After the Stroke

by May Sarton

  Not that letter which I treasure, but all the rest from unknowns silts me up till I feel crazy with frustration. What about my poems? What about my life?

  Wednesday, February 4

  What a difference the afternoon light makes in February, a tender light I have not been aware of since September, a light that lingers on now till past five. A pastel pale blue sky with small lavender clouds floating along, over white snow turning blue as the light fades and the gradually darkening slate blue of the ocean. This afternoon I stopped hurling myself at all I should be doing and sat here at my desk for an hour reading Robert Francis’s poems.

  So I’ll copy one here. It is hard to choose, as I remember when I was teaching at Harvard, a lowly instructor of English in 1950, how often I used Francis as an exemplar.

  Invitation

  You who have meant to come, come now

  With strangeness on the morning snow

  Before the early morning plow

  Makes half the snowy strangeness go.

  You who have meant to come, come now

  When only your footprints will show,

  Before one overburdened bough

  Spills snow above on snow below.

  You who were meant to come, come now.

  If you were meant to come, you’ll know.

  Friday, February 6

  The irony is that Robert Francis lived the life Robert Frost pretended to live and mythologized in his poems—for Francis was a solitary, lived on next to no money, grew his own food (he was a vegetarian) and had very little success. “What is more ludicrous than a successful poet,” Louise Bogan used to say.

  The difference is perhaps that where Francis lived close to the marrow, never married, and seems to have transcended conflict, Frost was always conflicted, treated his wife and children badly, must have known in his heart of hearts that he was terrible, a terrible person in many ways. The marvelous poems came out of constant struggle. Or the difference may be simply that Frost was a genius.

  But I want to place here another poem of Francis’s that does him justice. It is Part I of a poem called “Swimmer”:

  Observe how he negotiates his way

  With trust and the least violence, making

  The stranger friend, the enemy ally.

  The depth that could destroy gently supports him.

  With water he defends himself from water.

  Danger he leans on, rests in. The drowning sea

  Is all he has between himself and drowning.

  I decided to have a rhythm test yesterday as I was afraid my heart was out of sync. It only takes a few minutes and was well worth doing as the old heart is behaving in perfect sinus rhythm after all.

  For some reason the cold got to me yesterday—that icy wind that pierces one’s bones even though the sun was out. Today I have on long johns and two sweaters. That should do the trick.

  Jennings on ABC has been doing a segment on the homeless for the last three news reports. It does not seem believable that thousands of people five years ago or more were released from insane asylums with no provision for their future. The plan had been to set up halfway houses with some supervision. Without any follow-up, what did happen seems incredible. The federal government washed its hands of the problem and state governments simply let it happen and took no responsibility. We seem to be a Darwinian society now where the survival of the fittest means simply permitting the “unfit” to exist like animals, stray dogs or cats stealing from garbage cans. The dignity of some of these people is terribly moving as some of the photos last night showed.

  Andrew Young, the mayor of Atlanta, spent twenty-four hours with a companion, disguised as a street person. What he felt at the end was absolute exhaustion; it showed in his face. One wonders why there are not more suicides.

  The churches have done the impossible and feed hundreds every day, but they cannot do it all. They can’t afford to build houses.

  The key to all of this seems to be a kind of passivity on all our parts. We no longer believe that we can make things better. We have in an alarming way given up. I see it in myself. There is little in this journal about politics. What is the point, I have felt? And I have never felt as disassociated as I do now from the public realm.

  Is it old age? Or partly at least that corruption in every area finally corrodes the human wish to be of help? Why bother? It is the age of crooks. The Democrats were wildly extravagant “do-gooders,” we are told. Is it better to live as we do now under the aegis of liars and crooks?

  Sunday, February 8

  At five-thirty this morning the sun rose through a lemon-yellow sky, such a rare color of sunrise, and there were dark blue clouds low on the horizon—the morning star brilliant overhead.

  One reason I am in such a fix lately about correspondence is because I know so many people, now dead, whose biographies are being written and the authors want me to write from memory. In the last week I have heard from Muriel Rukeyser’s biographer, from Chick Austin’s biographer at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, about whether I have more H.D. letters. Yesterday a query from the University of Science and Technology in Ghent asking whether I have copies of my father’s dissertation!

  The problem in all this is not only time but my own reluctance to look backward into the past when my mind is concerned with the present and feels held back by contemplation of the past. After the stroke I was flooded with memories—as they say a dying person is—and I found it on the whole painful. Much of the past is never resolved, for one thing, or one has resolved it by going on, by surviving, and in my case by writing poems.

  I have not in earlier work said very much about Chick Austin’s kindness in offering to Associated Actors Theatre, while I was director, the theater in the Wadsworth Atheneum. We spent a winter in Hartford and produced three plays. I had hoped to find a new American play, to discover a playwright but although I read hundreds of plays through an agent in New York, nothing turned up. My actors felt cut off from New York. We had too little to do, and the year was not a great success for anybody. But Austin had been so generous I regret that we did not prove more able to meet that chance he gave us with a superior production.

