Sarton, May (1912–1995)

Prolific American writer of poetry, fiction, autobiography, and journals who was largely ignored by the literary establishment but always enjoyed an appreciative, loyal, and discerning readership. Born Eléanore Marie Sarton at Wondelgem near Ghent, Belgium, on May 3, 1912; died of breast cancer at York Hospital in York, Maine, on July 16, 1995; only surviving child of George Sarton (famed historian of science) and Eleanor Mabel (Elwes) Sarton (a talented artist and designer); after she and her parents fled Belgium for England in 1914 and settled permanently in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1917, attended the notable Shady Hill School, 1917–26, interrupting her studies there to study at the Institute Belge de Culture Française for nine months in 1925; entered the Cambridge High and Latin School in 1926, completing her formal education there in 1929; never married; lived with Judith Matlack, 1945–58; no children.

Joined Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theater in New York as an apprentice (1929); founded and directed the Apprentice Theater (1933), later renamed the Associated Actors Theater, Inc., which staged ten European plays as a course at the New School for Social Research in New York and five plays at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut; when company failed (1936), left the theater to devote her life to writing, supporting herself by brief stints of teaching and by yearly lecture tours to colleges and universities throughout U.S.; published first volume of poetry, Encounter in April (1937), followed by first novel, The Single Hound (1938), both of which won high praise in U.S. and Great Britain; completed four novels and five volumes of verse (1939–55) which were also favorably reviewed; after the 1955 publication of Faithful Are the Wounds (a novel about the suicide of a Harvard University professor), ignored by the literary establishment for years but gained an ever-widening readership with the publication of four autobiographies and seven journals (1959–96); at age 53 and in her tenth novel, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), "came out" as a lesbian, which rather than alienating her readers, enhanced her reputation for honesty and courage; old age and illness became major themes in all her writing, winning her yet more devoted readers (1970s–95).

Publications:

May Sarton was one of the most productive American writers of the 20th century. Between 1937 and 1955, she wrote and saw published 15 volumes of verse, 19 novels, 11 memoirs and journals, 2 children's books, several plays and other miscellaneous writings. In 1997, W.W. Norton, her publisher for over 30 years, reported that 38 of the over 50 books she wrote were still in print, an indication of the popularity she enjoyed during her lifetime and beyond. An anthology of her best poems, Collected Poems, 1930–1993, was published in 1993. Sarton herself correctly judged that her most enduring novels were Faithful Are the Wounds (1955), Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), As We Are Now (1973), and A Reckoning (1978). Her memoirs and journals have been unusually popular, especially I Knew A Phoenix (1959), Journal of a Solitude (1973) and The House by the Sea (1977).

The pattern of May Sarton's life—the need to be creative and the need for loving friendships—was established early. The gifted child of gifted parents, Sarton began writing poetry by the age of nine. Her first poems were inspired by Katherine Taylor , the director of the innovative Shady Hill School, and by one of its finest teachers, Anne Longfellow Thorp , both of whom became "root" or lifelong friends of Sarton. As was the case with many other women poets, going back to Sappho of ancient Greece, Sarton's muse was always a woman and usually a woman older than herself. In Sarton's poems, mind and heart, work and love, were inextricably entwined.

May Sarton was born Eléanore Marie Sarton at Wondelgem near Ghent, Belgium, on May 3, 1912, the only surviving child of George Sarton and Mabel Elwes Sarton , a talented artist and designer. While Sarton looked back on her childhood as a happy one, especially after she was enrolled at Shady Hill School at the age of five, her earliest years were traumatic. After the German invasion of Belgium in 1914, she and her parents fled to England, taking temporary refuge with her mother's English relatives. A second uprooting came in 1916, when the family set sail for the still-neutral United States. Within a year, the Sartons settled permanently in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where George Sarton, already a highly respected scholar in the new field of the history of science, won a teaching appointment at Harvard University. He was to teach there until his retirement in the 1950s.

George Sarton was totally engrossed in his writing, editing and teaching and that, plus his inconsiderate treatment of Mabel, especially over money matters, alienated May from him until her mother's death in 1950. Sarton adored her mother, for it was Mabel who nourished her talents and her emotional needs, who took care of all the household details, and who worked to help pay for May's expenses at school and at summer camp. Mabel Sarton had a great gift for friendship, and her friends became May's friends as well. Later, women's friendships became a constant theme in all of May Sarton's novels.

