by May Sarton
I did do the duck poem but it is still not quite right.
Edythe comes soon to help me take the tree down, a yearly ritual we each enjoy. I packed up Lee’s crèche yesterday after Maggie left.
Tuesday, January 6
Yesterday Dr. Petrovich’s office was closed. I had hoped to have the nurse do a “strip” to see whether my heart is fibrillating as I fear it may be. No luck but I’ll try again this morning.
I saw the sun rise, a perfect crimson globe in an orange sky in the center of my bedroom window. Only in winter does it rise precisely in the center.
Snow everywhere looks wonderful, so bountiful and clean. But how many animals I never see leave their footprints! From my windows up here I see swathes a foot deep, deer no doubt, and are the smaller tracks raccoon? Gray squirrels? The night must be full of coming and going but I never hear a sound. It is eerie. Pierrot is still afraid, stays out for a half hour and then is glad to come in and races up and down the stairs, in and out of the library, leaping up in the air in mock terror at a catnip mouse—flinging rugs here and there like a whirlwind. He is exhilarated by all the dangers outside, and having been a little frightened, then shows he is still Lord in this house!
I finally screwed up my courage to write Mary-Leigh a note about some small things that need to be fixed. The doorknob to the porch where I live and look at television came off in my hands two nights ago when I was calling Pierrot. He came, but I was nearly locked out because the front door was locked—nerve-wracking moment, but I did succeed in prying the door open. The back door’s lock fastener falls out all the time but does work when pushed back in. The door to the other porch where the summer furniture is stored can’t be locked since the huge rains we had before Christmas have swollen the wood. Little things, but they eat into peace of mind.
But then where is peace of mind these days? I am scattered into fragments of this or that every day.
Wednesday, January 7
Yesterday was a tumult of irritations but at two-thirty the rhythm strip at Dr. Petrovich’s office showed no fibrillation. My heart is in sync still! I had been so sure it was back at its old tricks that I was bowled over. Wonderful relief.
I had felt restless all morning and decided to rush in to Jordan Marsh in Portsmouth and try to get a snowsuit for my godchild Heather Miriam in Knoxville. I had ordered one for her for Christmas and only knew the other day that it had been out of stock because my check was reimbursed. There was hardly a snowsuit to be seen, but I did find a size two, elegant, down-filled lavender coat reduced from fifty-five to thirty-five dollars. Staggering what infant clothing costs! On the way back I suddenly thought of taking some cooked shrimp to Keats and Marguerite. I got a pound which turned out to be a whole lot. Home at noon I read the mail which contained a request for a recommendation that Brad Daziel at Westbrook get his richly deserved full professorship and a request that I read poems on a cassette for the Carmelites who are being celebrated with a special Mass by their friends in Indianapolis.
I cooked and shelled about forty-five shrimp before my lunch—and ate five or six for my lunch—awfully good! But these “things to do” weighed on me plus I felt terribly anxious about what the rhythm strip might show.
On the way to the doctor’s office the car made strange rattling sounds. I thought it might be the shovel I keep in the back, but when I stopped for gas the old man at the station looked under the car and advised me to get help. Something was wrong with the muffler. It was then one forty-five, so I dashed out to Starkey Ford and they did have a muffler which they put in in forty-five minutes. Bill: one hundred fifty-four dollars. Money pours out of me like blood these days. But at least it is done and I can set out to have lunch with Keats and Marguerite today without anxiety.
I came home longing for rest, and did lie down for twenty minutes, then came up here and roughed out the letter for Brad’s committee—also wrote a short note to Maggie Vaughan, including a page of this journal where she is praised which I hope will please her.
Pierrot follows me around these days when he only stays out for a half hour in the deep snow. Yesterday he was a treasure of affection but last night and this morning he is his old belligerent, macho self—he managed to knock my glasses off the bed table and broke the frame which Lee had glued together for me. I have a new pair coming from New York and am wearing my spare pair now.
