May Sarton

Belgian-born American novelist and poet.

• Born: May 3, 1912
• Place of birth: Wondelgem, Belgium (now part of Ghent, Belgium)
• Died: July 16, 1995
• Place of death: York, Maine

Biography

One of the most prolific and distinguished of American women of letters, Eléanore Marie Sarton was born in Wondelgem, Belgium, on May 3, 1912, to Belgian science historian George Sarton and English artist and designer Mabel Eleanor Elwes. After the German invasion of Belgium in 1914, Sarton's parents fled with her to England, and the following year her father went on to the United States. Sarton and her mother joined him later in Washington, DC, after he found a job at George Washington University. In 1916 the Sartons moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where George Sarton joined the faculty of Harvard University. and where Sarton herself was naturalized in 1924.

Sarton received her primary education at Shady Hill School in Cambridge. She was naturalized as an American citizen in 1924 before attending the Institut Belge de Culture Française in Belgium while her father was on sabbatical and her mother was visiting relatives in Europe. After returning to Cambridge, she finished ninth grade at Shady Hill and then went on to study at the Cambridge High and Latin School, from which she graduated in 1929.

Preferring not to attend college, Sarton was selected in 1930 as apprentice to Eva Le Gallienne at New York’s Civic Repertory Theatre, where she remained until 1936. In 1933 she founded the Apprentice Theatre at the New School for Social Research, and in 1936 she became the director of Associated Actors Theatre in Hartford, Connecticut. When her interest in the theater waned, Sarton traveled back to England, where she met Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Julian Huxley, and S. S. Koteliansky, who became a lifelong friend. Her first volume of poems, Encounter in April, was published in 1937. In 1945, after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, Sarton spent some time in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to focus on her poetry. While there, she met Judith Matlack, an English teacher who also lived in Cambridge. When they returned, the two moved in together and remained partners for over a decade.

Sarton taught at the Stuart School in Boston (1937–40), Harvard University (1950–53), Bryn Mawr College (1953), and Wellesley College (1960–64). During her lifetime she received eighteen honorary degrees from American colleges and universities. After 1964, Sarton wrote full-time and lectured and read her poetry at universities and conferences across the country. Her works include novels, poetry, journals, memoirs, and several miscellaneous works, including two children’s books. Her range thus extends to several distinctly different genres of literature; some of the same themes are addressed in a variety of forms.

Sarton explores several kinds of personal growth in her novels, including the miraculous flowering of unexpected or unconventional love and friendship. In some of the novels, unconventional love is repressed or denied, often with devastating consequences, as in The Small Room (1961) and As We Are Now (1973). In others, love powerfully transforms the lives of those who are open to it. In Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), love for both men and women moves the protagonist, Hilary Stevens, to create works of art inspired by a personal muse (the theme of several of Sarton’s best poems, as well as of several other novels). In A Reckoning (1978), Laura Spelman, dying of cancer, remembers her mother, her daughter, and a beloved woman friend, memories that enable her to achieve a transcendent perspective on her life. Harriet Hatfield, the sixty-year-old protagonist of The Education of Harriet Hatfield (1989), similarly achieves a perspective on her past life when she opens a feminist bookstore in a working-class neighborhood. Conversations with several younger friends help Harriet understand some issues for lesbians and gay men that she has never confronted before. In all of her novels, Sarton explores with sensitivity and courage the difficulties and joys of intense personal relationships in an often-hostile world.

In “The Writing of a Poem” (reprinted in Writings on Writing, 1980), Sarton called the making of a lyric poem a “holy game.” The “game” is the intellectual crafting of effects; the “holiness” is a life discipline undertaken to keep the poet “perfectly open and transparent, so that he may meet everything that comes his way with an innocent eye.” This combination of sacred calling and formal crafting is one of the principal themes of Sarton’s poetry. “The Sacred Wood” and “Because What I Want Most Is Permanence,” from The Land of Silence (1953); “The Muse as Medusa,” from A Grain of Mustard Seed (1971); and “The Autumn Sonnets,” from A Durable Fire (1972), are among the finest of Sarton’s poems in the ars poetica tradition. Other themes in Sarton’s poetry include the power of passionate love, the magical beauty of the natural landscape, the difficult quest for self-knowledge, the relationship of art to issues of social justice, and the role of silence and solitude in the poet’s life.

In her later years, Sarton’s health began to fail as she suffered a series of illnesses and then a stroke; she turned more toward writing in her journals. Her journals and memoirs present more directly many of the issues addressed in her novels and poetry, especially the importance of friends and lovers in the poet’s life and the role of solitude and silence for the artist. Sarton had a gift for divining, in her personal experience, patterns of meaning common to women of all ages and from many different educational and economic backgrounds. These readers, to whom Sarton refers as “Friends of the Work,” often find her journals and memoirs uncannily reminiscent of their own experience of love and family, as well as evoking the beauty and healing power of the natural world.

Sarton distinguished between “journals,” selective accounts of day-to-day experience, and “memoirs,” distilled reflections on the past. The most powerful of the journals, such as Journal of a Solitude (1973), The House by the Sea (1977), and Recovering (1980), achieve an aesthetic integrity seldom seen in the journal form. The most widely known of the memoirs, Plant Dreaming Deep (1968), confirmed Sarton’s reputation as a writer acutely sensitive to issues of aging, both as metaphor for human limitation, and, more important, as opportunity for positive growth.