In a tribute written in the '70s, Sarton wrote in A World of Light that through her mother, "I witnessed extreme awareness of all forms of beauty, and extreme sensitivity to human beings and human relationships…. Through my father I understood that a talent is something given, that it opens like a flower, but without exceptional energy, discipline and persistence will never bear fruit." Both parents were "the two people in the world I could feel in total communion about politics, art, religion, all that really matters."

While the Sartons all became American citizens in 1924 and lived in the United States for the rest of their lives, they never lost their European roots, returning to Europe regularly in the 1920s and 1930s and after World War II. In 1925, Sarton interrupted her studies at Shady Hill to attend the Institute Belge de Culture Française in Brussels for nine months. At the Institute, one of her teachers, Marie Closset , a poet who wrote under the pen name of Jean Dominique, became Sarton's next muse and a friend for life. Later, Closset became a central figure in Sarton's first novel, The Single Hound (1938).

Over a period of 68 years, from 1924 until her last visit to England in 1992, she made at least 25 trips, many by ocean liner, primarily to England, Belgium, and France. During one particularly magical summer, 1936, Sarton met many of England's leading writers and intellectuals, some of whom became root friends. These included the literary critics S.S. Koteliansky and Basil de Selincourt, the writer Elizabeth Bowen , and the zoologist Julian Huxley and his wife Juliette Huxley . Virginia Woolf , whom Sarton met on several occasions that summer and the next, haunted her for the rest of her days. Years later, Sarton wrote, "My heaven is Bloomsbury."

In 1926, Sarton graduated from Shady Hill School and entered the academically excellent Cambridge High and Latin School. While she was a student there, George Sarton took her to see Eva Le Gallienne in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. To his chagrin, his daughter fell in love with the theater, and in 1929 Sarton turned down a Vassar College scholarship to accept Le Gallienne's invitation to join her Civic Repertory Theater in New York as an apprentice. While George fumed (but agreed to provide his rebellious and stubborn daughter with a monthly allowance of $100), Mabel Sarton found safe housing for her daughter at the women's McLean Club near the Civic Repertory. During Sarton's four years with Le Gallienne's group, she studied many aspects of the theater, including acting, directing, and

translating and writing plays. Eva Le Gallienne became another of Sarton's lifelong friends, and there were no hard feelings when Sarton formed her own company in 1933, which closed after three years, a victim of the Depression.

Sarton's seven years in the theater were invaluable, for as Elizabeth Evans notes in May Sarton Revisited, Sarton "took with her excellent dramatic training … that has served her well, endowing her with a sense of audience, an awareness of timing, an instinct for character and conflict, an ability to convey emotion, and above all, an awareness of the well modulated speaking voice."

Sarton returned to her first love, writing, and in 1937 her initial volume of poetry, Encounter in April, was favorably reviewed. The following year, her first novel, The Single Hound, which was set in Europe, received excellent reviews by Orville Prescott in The New York Times and Basil de Selincourt in The London Observer. Encouraged, Sarton published her second volume of verse, Inner Landscape, in 1939. To support herself, she taught creative writing and choral speech at the Stuart School in Boston from 1937 to 1940; later she was to teach courses in writing and literature on temporary appointments at Radcliffe and Wellesley.

During World War II, Sarton satisfied her love of travel, her joy in making new friends, and her need to supplement her modest income by embarking on spring and fall lecture/poetry reading tours at colleges and universities in many regions of the United States. The tours introduced Sarton to succeeding generations of college students and were to become a yearly ritual until ill health forced her to end them in 1987. Although Sarton was not a college graduate (as was also true of two writers she much admired, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Townsend Warner ), she found early and enduring support for her writings in academia.

In 1945, while vacationing in New Mexico, Sarton met Judith Matlack , an unmarried teacher 14 years her senior who taught at Simmons College in Boston. Within weeks, they became close friends, and on their return to Cambridge agreed to live together, a new experience for each of them. George and Mabel Sarton were happy to see their only child settle down at last, and every Sunday until their passing they welcomed their daughter and her gentle and considerate housemate to dinner. Meanwhile, Sarton was delighted to forge strong and lasting bonds with Judith's more numerous family.

Sarton and Matlack settled down to a comfortable routine: while Matlack taught at Simmons, Sarton spent about eight hours at her desk. After Matlack's return at four, they discussed their respective experiences of the day over a drink, and then went for an hour's walk. After a companionable dinner, Matlack graded papers while Sarton resumed work at her desk. Their household was enriched when they adopted a cat they named Tom Jones, who is the subject of one of Sarton's most endearing novellas, The Fur Person (1957). Sarton later recalled, in her writings and in interviews, that she spent the happiest years of her life with Matlack. They were certainly very productive years as well, for between 1945 and 1958 Sarton wrote six novels and four volumes of poetry.

