a pig in clover—and now have had to lay that pleasure aside while I read this negative assessment—negative on the whole—which the European in me does not want to hear. But it is healthy to face the deterioration in manners, for instance, and try to understand the reasons for it. What I miss in the mixture of anecdotes and history is style—just that is partly what makes Halperin so engaging, but he is writing from admiration and love as well as knowledge, and there is some sharp edge of grievance and irritation in Miller’s book.

  It has been said before but hit me again with the truth that the only successful revolution in history is the American one. Maybe that is because we were so far away from our former ruler, Great Britain—and the British did not boil with rage for generations after it. I have been surprised at some French friends who wish for the ancien régime even now.

  Friday, December 12

  Yesterday I heard from Casyn Van Till that his mother, Hannie (Baronesse H.P.J. Van Till), had died and today I have been thinking of her and that she was one of the only heroes I have known. She came into my life because she read Joanna and Ulysses and was delighted by it. I still remember on a black winter day in Nelson the thrill it was to get a letter in a bold hand from a Dutch baronesse! Later she came to Belgium and we had a long romantic walk in the great beech forest, La Fôret de Soignes, and the next year I stayed with her for a week. Later she came to Nelson. Since then we have corresponded.

  She was a friend of the old queen, Wilhelmina, with whom she went on painting trips—Hannie painted birds and flowers (she was a passionate bird watcher) in a direct, naturalistic style. A boyish figure with a loud laugh and an immense capacity for enjoyment, she was for years head of Queen Juliana’s household, and her husband Hans, aide-de-camp to Prince Bernhard. But there was nothing stuffy or snobbish about her at all. And when I saw her last she was living alone—Hans had died, her two sons were married—in a tiny house in Eemnes, a small village. She had made a studio of a shed and there she worked, painting tiles and water colors of birds. One day her neighbor, an old poacher she told me, came in great excitement to say, “I must be crazy, but yesterday while I was smoking a pipe on the bench by the back door, I swear I saw the queen’s dog run down to the river! Was I dreaming?” Of course Juliana came to see Hannie, driving herself, and incognita—and Hannie did confess that he had not been dream
ing. I can imagine the twinkle in her eye.

  Why was she a hero? Because her husband, a naval officer, had been aide-de-camp of the governor of Java in World War II. Of course they were taken prisoners by the Japanese—Hans interned in a rather comfortable prison for men and Hannie in a concentration camp for ten thousand women and children. She was there for four years and somehow survived and brought her two boys, then four and six, I believe, through that hell.

  Every morning in the steaming heat they were forced to stand at attention for the Japanese officers for one hour. Hannie often carried her sons on her shoulders. Those who fainted or died were never seen again.

  Hannie’s job was to make the coffins so she was taken to measure the dying every morning. How she managed to make them with almost no tools, no proper wood, nothing that might have made it easy, I do not know. The commandant also sent her out at night in a truck with soldiers to steal anything he might need—once, a garage door. So they had something of a relationship.

  He himself went crazy whenever there was a full moon, danced and tipped over the huge cauldrons from which the inmates soup was dished out. So whenever the moon was full, a number of women and children died as one day without food in a state of near starvation killed them off. Hannie made the coffins but neither she nor any other prisoner had ever seen where the coffins went. When she managed to bring the commandant the door he had wanted, he asked her what she wanted as a reward and she answered “to go with a coffin to the cemetery.”

  He granted her request. It happened that the coffin that day contained the body of a child whom Hannie had heard feverishly begging for an orange. The child never got his orange; in fact, prisoners never saw fresh fruit. There, in the cemetery, however, a bowl of fruit was laid in the Japanese mores on top of the earth. Hannie, for once, lost her control, and screamed and shouted at the guards and tore the Japanese flag down. Of course she was taken at once to the commandant who struck her across the face and pushed her into a corner. She felt sure she would be shot.

  Instead when they were alone he asked her to explain her rage—and she told him about the child and the oranges. The next day, a never-to-be-forgotten day, a train load of oranges was delivered to the camp.

  Making coffins was not the only thing Hannie did—once a week she managed to crawl through the sewage pipes to the fence around the camp and there one of her former Chinese servants came to tell her the war news. Then she crawled back—through one mile or more of filth—and through a network she had set up conveyed the news to the prisoners.

  She told me no one would have survived if they had known how long it would be before they were freed—four long years. And when at last the Japanese were beaten, a Dutch naval officer in immaculate whites flew in by helicopter, an unbelievable sight. Hannie was still wearing the one dress she had on when she was imprisoned.

  All of this poured out in the times when we were together—and also the bitterness because when she finally got home and went to tell the old queen, Wilhelmina said, “Don’t tell me. It is too horrible.”

  I know Hannie wanted me to tell her story and I wish I could have done it sooner—although perhaps she would not have wished to seem to criticize the queen whom she dearly loved. Yet she did tell me.

  Heroism has been inherited. For she wrote me a few years ago, when her son Casyn was a naval officer on a destroyer in the Indian Ocean, that Queen Juliana had just called on the phone to say, “I have just awarded Casyn the highest decoration in my power for his heroic saving, at the risk of his life, of a man who had jumped overboard.”

  It is hard to believe that Hannie is dead—so vital, so alive she was—although the last years have been hard, her legs paralyzed from diabetes. May you rest in peace, H.P.J. Baronnesse van Till-Tutein Nolthenius, and may there be lots of birds you have never seen on earth, in heaven!

