After the Stroke

by May Sarton

  She is still delighted by, for instance, her geranium window where Mitzi loves to sit. She listens to “All Things Considered” and also to the books for the blind which are read aloud. She is very aware politically and in fact is alive in the sense of enjoying life. She will be ninety-three next summer.

  Monday, December 22

  I never did finish because Jabber called from St. Louis and Karen Hodges in Texas returned my call. Karen and I have been out of touch for over a year, so I was relieved to hear that things go well with her and that Emily is applying to several colleges in the East, including Wellesley where Karen graduated with honors. Christmas does bring in the network scattered all over the country. After supper Doris called from Berkeley.

  But the best event of the day was at eleven in the morning when Edythe came for our yearly decorating of the tree, this year a small elegant tree with a perfect cone shape. The image of last year’s tree burning up is in everyone’s mind. I discovered that far from all the ornaments being destroyed, there are still quite a few left. How did they survive? For a second, looking at boxes filled with the shiny ornaments—red, gold, blue, green—which used to be so common and are now unobtainable, I felt under a spell as though they had been recreated by some magic wand—the loaves and the fishes. I thought there was nothing left to save. The tree went up in a few seconds—filling the room with terrifying black smoke. How did I manage to put it out? Thanks partly to Mary-Leigh’s placing of large fire extinguishers on each floor. Partly to my wild fear that the whole house might go.

  Anyway, yesterday Edythe and I had fun savoring the tiny ornaments I had bought in Louisville and elsewhere. This exquisite tree is not easy to deck because it has been shaped and thick needles rather than supportive twigs and branches are slippery for hanging on ornaments. Many we simply laid on the tree, a mouse in a sleeping bag for one. I was happy to find the reindeer in a glass bauble safe and sound and especially, mirabile dictu, the star Judy and I always had on our tree.

  I had written ten or twelve notes that morning before eleven and was tired—by afternoon a deflated wreck. I rested for two hours. A rough night as I had a hacking cough which has turned into a real head cold today, and poor Pierrot threw up lavishly on three rugs in the middle of the night.

  Wednesday, December 24

  I feel rather starved for time and space, although the sun is out and the fuchsia is out, today, against hard weather. How to try to keep afloat and not simply drown in the wild accumulations that Christmas brings to this house? Little by little, it fills up with chocolates, presents for under the tree, long letters and innumerable cards, and while it does I feel poorer all the time—and rich only in lists of what still has to be done. Chiefly more white candles if I can find them, oysters for Lee tonight—scalloped oysters were Judy’s and my usual Christmas Eve fare for supper—a chicken to roast for tomorrow, and the tenderloin roast for the twenty-sixth when Anne and Barbara come. I dashed into Portsmouth and got vegetables yesterday—and hoped for persimmons but there were none.

  In a way having my hair done is good—I have to sit down for a half hour there and glance through the mail. Two days ago it took me two hours to read it and it was too much for me. By half past one my old bones only long for rest. And perhaps also for one central person instead of this multitude—why? Because my response can’t be in depth, and the cards I send out are hardly more than a word to say I am well again. Guilt and starvation move in.

  Last year a fan made cards, and sent me a few. The message was a quote from somewhere in the journals: “Everyone at a certain point in the pre-Christmas shuffle must long to … think quietly about friends and loves and ways toward renewal.…”

  It made me feel better to copy it out.

  And now to answer … one or two of the multitude.

  Saturday, December 27

  Lee left early this morning. It was awfully good to see her after a whole year—for I was too ill to have her here on my birthday—but I have laryngitis, have warded off a bad cold with aspirin, but the three days of Christmas here were a little too much. I kept feeling I was being buried under paper, wrapping, things, food. Two big dinners to cook on the day for Janice, Edythe, Lee and me and then yesterday for Lee, Janice, Anne and Barbara. The table looked beautiful with a white cloth strewn with violets—the pattern is violets—two deep red roses in the center with the silver candlesticks and tall white candles. The tenderloin roast about which I felt terribly anxious turned out perfectly. We had a great Haut-Médoc Bordeaux Lee had brought, and for dessert vanilla ice cream with crème de menthe and pineapple macadamia cake from Joan Palevsky.

  Why do I talk about food when it was the spiritual food of being together and the good talk that really nourished? Why I talk about it is that I realize the energy expended reduces even my spiritual hunger to near zero.

  So the magic moment came last night when I was turning out lights alone downstairs and for a moment stood in the library with only the small tree lit up, a poignant light—very beautiful and quieting. Alone with the tree I felt suddenly at peace.

  I have just answered a letter from Jean Anderson in Seattle—she who sent me a fabulous huge box filled with red and white packages of Belgian goodies, and even a card of Ghent. It took my breath away when I opened it. I really am a spoiled old critter.

  But even more of a present was this she sent me by Rene Daumel:

  You cannot stay on the summit forever, you just have to come down again.

  So why bother in the first place?

  There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regime by the memory of what we saw higher up.

  When one can no longer see, we can at least still know.