I have packed the tiny coat for Heather and shall take it to the post office on my way.
What an interrupted solitude this can be!
Thursday, January 8
I set out a little before ten to drive to Bedford to have lunch with Keats and Marguerite. I never got to them at Christmas because Keats suffered a long seige of flu. How precious it was to be with them again! This time they had prepared lunch. I brought shrimp all cooked and shelled for their lunch tomorrow. As usual we talked about the state of the world. They are deeply aware of all that goes on. “How shall we live with Reagan for another two years?” Marguerite agreed that Sam Nunn might be presidential material. Keats is reading the biography of Vanessa Bell.
I left bearing a bottle of Mouton-Cadet which they had kept for me since Christmas, beautifully wrapped in flowery paper. At ninety-four and ninety, Keats and Marguerite will not go on forever and this time I left them knowing how precious they are and have been for years—the elder statesmen one turns to for trust and faith.
I keep forgetting to say that at last I am reading for pleasure. Dorothy Jones sent me Patricia MacLachlan’s small masterpiece—it won the Newbery awards—Sarah, Plain and Tall, and I read it one morning when I was low in my mind, and found myself in tears. Such a pure style, such reality of imagining! And at last I am back to Jane Austen into which I dive every night with extreme pleasure. Keats does not like Jane Austen. “It is all about women wanting to find husbands,” she said. This made me smile, it is so characteristic. She is passionately interested in anything about Bloomsbury.
When I got home at four the roof in the porch was leaking again and the floor soaking wet. Luckily I bought plastic pails last time. At the moment I am again in a chaos of the undone, wondering whether my desk will ever be cleared again.
Later
A very hard day. Thinking of other people’s needs—and crying with frustration. I finally took five minutes to make a few notes for a poem. Somewhere on my desk I found this note: “I feel like an animal in a cage, and the cage is kindness. The bars are what keep me in prison, what I feel I owe, what someone else needs, the so much wanted response.”
So today the morning went up in smoke. It took Nancy and me to manage to put a few poems on a cassette for the Carmelites—for the Mass in their honor. They would never have asked me. It took the best of the precious morning. I wrote to a good poet in northern Maine, a woman who had been badly beaten and forced to move away from where she was living—sent a check. She is a good poet but unfortunately depends on “pot” to write and so gets into trouble. I wrote a Sister of Bon Secours who has poured herself out to me in long letters and yesterday a cassette. I might as well say it now. The letter by cassette demands three-quarters of an hour of listening to a stranger. I can read a letter in a few minutes. It is so imperious—this business of a cassette. I will not listen. It sounds cruel, no doubt, but since my whole life goes into responding day after day, where is three-quarters of an hour more to come from?
It is certainly at present a life of quiet desperation. I am nearly at the end of what I can ask of this self I bury alive every day for the sake of strangers.
Friday, January 9
I wish sometimes I had never written all those books that attract people like deer to a salt lick. I am almost licked to death.
I couldn’t sleep last night and around midnight I went to the window in my bedroom and was dazzled by the moonlight on the snow and the extremely brilliant stars. I saw the Pleiades rather near the horizon under Orion—it was thrilling. Pierrot often lies now on top of a suitcase which is held on the arms of a rath
er stiff armchair. From there he can look out and himself looks handsome, a white tiger. I wonder whether he sees the stars. He seems to be looking very intently at something.
Of course everything is brilliant in the snow dazzle since the storm. When I came home on Wednesday after Bedford, it was just after four and the sun was setting right in front of me as I swung onto the private road. It was a marvelous crimson globe going down and quite bearable to my eyes—an amazing sight through the dark pines and the snowdrifts.
Yesterday the cardinal was at the feeder again.
Saturday, January 10
In bed this morning looking out on a very black sky, ominous, I read Alexander Brook’s obituary for his mother Peggy Bacon. Rare the son who can so celebrate a mother, and rare the mother—and grandmother—whom Peggy Bacon was. She died at ninety-one.