Sarton’s final poetry collection, Coming into Eighty (1994), published shortly before her death, is a meditation on the meaning of old age, unaccustomed limitations, and intimations of mortality. The everyday activities of the old person, taken for granted by those of younger generations, are highlighted and dramatized here, in curt lines that imitate the conservation of energy and snippets of memory typical of old age: “These days,” she informs readers, “Everything is an effort, . . . / An adventure.” The poems capture the nexus between the sublime and the mundane: the “effort” and the “adventure,” or the “Muse” that, like her cat, “Mews.” The poet becomes enthralled by even the most common daily sensations—“Alive to every stir of a leaf—which in turn reinforce her own, still living, state. These are the experiences, sharply focused, that move her, and her readers, on a “slowing ship,” a “last mysterious voyage,” toward a final destination.

Sarton’s literary career embraced more than half a century of experimentation and achievement in a wide variety of literary forms. Still at the height of her powers in her last years, she celebrated with style and profound insight the life of artist and lover. She died at the age of eighty-three from breast cancer.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

The Single Hound, 1938

The Bridge of Years, 1946

Shadow of a Man, 1950

A Shower of Summer Days, 1952

Faithful Are the Wounds, 1955

The Birth of a Grandfather, 1957

The Fur Person: The Story of a Cat, 1957

The Small Room, 1961

Joanna and Ulysses, 1963

Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, 1965

Miss Pickthorn and Mr. Hare: A Fable, 1966

The Poet and the Donkey, 1969

Kinds of Love, 1970

As We Are Now, 1973

Crucial Conversations, 1975

A Reckoning, 1978

Anger, 1982

The Magnificent Spinster, 1985

The Education of Harriet Hatfield, 1989

Drama:

The Underground River, pb. 1947

Poetry:

Encounter in April, 1937

Inner Landscape, 1939

The Lion and the Rose, 1948

The Land of Silence, and Other Poems, 1953

In Time Like Air, 1958

Cloud, Stone, Sun, Vine: Poems, Selected and New, 1961

A Private Mythology, 1966

As Does New Hampshire, and Other Poems, 1967

A Grain of Mustard Seed: New Poems, 1971

A Durable Fire: New Poems, 1972

Collected Poems, 1930–1973, 1974

Selected Poems of May Sarton, 1978 (Serena Sue Hilsinger and Lois Byrnes, editors)

Halfway to Silence, 1980

Letters from Maine, 1984

The Silence Now: New and Uncollected Earlier Poems, 1988

Collected Poems, 1930–1993, 1993

Coming into Eighty, 1994

Nonfiction:

I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Autobiography, 1959

Plant Dreaming Deep, 1968

Journal of a Solitude, 1973

A World of Light: Portraits and Celebrations, 1976

The House by the Sea, 1977

Recovering: A Journal, 1980

Writings on Writing, 1980

May Sarton: A Self-Portrait, 1982

At Seventy: A Journal, 1984

After the Stroke: A Journal, 1988

Honey in the Hive: Judith Matlack, 1898–1982, 1988

Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year, 1992

Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year, 1993

At Eighty-Two, 1996

Dear Juliette: Letters of May Sarton to Juliette Huxley, 1999

Selected Letters, 1997–2002 (2 volumes; Susan Sherman, editor)

Children’s/Young Adult Literature:

Punch’s Secret, 1974

A Walk through the Woods, 1976

Miscellaneous:

Sarton Selected: An Anthology of the Journals, Novels, and Poems of May Sarton, 1991 (Bradford Dudley Daziel, editor)

May Sarton: Among the Usual Days, 1993 (Susan Sherman, editor)

From May Sarton’s Well: Writings of May Sarton, 1994 (Edith Royce Schade, editor)

Bibliography

Evans, Elizabeth. May Sarton, Revisited. Twayne Publishers, 1989. Updates the 1973 Twayne series volume on Sarton by Agnes Sibley. A revaluation of Sarton’s lifetime achievement, offering careful analysis of her work in four genres. Includes a chronology of Sarton’s life and accomplishments.

Fulk, Mark K. Understanding May Sarton. U of South Carolina P, 2001. A comprehensive study of Sarton’s work that consciously avoids categorizing her solely as a feminist or lesbian writer, attempting to come “closer to the spirit of Sarton’s work as she saw it.”

Hunting, Constance, editor. May Sarton, Woman and Poet. National Poetry Foundation, U of Maine at Orono, 1982. Twenty-four essays on Sarton’s novels, journals, and poetry, including analysis of Sarton’s journals and memoirs and of French influences on Sarton’s writing style.

Kallet, Marilyn, editor. A House of Gathering: Poets on May Sarton’s Poetry. U of Tennessee P, 1993. Essays written in honor of Sarton’s eightieth birthday. Bibliographical references, index.

Peters, Margot. May Sarton: A Biography. Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. The first full-length biography of Sarton, a detailed examination of Sarton's life and work that delves into her passionate and often troubled relationships, assesses why Sarton inspired such a devoted following among readers, and discusses her uncertainty about the literary value of much of her work.

Sarton, May. Selected Letters. Edited by Susan Sherman, 2 vols., W. W. Norton, 1997–2002. A collection of correspondence spanning from 1916 to Sarton’s death in 1995. Offers invaluable insight into her life and work. Includes an index.

Sibley, Agnes. May Sarton. Twayne Publishers, 1972. An early book-length treatment of Sarton’s poetry and novels through the 1960s. Groups the novels under two themes: “detachment” for the early novels and “communion” for the later ones.

Swartzlander, Susan, and Marilyn R. Mumford, editors. That Great Sanity: Critical Essays on May Sarton. U of Michigan P, 1992. Thoughtful essays on Sarton’s works. Bibliographical references, index.

Tillinghast, Richard. Review of Coming into Eighty, by May Sarton. Poetry, Aug. 1995, pp. 297–98, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=166&issue=5&page=53. A brief review of Sarton’s last collection, as well as a eulogy.