  Sunday, December 28

  Yesterday I was a failure and was swept by a storm of tears, facing what is on this desk, what must be answered, what will never be answered although it should be. I have lived now for more than a month in a sort of dry frustration. I feel unable to deal with my life, with the too-muchness of it. All through December I have gone to bed with books in proof I am asked to blurb, first the one about Europe that made me feel so ambivalent and cross, now for the last week Mary Elsie Robertson’s novel Family Life. This is a very good novel and will be easy to praise but I felt imprisoned, shackled when I went to bed exhausted and could not choose what to read—Elizabeth Bowen’s collected essays, two novels by Primo Levi I long to get at.

  When Mary DeShazer’s book Inspiring Women arrived a few days ago, I was exhilarated to see it out (Pergamon Press). It is about the muse as Bogan, H.D., Sarton, Rich and Lorde have experienced her. Of course I read the chapter on me first—no time yet to read it all as I shall of course. It is a fascinating book. Then when I read the later chapter on my friendship with Bogan, it was like a drop of poison and gave me sleepless nights. It is time perhaps that the question was asked, “Why did Bogan never give Sarton credit for her work? Why is the tone patronizing?”

  During the time we were friends my book of poems In Time Like Air was a candidate for the National Book Award and in the same year my novel Faithful Are the Wounds was a candidate. I know of no other writer who had two books in two genres nominated in the same year.

  It has taken me a long time to be honest about Louise Bogan because I loved and admired her so much. But now at nearly seventy-five I must admit that the explanation may well be jealousy. At a time when she almost ceased to write poems, I was producing a lot, in three fields. Chapters of I Knew a Phoenix were appearing in The New Yorker the year after I began seeing her.

  I am tired of everyone—under Limmer’s delighted guidance—quoting a letter Bogan wrote to Limmer that said “If only she [Sarton] would stop writing sentimental poems! I had her take out two mentions of ‘kittens’ from one poem. ‘Cats’ yes, ‘kittens’ no.”

  First Bogan lied. I did not change “kittens” to “cats” for this was a really felt poem about two of the wild kittens who both died, and the poem is not a poem for Hallmark, but really about our r
esponsibility toward the animals we tame. Here it is:

  The two sick kittens, round-eyed, stare

  As if I were the one to be tamed

  Or give them what they ask by being there.

  Nothing between us can be simply claimed,

  But I, as nurse, can touch the heavy head

  With what should be a tongue but is a hand,

  And all night long they purr upon my bed,

  Their presence there at all like a command.

  Who can resist the sad animal gaze

  That takes us in so close always to fear,

  So close to pain, where violence obeys

  That deeper instinct that would have us near,

  And pays the price, for what? For human love?

  Whatever they implore that we must give.

  But what is hard to take is the contemptuous “I had her take out” etc.

  Bogan certainly gave me fruitful advice. But I was not, as everyone now seems to believe, her acolyte. She was never a muse for me. Because at the root of our friendship there was no real generosity on her part. Always the tone was patronizing, or condescending.

  Later

  I have now written the Greek family I helped for twenty years while their little girls grew up; Kyoko, my Japanese friend who was my guide when I was there in 1962; a Sister of Bon Secours who has started to pour out her life as she lies terribly ill; Marian Shields whom I also have never seen but to whom I have been writing for years. Marian sends me touching cards and messages and I admire her because she has kept her sense of humor, surrounded as she is by “dull people” in the nursing home.

  Wednesday, December 31

  The last day of this bad old year full of illness, depression and death. I write that, it is the truth, yet it makes me laugh at the same time. For really, in spite of all my complaining, I am happy deep down inside me and that happiness turned into a short lyric two days ago.

  But I am having to face at long last the unhealed wound of Bogan’s attitude toward my work. She did not, could not, perhaps, respect it as it deserves. But does it deserve to be?

  What all this does is to exacerbate and bring to the surface all my doubts about the value in the long run of what I have achieved.

  Bogan was an extremely good critic but could not bring herself to praise me in print—as a poet. So either she was right and I have given my life to a crazy delusion, or she was wrong. And if she was wrong and perhaps knew she was being “mean-spirited”—one of her favorite words—then jealousy is the only explanation. Both of these possible explanations cause extreme psychic disturbance in me. At night I pace around inside my head like a caged animal who can find no rest.

  It would help if the correspondence between us could at last be published. Bogan’s letters to me are at the Berg Collection in New York and mine to her at Amherst College’s library—in all about two hundred. But Ruth Limmer’s hostility and sneering attitude toward that relationship has, so for, stood in the way. At least it is now understood in academic circles that she has chosen to do so.

  Lately I have felt covered with wounds like a tattoo—everywhere I look in the past there is pain. Why then am I on the whole a cheerful person and as someone writes me these days “a life-giver”? Why haven’t I given up long ago? What has kept me going? Partly I have to admit the need for money. I am used to giving a good deal—in this last week for example, seven hundred dollars suddenly needed when Medicare gave out for an eighty-six-year-old friend who has had major surgery. Medicare paid for two weeks in a nursing home. I paid for the third.

  In these last years I have felt rich, but when I was ill I realized that I have been rich because I was producing so much. What if illness or fatigue, the fatigue of old age takes over? I have no large amount of capital. A year in a nursing home would leave me dependent. So the necessity to earn has always been a spur.