Her son, Alexander, in a more personal appreciation, remembers, “She was the ultimate creative person, recognized early in life, but rewarded only later with public acknowledgement of the merit of the great bulk and variety of her work and talents, never in the usual sense, with money or the things that money can buy. Neither ambition nor desire corrupted her. She wrote and drew and painted and etched and embroidered and the rest for the pleasure she gave herself in giving pleasure to her friends, only incidentally to pay her modest bills. To the world of her later life she was withdrawn; to the people she loved she was the ultimate giver, grateful for her friends, indifferent to critics, tender toward all sufferers, human and otherwise—an extraordinary person in her modesty, intellect, and sensitivity. Noble is not too strong a description.”
After I came up here I was absorbed in planning what to say about journal keeping at Radcliffe on Tuesday. Suddenly I looked out and saw that the world had vanished behind a thick white veil—a predicted snowstorm was starting early! It was about eight-thirty. Because of going to Cambridge Monday, I needed to get my wild old hair washed and curled—I was in a panic and decided to fly out immediately and take a chance that Donna, good friend and my hairdresser for the past ten years, could fit me in somehow although my appointment was for eleven. It was slippery even then, with half an inch of snow over ice.
Now it is ten forty-five. My hair looks fine. I have just called Eleanor to read the obituary of Peggy Bacon whom she knew well, for Eleanor owned a house with Cecile de Banke in Cape Porpoise.
I remember how tiny Bacon’s house was and how it was packed with paintings, cartoons, embroidered pillows of hers—a Beatrix Potter house it seemed to me. I felt she had a wonderful sense of life, loving what she made, making it with the total absorption of a happy child.
Wednesday, January 14
My instinct was right that the talk about keeping a journal to a journal writing group in the Radcliffe Seminars would be difficult. A two-hour session without material other than my own seemed an ordeal. The backlash was severe. I do not want to talk about myself except by reading poems. I am bored by analyzing why I do something I do. I have never pretended to be a critic nor an academic person. I had worked for at least ten hours last week trying to put something invigorating together and finding passages to quote. I hate rereading myself. But Dorothy Wallace who has always been like a great warm sun—I used to call her “the sun”—had invited me and arranged to pay my usual fee—and to put me up at the new posh Charles Hotel in Cambridge. How could I refuse?
I must describe the horrors of two nights in a glitzy hotel. I arrived at eleven—it had been arranged that I could check in early. A huge empty lounge. The woman at the registration desk did not say “Welcome” or anything remotely like that, but demanded that I give her my American Express card to copy in case not everything would be paid for. She did not say, “Enjoy your stay.” In fact the atmosphere was frigid.
On the way up I told the nice luggage man that first impressions were all important in the hotel business as in any other. If people do not feel welcome they will not come back. I would not come back, I told him.
The suite was very cold, though well-designed. A round table with four straight chairs on one side of the living room, with a bar counter behind it, and a tiny bedroom with a double bed in it, and a television set and that’s about all. I found it claustrophobic if I closed the shuttered door.
No flowers. During those two days I missed flowers and silence terribly—and Pierrot.
I had noticed men working in the hall and they made a lot of noise hammering and papering all morning.
At twelve the phone rang and it was Janine to say Marian Christy from the Globe was here and could they come up. Janine is P.R. for the Unitarian Universalist Association—which was launching a new magazine the World and honoring me at a reception on Tuesday and had set up the interviews. The front desk called to ask if I had an appointment with Janine. I realized why when she came up with Marian Christy from the Globe. Janine is black, a charming, sensitive young woman. I was furious. She had called me a few moments before herself to be sure it was all right to come up. The racism upset me.
I don’t want to talk about the interview which was deliberately challenging, an adversary interview. Christy had not read anything of mine. Her questions were obtuse and domineering. A bad combination.