In 1958, Sarton's life took a new direction when she decided to buy and restore an old farmhouse in Nelson, New Hampshire, some 85 miles from Cambridge. Many years later in her tribute to Matlack, Honey in the Hive: Judith Matlack, 1898–1982 (1988), Sarton conceded that her decision to leave Judith was very hard on the latter. However, Sarton never conceded, except indirectly, that she left Matlack because she was in love with another woman. It appears that Matlack, who regretted that she never married, was never able to respond to Sarton's passionate needs. However, after Sarton's departure for New Hampshire they remained close friends until Matlack's death in 1982.

In Nelson, Sarton embarked on a new phase of her literary career, and in 1959 her first memoir, I Knew a Phoenix, was published. It was followed by three more memoirs, Plant Dreaming Deep (1968), Journal of a Solitude (1973), and A World of Light (1976). These autobiographical works, and the seven journals Sarton wrote between 1974 and 1994, sold very well and attracted a host of new readers to all of Sarton's writings.

The 15 years in Nelson were especially productive of poetry, and, inspired by one new muse after another, Sarton completed six volumes of verse. She also wrote seven novels, including two of her most highly esteemed works, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965) and As We Are Now (1973). The protagonists in both novels are older women, which had always been a constant in Sarton's fiction. What was new was that Mrs. Stevens is a lesbian poet who has come to terms with her sexual identity and is able to help a troubled young man accept his homosexuality. As We Are Now is the only novel Sarton ever wrote in which violence occurs, though off-stage. The protagonist, Caroline Spencer, ends her life by burning down the nursing home where she and other inhumanely treated residents are confined.

In Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, Sarton is both Mrs. Stevens and the young man struggling with his sexual identity. Despite the fact that Sarton was attracted to older women from her earliest years and appears to have had only one brief affair with a man (Julian Huxley), she was unable to come to terms with her preference for women until she was in her 40s. Like many women of her generation growing into adulthood at a time when lesbianism was viewed with horror, Sarton never came out to her parents, though Mabel Sarton must have been aware that her daughter was, at the very least, woman-centered. And fearful of the label "lesbian writer," Sarton postponed her coming out until she was an established writer. As she explained many times, she considered herself a full human being, a universal writer who wrote for all human beings—young and old, male and female, single or married, gay or straight—rather than a lesbian or woman writer.

With the publication of Mrs. Stevens, Sarton gained new readers while losing very few of her admiring fans. Her novel preceded the gay-rights movement by several years and lent the movement considerable support by portraying gays in a convincingly positive light. Sarton came out because she could afford to be honest, whereas lesbians in teaching and other professions who revealed their sexual orientation would very likely face ostracism and lose their jobs as well. Referring to Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, Sarton wrote her good friend Basil de Selincourt, who had been supportive of her work for 30 years, that "now it is done, I doubt if the subject will come up again in any future work." Such was not the case. In Sarton's last two novels, The Magnificent Spinster (1985) and The Education of Harriet Hatfield (1989), she paid homage to women whose lifelong relationships with other women were accepted and understood by their families and friends.

In 1973, Sarton sold the house in Nelson and moved to a house rented from friends by the sea at York, Maine. Though Sarton dearly loved Nelson and was buried there, she found it too small and too isolated a community for a person past 60. York, on the other hand, was just over the border from Massachusetts and relatively close to Cambridge and Boston's Logan Airport. And York, an upscale summer resort area, had many more doctors than Nelson, as well as an excellent hospital. The move proved to be a wise and fruitful one in every respect. Sarton had always been an ardent lover of nature, and the sight and sounds of the sea added new imagery and a new dimension to her poetry and prose. During her 20 years at York, Sarton continued her amazing productivity, completing seven volumes of poetry, five novels, two children's books, one memoir and seven journals before her death in 1995.

One reason why Sarton was so productive and more popular than ever during the last two decades of her life was the attention and recognition she received from feminist scholars like Carolyn Heilbrun of Columbia University. In 1985, Sarton wrote to a friend that after 1955 she became "old-fashioned, not interesting" to the (mostly male) literary critics. "It was Women's Studies which has brought me back." Beginning in 1972, panels on Sarton's writing were a regular feature at the annual meetings of the Modern Language Association, and courses on her work were offered at a number of colleges and universities. In addition, Sarton was the subject of two studies in the Twayne U.S. Authors Series, Agnes Sibley 's May Sarton (1972) and Elizabeth Evans' May Sarton Revisited (1988). Between 1982 and 1994, four collections of critical essays on her writings appeared, and three anthologies of her writing were also published. And in the 1980s, videos about Sarton or of Sarton reading from her work were also released.