  Chick himself was a kind of magician as far as it is possible to imagine from one’s idea of a museum director. He had immense style, for one thing. The air was brilliant around him, but what is rare is when brilliance and style are matched with imaginative kindness.

  Monday, February 9

  A blizzard is brewing and I must run out with the mail before it starts. Last night I had supper with Vicky and Glen Simon and their family in their new house. They used to be neighbors when they lived down the road in a big old ark, and I have missed them and their two children, Saul and Carie, now five and seven. I so rarely am part of family life these days it was quite an adventure.

  Vicky picked me up at five-thirty alone so we had fifteen minutes to talk on the way, and just time for me to be shown around the house before Glen arrived with the children. It is a long house, rooms opening into each other, except for the sleeping quarters, the children at one end, each with a room of his own, and the parents at the other end, so there is privacy in what is otherwise an open world. They heat mostly with a single wood stove. The house faces south and is almost entirely solar heated. I could not see in the dark the long stonewall that borders a large field with the woods beyond.

  Carie was anxious to show us the dance of the dwarfs she had been rehearsing for a production of Cinderella. Saul went off to make a journal—they have kept them in kindergarten. Carie has written two stories. They wanted to show off all these things and I was happy to be shown off to—up to a point. Then I suggested that I love Vicky and we must have a chance to talk.

  Vicky had said in the car that her problem was never having time to feel what she herself was experiencing. The children preempt her almost entirely.

  But as they ran in and out, we did have some talk. I had not known that she had worked in a nursing home when th
ey first came to Boston from Minneapolis—but after two months became ill from all the woe and bad treatment she witnessed. But of course she must have been a lifesaver at the home. She felt so badly about one old woman who had not been out for thirty years that she and Glen hired an ambulance and took her to the circus! Glen’s firm is now adding a wing to a nursing home in an old house in Portsmouth.

  We had a beautiful dinner of artichoke soup, salmon, and fresh asparagus, with splendiferous blueberry cheesecake for dessert. How dear of Vicky to take such trouble.

  The image I carried home with me was of Saul, climbing into her lap as we talked and covering her face with passionate kisses.

  Wednesday, February 11

  One reason I do not want to go back into the past, as when, after the stroke, I found myself in a maelstrom of memories, is because I am shocked that I could have loved so many people. Always when I realize this I remember Edith Kennedy saying once—not pejoratively—“You are facile emotionally.” That may be true for all I know, but it does not feel true. I think it is more that I learned before I was one year old to make roots very fast, to attach myself to someone out of sheer self-defense. In that first year in Wondelgem in Belgium, I was taken from my mother at least twice and for a month also before I was two. My mother must have been ill. Once my father took me to stay with friends, the Tordeurs, and told me years later that I cried so desperately in the train, that he cried himself. It may be that my mother went away somewhere for a month when I was one-and-a-half, after the birth of a little boy, who died almost at once. That time her adoring, much younger artist friend, Meta Budry, came from Geneva to take care of me. She threw me up in the air and played with me in enchanting ways, and I fell in love with her, I suppose, for I cried when my mother came back. Such radical disruption before the age of two could have made me close up, but had the opposite effect. And when we left Wondelgem in August 1914, when I was two-years-old, our carriage riding through ripe fields of wheat, with gray files of Germans marching in the distance, the life of refugees was just as disruptive or more so. Because now for two years we had no home. There was nowhere to make roots at all.

  And the beginning was traumatic. Belgian refugees were being “taken in” here and there in England, and my mother and I went by train to some “great house,” where we were put in a cold isolated barnlike bedroom because I had a high fever, which turned out to be measles. The owners might have been kind but were not in residence and as it was, the servants treated us like unwelcome trouble. My mother got measles and was very ill indeed. And the only saving grace was the doctor who took me on his rounds in a carriage and called me “that topping little girl.”

  My father, meanwhile, was working as a censor in London. Mother and I escaped from prison—for that is what our quarters felt like—when farmer cousins took us in for a while and at last I had a playmate in Ruby who was nearly my age.

  But at some point I was removed to stay with a childless couple. My only memory of that is being forced to take castor oil and my outrage about it, and the way it was forced down my throat.

  What it all comes down to is that we three Sartons were displaced persons until we finally reached the United States in 1916.

  And during the first four years of my life I learned to be charming, to attach myself like a limpet to a rock. My love affairs have been literally “attachments”—and when I have been happiest is when I could feel at home, and what I must have always longed for is family life.

  The opposite of Gide who said, “Je hais les families,” I was in love with family life; it meant safety, a nest, a time to breathe and to be allowed to be myself.

  When I remember where I have felt most at home during all the years, “Le Pignon Rouge” where the Limbosches lived outside Brussels comes first, and Céline like a second mother to me. She was fond of telling that she had held me in her arms before my mother did. There were animals, a goat, geese and ducks, a dog, a cat and a huge garden. There was Bobo, the governess, whom we all adored for under her German: fagade was a most loving heart. And there were four children, three girls and a boy with whom I could play. I was there with my mother twice for a full year, when I was seven and when I was fourteen. And I am glad I have been able to celebrate the life there in my second novel The Bridge of Years. After I was grown-up I spent a month there almost every year till World War II and many times after that. Now the house has been torn down and Céline and Raymond are dead, but I shall never forget any of it and her portrait hangs on the wall by my bed.