  Saturday, December 13

  I treasure what my old friend Patience Ross wrote in a Christmas message from England. Now in her eighties, she was my agent in London from 1939 on, until she retired.

  I know it’s useless to bid you save your energies—and in a way, making the effort generates the needed strength—as I hope it will be for me. You have always been a giver—a source-person—making time (one’s only unstorable wealth) for so many, yet always as one-to-one with your whole self. I want to thank you so much for that unique gift—and to honour you for your great Act of Work in your whole life.

  Could I ever receive a better Christmas present than that?

  Wednesday, December 17

  Quite a fall of snow—Pierrot dashed out into it and was gone for an hour, then spent a long time licking his big paws.

  It’s hard to write here when my desk is so crowded with lists of “not to forget”—but one of the best things about Christmas is hearing from friends like Liz Knies in Japan.

  On Monday I had a lovely adventure. I’m so rarely out at night that I was dazzled, as I drove into Portsmouth to have dinner with Dorothy Molnar, little Sarton’s mother, by all the lights and lit-up trees all over York. I felt like a child at a feast of lights. The most beautiful are the white clapboard houses where the decoration is a single candle in each window. I came home via Kittery and there too are prodigies of invention. The poorest houses have become magic palaces, sometimes windows and doors outlined in many colored lights. Sometimes a single tree has been decorated with tiny white lights.

  It reminded me that Judy and I in the old Cambridge days always went out on Christmas Eve for a walk across Massachusetts Avenue where people were not academics and the houses were all lit up.

  Later

  I saw Dr. Petrovich at noon, the first visit since August and he was surprised and happy to find my heart beating away in sync. So to celebrate this excellent report I have made brownies to take to Eleanor Blair if we don’t have the big storm which is expected. It’s very white and black outside now, dark clouds over a dark gray ocean, and new snow, about two inches, that fell last night.

  Bill Heyen has sent a wonderful Christmas poem—the first time I have felt that shiver in my bones of what Christmas is all about:

  Lord

  of poised rocks shimmering in moonshine,

  Lord of matter, and more;

  Lord of being,

  Lord of myself and the deep notes of tides,

  creatures, trees tending toward me

  almost beyond hearing,

  reciprocal Lord of nothing, and all,

  Lord of mica,

  Lord of the harbor’s light and haze,

  I place this song

  in my trembling book of praise.

  Thursday, December 18

  One of those days when gremlins are hard at work! The refrigerator is not defrosting. I’m waiting for a man to come, and actually found someone who says he will; the roof of the closed-in porch where I live when I am not up here in my study leaks—so three containers now are strewn around, nothing to do till the ice melts, I guess. Bruce Woods, the nicest man in the world, has been here to put in two extra plugs in the attic, so the sound machine that terrifies red squirrels can be plugged in there and the wire not go under the door to the office—and getting a plug to work in the office so I can get Nancy some proper light. Eleanor is here cleaning!

  It is now ten in the morning and I’m exhausted, but Nancy and I did manage to set up the adorable small tree in the library and the wreath hung, so that room is on the way to Christmas. Pierrot meanwhile has had a fine morning rushing about up and down stairs and into everything.

  The expected storm makes me rather nervous about the trip to Cambridge this afternoon and then Wellesley tomorrow from there—and I slept badly, wondering whether to call it off.

  Sunday, December 21

  Now it is Sunday—the porch roof is still leaking but is gradually drying out, but the fridge is working again and a new fan will be installed before noon. Again such a comforting man came to work on it. So things are more or less under control.

  The storm was
rain not snow. Had it been snow about twenty-two inches would have piled in! But the driving rain from the southeast made the leak worse and Edythe had to bring in a tall rubbish can from the kitchen. In Cambridge in the familiar guest room at Cora DuBois’s, I listened to the rain lashing the windows and wondered what was happening here.

  It was an interesting contrast to be first with Cora and Jeanne Taylor and then to drive off to have lunch with Eleanor Blair in Wellesley on Friday. Cora is now eighty-five and Jeanne my age, and Jeanne has to do everything now, even to cooking dinner, although Cora lays things out, peels potatoes, etc., ahead of time. Cora suffers from a rather despairing old age, is glum, and with some reason as her good eye was operated on unsuccessfully some years ago. As a famous anthropologist, to be deprived of reading for more than an hour or so is frustrating, to put it mildly. She had major intestinal surgery for cancer two years ago. “I am a recluse,” she says, and it is true for she stays at home all the time. How does Jeanne survive? I admire her spirit for she is determined not to sink into lethargy, the quagmire, and manages to do some writing, to go out, to see friends.

  But who really lives in that house now? Only the adored tiger cat who is suddenly thin—I have not been there for a year of course—and old though his luminous eyes do not waver. But it is tragic to see Cora so wasted—having in some deep way repudiated her own life.

  It was walking right into life to walk into Eleanor Blair’s little house in Wellesley and to be warmly welcomed—and there was such a Christmasy feeling everywhere I looked: a tiny tree in the front parlor, already decorated and with presents around it. Eleanor’s eyes were shining and we had a good talk over our sherry, but Mitzi, her cat, was nowhere to be seen and did not come up from the cellar while I was there. Eleanor still manages alone but what she needs is someone who will read aloud to her. For instance, mail piles up and sometimes it is days before anyone turns up. A regular visitor to do a few odd jobs would do the trick.