Academia, which had always been supportive of Sarton, showered her with honors in the last decades of her life. She was the recipient of a record 18 honorary degrees, and it was standing-room only wherever Sarton read her poems, gave lectures, or signed copies of her books on college campuses throughout the country. In one of her last poems, "A Fortune," published in Coming into Eighty, she recalled that, when she was 34 and out of a job, a reader of tarot cards assured her that, in the end, she would finally achieve money, love, and fame.

Now I am eighty
The long game of solitaire
Has ended
Exactly as he said
It must.

However, in addition to fame, love and success, there was also a great deal of illness, pain, and loss in Sarton's last 15 years. In her journal Recovering (1980), we learn that Sarton developed breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy in her 68th year. In the later 1980s, she suffered the first of a series of strokes, which, combined with a fibrillating heart, cancer of the lining of her left lung, and irritable bowel syndrome, left Sarton exhausted and depressed. "Everything hurts," she wrote in Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year (1992), and it especially hurt that one by one she had to give up her greatest pleasures: gardening, long walks, traveling, giving lectures and readings, and long visits with friends far and near. The death of many of her older friends added to her anguish and loneliness. A woman of fierce independence, Sarton was forced by illness to accept dependence and rely more and more on help from her friends and those she paid to run errands and care for the house and garden.

Lacking the mental and physical energy to write novels after 1989, Sarton wrote journals, the last of which, At Eighty-Two: A Journal (1996), appeared posthumously. They were her lifesavers. Without them, she said, "life would seem empty and without purpose." The principal reason Sarton was able to continue the journals was that she gained a new lease on life after meeting Susan Sherman in the mid-1980s. Sherman was an English teacher at the Riverdale School in New York who, before she met Sarton, had spent years reading Sarton's letters and other unpublished writings stored in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. After they met, a great and lasting friendship developed between the two women, and they collaborated closely on May Sarton: Among the Usual Days (1993), a thematic compilation of excerpts from Sarton's letters and other unpublished writings edited by Sherman.

Sherman was an exemplary and loving friend—driving up to York on weekends, spending her summers with Sarton, and even taking a leave of absence from the Riverdale School one autumn in order to care for the increasingly frail Sarton. Sherman delighted Sarton by always arriving with an armful of flowers and by preparing elegant meals which were accompanied by animated conversation at the dinner table. For Sarton fans, it is comforting to know that her last years were made bearable by Sherman, who also served as a muse for poems that are included in Sarton's Collected Poems, 1930–1993. Sarton's very last muse, however, was a "fur person," her beloved cat Pierrot. Her final volume of poetry, Coming Into Eighty (1994), was dedicated "to Pierrot, the Muse Mews."

Her friend and literary executor, Carolyn Heilbrun, captured the essence of Sarton's life work when she wrote: "she has written of the old, the sick, the dispossessed, and of the joys and glories of life: flowers, birds, cats, sunrises, and of the endurance of love and the ephemerality and dangers of passion." While the literary establishment has been dismissive of much of her work, Sarton continues to touch the lives of an ever-widening circle of readers because she wrote about the things that really matter.

sources:

Daziel, Bradford Dudley, ed. Sarton Selected: An Anthology of the Journals, Novels and Poems of May Sarton. NY: W.W. Norton, 1991.

Evans, Elizabeth. May Sarton Revisited. Boston: G.K. Hall, Twayne United States Authors Series, No. 551, 1989.

Hunting, Constance, ed. May Sarton: Woman and Poet. Orono, ME: University of Maine, 1982.

Ingersoll, Earl G., ed. Conversations with May Sarton. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1991.

Kallet, Marilyn, ed. A House of Gathering: Poets on May Sarton's Poetry. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1993.

Peters, Margot. May Sarton: A Biography. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

suggested reading:

Sarton, May. As We Are Now. NY: W.W. Norton, 1973.

——. Collected Poems, 1930–1993. NY: W.W. Norton, 1993.

——. The House by the Sea. NY: W.W. Norton, 1977.

——. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. NY: W.W. Norton, 1965.

——. A World of Light: Portraits and Celebrations. NY: W.W. Norton, 1976.

Anna Macías , Professor Emerita of History, Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio