Not long ago I wrote about the amazing time in my life when I had met and become friends with the writer who was a mentor and muse through her books and became a dear friend until the end of her life in the summer of 1995. The writer was May Sarton. It was a time I could never have imagined, and one of the most cherished experiences of my life. But apart from actually getting to know May, it was her books that had sustained me for many years.
May was a poet, a novelist, and in her later years became famous for her journals. She had published a memoir, Plant Dreaming Deep, and because she wrote about leaving the world to buy and restore a home in the country and live a life of solitude as a writer people idealized her and the life she had written about. She was not happy with this because, as she often said, it was not a life to be idealized. Living alone was hard, it could be lonely and very painful. She had rages and difficult times. And yes, good times, but she wanted to present a clearer picture about what her life was really all about. She wrote the first of what would be many volumes of journals, Journal of a Solitude, and after having written since she was in her 20’s, a great many books, and never finding the fame she hoped for, it came, finally, with the journals.
I love May’s poetry, and many of her novels have become very special to me, but it is her journals that have saved me, inspired me, sustained me, and which I have taught over decades in my own journal writing classes. I return to them again and again, for comfort, for solace, they are truly “comfort food” for me, and since the hurricane, and this last awful week dealing with Delilah’s injury, I have clung to these books in my spare moments. Yesterday I pulled a number of her books off of my shelves, the ones you see above. I am currently rereading “At Seventy,” one of my favorite of her journals, but I love them all. I am about to start over with Plant Dreaming Deep and read my way through all of the journals. It is like returning home after a long absence. I need to “plant my dreaming deep.” This was the epigraph from that book, a few lines from May’s poem, “After Du Bellay”…
“Happy the man who can long roaming reap,
Like old Ulysses when he shaped his course
Homeward at last toward the native source,
Seasoned and stretched to plant his dreaming deep.”
At 64 it is time to gather the dreams of a lifetime and plant them deep, below everything, to let them sprout and spring forth into what they might become to see me forward into this phase of my life, autumn into winter, when we still have time to dream, to plant, and to plan for new things, but there isn’t a moment to waste, we are no longer young, the time is now.
As I look at this stack of books I feel so tender. I have read and reread them all. Some were gifts from May, all of them touched me deeply, enriched my life, taught me what I needed to learn at critical junctures. All felt like home to me. And as I move into this next phase of my life I feel like the answers that I seek, the map to how to move forward, the keys to what I need to understand, are here in these books.
The last Sunday Night Writing Group class that I taught centered around the work of May Sarton. I have already told my students that the next couple of classes will be centered on Sarton’s work as well. I want, so much, to share these books with my students. For now, I will revel in them, let them feed and comfort me. These books are home to me. It’s good to be home.
My grandmother, a wonderful writer herself, who had her abilities questioned early on, loved May Sarton, and had many of her books on her bookshelf.
I’ve loved the books that I’ve read, although I regret that I didn’t understand the pull of her work until I was older, so don’t have all of my grandmother’s books now — but it’s Sarton’s words that are compelling after all.
Ah Lisa, I loved hearing that your grandmother loved Sarton, and you know, books find us when they find us. Sarton’s journals have a wide appeal to women 60 and beyond, and yet she talks about how many young people, much to her surprise, loved Journal of a Solitude. I read and loved her books and yearned for the kind of solitude I thought she was writing about when I was married, raising my 3 young children. I hadn’t a clue. I, like so many people, idealized the solitude as she writes about it, kind of picking up on the things that spoke to me and overlooking the hard parts. Now, in my 60’s, and having truly lived alone for nearly 20 years, I understand only what you can understand when you are older.
It is never too late to find and relate to a writer who will speak to us, now, where we are. It is never too late for Sarton! 🙂
My grandmother left my Granddad as a fairly young woman, leaving my Granddad to bring up my father, an only child. She then remarried him when she was older, after a career as an executive secretary (they must have been in their late fifties, then, but I’m not sure — I’d have to think about the timing).
Her one big trip was to Paris, as a single woman. She loved plays, too, and her books include many of those sorts of things, too, along with so many other books. And she loved going into San Francisco to shop (from Redding, CA) where she lived.
Her writing story was a teacher didn’t believe that she wrote what she wrote, and accused her of copying it from somewhere else. She was a farm girl from Kansas, who met my Granddad at the Teacher’s College. They moved to Nevada, and then to Northern California, in Redding, where my Dad was born (and my Mom, too).
My grandmother definitely had dreams — largely fulfilled through her reading, I think.
What stories we have… aren’t they treasures? I hope the books that she loved brought her comfort, but it is heartbreaking that a teacher would accuse her of using writing that wasn’t her own. When I was very young, about 2nd grade, as you’ve probably read before, my teacher held my drawing up in front of the class and laughed at me and said I’d never be an artist. It scarred me for life. I was 59 before I finally got the nerve to draw, and still — people ask why I’m not drawing Anna — when I am going through hard things and vulnerable it’s the first thing that goes. The damage teachers have done to children is criminal in my mind, and so sad. I’m sorry for your grandmother…
how wonderful that these books made it thru the fire, maitri, and the hurricane. they were made to last, a bulwark against any storm. how incredible that you knew this author, understand her ups and downs, as a person living alone, and connected with her strong spirit.
books are a refuge, a sanctuary, and a candle in the dark. so glad May is still with you, through it all…
xo
ka
Thank you so much dear Katya and you, of course, know so well what books mean. And yes, as I wrote the other day, they had boxes of books they were going to destroy feeling I would not want them back but I did, and among the books I got back were some of Sartons, and some of these are charred with black markings from the terrible smoke, and still, filled with underlinings and highlightings and notes in the margins. Sarton’s books survived to save me yet again. There is magic here…
M. xoxox