  Friday, February 13

  At Céline’s the magic was the garden and tea under the apple tree surrounded by Franz, the white gander, and his wives, the Persian cat, a few hens, and the leisurely talks one only has out-of-doors when tensions melt away in the evening light, when there is time to reflect, to listen to a thrush.

  Grace Dudley’s “Le Petit Bois” in the Vallée Coquette, Vouvray, was also home for me for several springs. There it was the silence, only broken by Jami, her wire-haired terrier, barking. Not family life but a wonderful quietness and freedom—the long mornings when I wrote poems upstairs and she disappeared perhaps to weed the old-fashioned roses she loved—the walks among the vineyards after tea—that order and completeness of every day that is so rare. And for me—and for her also—the passionate love we shared for France itself, and the lazy, slow-moving river Loire—“ce fleuve de sable et ce fleuve de gloire.”

  As soon as I lie down these landscapes from the past swim up through my consciousness and I feel what a rich life it has been.

  On this Friday the thirteenth of February there was news to set my hair on end. At long last the Ku Klux Klan is going to have to pay seven million dollars to the mother of a boy they lynched in 1981. Could this huge penalty break the Klan? It has been reviving in Georgia lately after the march the Klan tried to stop in Fairbanks.

  I am reading proof of a new edition of Lura Beam’s He Called Them By the Lightning, and the story of her experiences teaching high school to black children in Wilmington, North Carolina, under the auspices of the American Missionary Association in 1908–19, struck me with great force. The total racial separation is scary to read about. As a teacher she had to be very careful. Negroes, as she calls them—“blacks” came later—would not have condoned her becoming part of the racist white community, and the white community did not have anything to do with a “nigger-lover” as some called a white teacher in a black school. It was an extremely lonely life. It is a remarkable book.

  It is nearly five and the snowy field is lit up to a soft rose by the setting sun—the ocean very dark blue. The extraordinary beauty of the landscape in all seasons never fails to “compose the mind.”

  Sunday, February 15

  Every morning at sunrise three leaded crystal balls I have hung in my windows catch the rays and the whole room becomes a rainbow flight back and forth, over the ceiling, the walls and even my bed. Pierrot becomes a dancer as he tries to catch these light-birds, especially just above my bed. It is exquisitely beautiful and amusing, so I start the day laughing these days of bitter cold—zero this morning—and brilliant sunshine.

  Tuesday, February 17

  Maggie Vaughan came yesterday to celebrate Valentine’s Day with me, a good catching-up time, but when we parted I had a wild fit of sneezing and one of those twenty-four hour violent colds set in. Yesterday I did something I very rarely do, gave up! Not a letter got written. All I accomplished was a final seed order and a lot of browsing in the Wayside Gardens catalog to try to decide on a small tree or shrub as a memorial for Tamas, where I shall bury his ashes. The problem is that there is a lack of space, the right space. I think I have decided on a mountain laurel which can be placed back of the daffodils and against pine trees—if it gets enough sun there.

  What I did do yesterday was wander around the house, enjoying the valentine flowers, the plant window where Coleen’s brilliant red cyclamen is surrounded by the azaleas I summer out in the garden and which start to f
lower in November when I bring them in. It is a dazzling show these days. Three white cyclamen have continued to flower also.

  It felt very peaceful to lie around doing nothing—and today I am better and ready for my desk.

  Wednesday, February 18

  It is good to wake up now at dawn, just after five, instead of burrowing down into my blanket because it is still dark, as I have been doing all during December and January—and the late light in the afternoon is dreamy. The dreams are of the garden. I have ordered as usual with wild extravagance about seventy annuals including all the old regulars: cosmos, nasturtiums, calendulas, Chinese forget-me-nots, love-in-a-mist, annual larkspur, bachelor’s-buttons, shirley poppies. This year I intend to buy some flats, especially of zinnias and snapdragons because the season is so late.

  The Wayside Gardens catalog is full of intoxicating ideas, but I try to restrain myself, remembering that ordering means planting in the spring and I must not pile up too much work. Sowing the annuals alone will take days. However, I am going to try their new Louisiana iris, and one or two roses. Except for New Dawn, which was here when I came and blooms all summer long and into autumn, I have not had much luck with roses. No doubt it is because I am so lazy about preparing the ground, digging deeply enough.

  It is good news that Diane who gets the rubbish these icy days has agreed to give me four hours a week this spring.

  How I look forward to gardening again!

  Thursday, February 19

  Yesterday Jim Gilsenen drove from Boston to have lunch with me. I haven’t seen him for a year and he is thriving, earning his way through Leslie College as an English major—and hoping to do his senior thesis on my novels—and wants to teach as a career, and partly so he can teach Sarton! He looks like a Renaissance young man with long, very fine, red-gold hair and an incredibly innocent look about him. We had talked for two hours and I felt rather too tired when we came back here briefly so he could meet Pierrot who did finally emerge from the cellar—and came near enough to smell his shoes and look at him with wide blue eyes.