Finally at around one-thirty, exhausted and starving, I ordered a Martini, oysters and a glass of milk sent up—and prepared, after I had eaten, to lie down and sleep if possible.
At two-thirty a sharp knock on the door roused me from a doze and when I opened it a man was there “to put in a new sink.” Mind-boggling. Was I so crazy that I had washed my hands without a sink? It turned out to be a round gold sink on the bar counter. It was soon done. A few minutes later I heard someone creeping around in my living room. I got up and found a bowl of fruit, cheese and crackers from the management. It would have been great to find them there earlier when I was starving.
At some point, I guess before the interview, I realized that the suite was icy cold. I called housekeeping and a half hour later a man came with a blanket and discovered the heat was turned off! By three it was very hot and I turned it off
I must admit that once it was dark things warmed up—and the view was pleasing from the tenth floor, with a small piece of the river and a lovely sky to be seen between buildings. The hotel is built around a square, centered still now by a huge lighted Christmas tree.
Thursday, January 15
I finally did get some rest and at five Janine brought Rosemary Bray from Ms for an hour’s interview. Bray is a heart-warming, sensitive, highly intelligent black woman. The atmosphere was supportive. She had read me, discovered Journal of a Solitude last summer and went on from there. We had an immediate bond as she was a scholarship student at the Parker School in Chicago where Katherine Taylor taught before she was called to be head of Shady Hill. From there Bray went to Yale. Our rapport was instant and the interview was a pleasure.
Poor Dorothy Wallace had a twenty-four hour virus and could not have dinner with me, a real blow as I long to see her. I had dinner sent up.
Tuesday was a killer and I am not going to say more than that a five to seven reception in my honor at the Unitarian Universalist Association on Beacon Street and dinner afterward nearly finished me.
But the saving grace was the drive from Cambridge to Beacon Street with a charming Unitarian minister. There was a full moon, the “wolf” moon, and all my nostalgia for Cambridge and Boston came back as we drove along the river, looking out on all the lighted buildings, across the river, and even criss-crossed the Hill to avoid the worst of the traffic. It is magical still at night, especially since the old-fashioned gas lamps—now electric of course—have been installed.
The brilliant scene was my reward and I was happy and relieved to go to bed at last around nine. At ten I was half-asleep when a sharp knock came at my door, then another. I got up, rather scared, and was terrified when I heard a key in the lock and the door being opened. I shouted, “Go away.” A man’s voice said, “Sorry,” and the door closed. I ran to the phone, pre
ssed the emergency button and said, “Someone is trying to get into my room.” “We’ll send Security up,” said the cool front desk woman. It took fifteen minutes. I could hear people conferring in the hall. Finally a knock. I opened to three men: a young blond in work clothes; the security guard, a black; and an assistant manager. They explained the front desk had sent the engineer up to check the suites. They had not bothered to find out I was in one of them! I was furious. It was then after ten and suddenly the exhaustion of the day and a bad fright brought on hysterical tears. I called the front desk and asked them to send a nurse or doctor who could give me a sedative. They did not apologize for what had happened!
Fifteen minutes later the manager and security came again to explain they would send for an ambulance. No doctor could be reached. It was becoming really hilarious, like a Lily Tomlin show. I said, “No, the last thing I need is an ambulance, but maybe you could bring me some hot milk and brandy.” In a half hour they brought it and explained also how to double-lock the door. But I couldn’t do that because if I had heart failure no one could get in!
Then I finally went to bed. A half hour later, another knock—the engineer. He thought the other two would be found with me! Incredible!
So that is life in a glitzy hotel. Lord, deliver us. I kept thinking of the Ritz and the Algonquin, shabby, comfortable, with beautiful antique furniture in every room.
I found a wonderful quote in Newsweek from Lily Tomlin’s show, in a column by George Wills, curiously enough:
A bag lady is speaking: “I made some studies, and reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it. I can take it in small doses, but as a lifestyle I found it too confining.”
And now off to the vet with Pierrot to get his nails clipped.
