Sarton’s letters packed with passion, punch

MAY SARTON: SELECTED LETTERS 1916-1954, edited by Susan Sherman; W.W. Norton Co., New York, 1997; 415 pages, $35 hardcover

Appropriately enough, the first volume of May Sarton’s “Selected Letters” begins with a note from Ogunquit in 1916 when Sarton was 4 and living with her mother, Mabel, at a summer place they rented for a few years. The note is to George Sarton, Sarton’s father, who taught the history of science at Harvard. The last letter in 1954 in this collection is to poet Louise Bogan, a Maine native; and throughout this excellently edited book are many references to Maine.

For instance, Sarton and her family were friends with Leslie and Mary Peabody Hotson, longtime summer residents of Sorrento; and there are several letters to Anne Longfellow Thorpe, granddaughter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was Sarton’s teacher at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge. Years before she moved permanently to York, where she died in 1995, Sarton used to visit Thorpe in the summers on Greenings Island in Somes Sound.

In her introduction, editor Susan Sherman writes: “Her memoirs and journals distinguish Sarton as one of the great autobiographers of her time; this first volume of `Selected Letters’ reveals her as a pre-eminent letter writer as well, for whom letters were a devotion, a discipline, and an art. It is their scope and richness which constitute her ultimate autobiography. Throughout her life Sarton was intensely objective and self-critical; her expressions of doubt are an intrinsic matter of temperament, a measure of her purpose; far beneath them existed an abiding belief in the lasting value of her work.”

The earliest letters are mostly to her parents about her travels, especially to Europe where she enjoyed visiting the famous people and friends of her European-born family. In a 1937 letter to her friend Edith Forbes Kennedy, she writes about her first awkward meeting with Virginia Woolf at Elisabeth Bowen’s house in London. The first question Woolf asked Sarton was, “Are you a professional?”

The first letters, too, are about Sarton’s attempts to become an actress and run her own theater companies. Later letters detail her love affairs with both Julian and Juliette Huxley. She talks about the publication of her first poems and novels, gives her reactions to Hitler and the World War II years, presents her frustrations with critics, and expresses her thoughts on the death of her mother. She moved around a great deal, and the letters are written from many addresses in Europe and the United States.

Sarton, in fact, seems to have been born cosmopolitan and worldly. She spices her letters with French phrases and a sophisticated vocabulary. Forever full of passion and energy, she writes of “a luminous force without which I am only half-alive.” She says, “The soul has no age” and “to live is to love.”

As compassionate as she could be, however, she also could be rather insensitive to minorities. Meeting an African king from Nigeria in London, she writes: “He is a huge nigger …” and she describes a young Jewish man at Oxford as having “that slightly heavy fair look some jews have, frightfully handsome and self-assured.” At one point she writes of the magazine “Harper’s Bazaar, now run by a nice fairy …”

In a letter to Louise Bogan, Sarton writes about men and women: “The great difference between men and women is that women cannot separate sex from love and men can. There are no women homosexual prostitutes, but male homosexuality (even in the case of someone as good and sensitive and honest as Auden) tends toward prostitution. The drive is primarily a SEX drive. There is nothing wrong for a man picking up a sailor, but a woman who would do the equivalent would be violating herself (in either a heterosexual or homosexual relationship …)”

Concerning writing, she says: “It is a curious thing what a feeling of peace and confidence it gives to have managed to produce any part of one’s inner world and find it has touched other people.”

Besides the letters themselves, there is an appendix of unpublished poems and another appendix of letters Sarton wrote in French. There are 16 pages of photographs.

On the back cover, Orono poet and publisher Constance Hunting is quoted: “May Sarton explores the world opening before her — HER world, HER story, from earliest youth to the midpoint of the great arc of experience. Here is all the resiliency of mind and spirit that we have come to know; the imagination, idealism, and common sense; and especially the integrity and ultimate sanity of her art.”

Hunting not only knew Sarton for the last 15 years of Sarton’s life, but she published Sarton’s “Writings on Writing” and Sarton’s mother’s book, “Letters to May.” Hunting also edited “May Sarton: Woman and Poet” for the National Poetry Foundation.

No fan of last year’s controversial biography “May Sarton” by Margot Peters, Hunting feels “Selected Letters” presents a much more accurate picture of Sarton. “It is totally authentic,” she says. “She may have been posing for the person to whom she was writing, but the letters are hers and are factual. From the `Letters’ you get a more authentic person than the so-called biography.”

An early admirer of Sarton’s works, both poetry and prose, Hunting says, “May was a fine lyric poet of genuine vitality and a tremendous source of energy. In the early novels, the language was so precise, the view of her characters not rigid.”

When asked why so many women love Sarton’s works, Hunting replied, “They want to live like her.” She also added about the burgeoning Sarton industry: “May hasn’t come into her own yet … it’s just the beginning, and it’s going to be a tremendous harvest.”

Besides the biography, the “Letters,” and other Sarton books of critical essays and photography, there’s even a 1998 calendar called “From May Sarton’s Well.”

I first met May Sarton in 1981 at Hunting’s house in Orono when Sarton was a writer in residence at the University of Maine. I played chauffeur that memorable evening for Sarton and her old friend Ted Adams, a lifelong summer resident of Hancock Point. Adams took us out to dinner at the Red Lion in Bangor. I met several May Sartons that night. As the actress, she made a scene at the restaurant, slamming a fork so hard on the table that it flew into the air. As the egotist, she compared herself to Jesus and Shakespeare. As the warm friend, she shared lovely reminiscences with Adams. I enjoyed being in her dramatic company very much.

Throughout my reading of this first selection of Sarton’s letters, I kept wondering how many other men, besides myself, would be reading this book — or any of Sarton’s many books. From 1978 to 1988 when I was a summer librarian at Hancock Point, I noticed with what fervor a number of women read Sarton’s latest book (and there seemed to be a new one every year), but I couldn’t help but notice how few men picked up her work. In fact, I remember few men showing the slightest interest in what she had to say.

After reading this wonderful book, I’d have to say that’s too bad, for Sarton has a great deal to say to men as well as women: about the human condition, the life of the artist in the 20th century, the struggle to become oneself and realize one’s vision.

What letters, and what a life.