  But deeper than that is that I feel happy when I am working on a poem. “My cup runneth over with joy.” Sometimes the poem has come as the direct result of a wound. Everything is part of the whole person, so tattoo, an external pattern imposed from outside, is not an accurate image. The wounds, I suppose, teach—force to resolve, to surmount, to transcend. I will not be put down permanently like a dying animal. I can recover and go on creating.

  New Year’s Day 1987

  An open brilliant day to start the New Year, Pierrot, very affectionate, purring beside me at five in the morning—still dark—and the warm joy I feel when Karen Saum is in the house. She drove down from H.O.M.E. last night and we had lobsters—what an event these days—and the end of Maggie Vaughan’s plum pudding—and sat with the tree and talked about our lives. Karen now has twelve students in her two-year college program connected with Unity College. Her eyes shine when she talks about three students, among the very poor, those to whom H.O.M.E. has been a lifeline. Imagine what being able to go to college means! A man who taught philosophy at Notre Dame but left because he got fed up with academic life is among the professors. Karen herself teaches history.

  Off she went into the sunlight at eight this morning after helping me fill and put up the bird feeders.

  Today the New Year feels heavy because I’m afraid my heart may be fibrillating again. I feel spent—not surprising considering all I have done through the season—but it is frightening, of course. It may be simply the result of a dry cough—I had laryngitis through a week of the festivities—and everyone teased me about my “sexy” voice.

  I hope so much to be well in this New Year—to stay well, I mean. Last year was hard but I did learn a lot about Brother Ass, the poor old body and the heavy heart that somehow goes on beating, God knows why. Not a lost year but I am glad to turn the leaf now and look forward.

  Friday, January 2

  We are having a real blizzard, about four inches of fluffy snow now, but it sounds like rain and will make a frightful mess. There is always excitement and a fear in the pit of the stomach when there is a real blizzard. The fear is of the electricity going out. So I have put candles around and got out on the kitchen counter the wonderful small cooker which works on butane and also one Huldah gave me which burns wood alcohol and is less scary to handle.

  There are to be tremendously high tides. Mary-Leigh and Beverly have boarded up the back of their house that faces the ocean she told me. They are terribly exposed right on the rocks, so there is also the danger of wind pressure on large areas of glass. I’m glad I’m up here on the Wild Knoll for which the house was named.

  Pierrot is sitting on the table in the porch looking out at the birds and into the strange white world. It makes the house feel very dark inside somehow.

  Meanwhile Maggie is driving her older sister down to Boston to meet a limousine which will take her to New York. Apparently there it is only rain. Maggie was to have come here on the way home and spend the night. I have oysters to scallop but they won’t last another day so we’ll have to see. Even in her Saab she’ll never make it out here—and we won’t be plowed of course until tomorrow when the storm has blown off to sea.

  I’m going to have a try at the duck poem. Yesterday, too tired, I messed it up in trying to revise—too many words! Now to prune and test for accuracy. I want to celebrate these ducks which have been my delight all through this year. I see them as I cross the causeway on my way to town—often in a single line and very funny because they are so various yet so evidently “a family.” The two geese are exotics with crests on their heads. The ducks are a pair of mallards and a white one.

  Sunday, January 4

  Maggie, intrepid person, did get through and walked in through the woods from the Firth’s road north of the house, which had been plowed. It was grand of her to make it and a comfort. It is rather lonely here, I must admit, in a bad storm. I have only seen this much snow here once before, about fourteen inches and of course huge drifts. Then in 1978 it drifted against all the doors and I could not get out for twenty-four hours. This time light and power stayed on.

 
Yesterday morning, with piles of stuff to work at on my desk, I did not notice that Pierrot disappeared. Luckily Maggie was still here. For nearly two hours we called and she shoveled around bushes where he might have been hiding. I felt hysterical with fear—convinced that the furies were planning, on top of all the rest, to take Pierrot from me.

  It was finally Maggie who shouted “I think I know where he is” from behind the house. There is a small cellar blocked out from the main one under the porch where summer furniture is stored. But the door was stuck—open enough for Pierrot to creep through, not big enough for a human being. Maggie finally forced it open about a foot and a half and I was able to squeeze through. A filthy dirt floor covered with pieces of insulation the red squirrels had no doubt dragged in there, some of which dangled from the low ceiling. I searched everywhere—no sign of the cat, no sound. Then Maggie came in and was able to push from the wall a heavy wooden door, and we saw Pierrot half-buried in the corner where he had tried to burrow himself in, not lifting his head, in a state of stark terror. I tore him out somehow and carried him in, filthy, his fluffy tummy oozing with wet dirt, but safe. Would I have ever found him without Maggie?

  Last night I woke up around midnight and somehow lived through his experience—felt the terror in myself—and saw in a flash that he must have been chased there by an animal too large to creep behind the door, too small to knock it over. A raccoon? A coyote? A fisher? It happened in broad daylight. But we had seen what looked like a large dog’s paw marks in the road when we went to get Maggie’s car. Now I am very relieved Pierrot has not asked to get out today.