With Women Writers from America: May Sarton

With Women Writers from America

Four collections of verse: Encounter in April, Inner Landscape, The Lion and the Rose, and The Leaves of the Tree; three novels: The Single Hound, The Bridge of Years, and Shadow of a Man; a fifth collection and a fourth novel that the wheels of the press will bring forth before the wheels of time bring forth the new year; and a scattering of poems in the leading poetry magazines — such is May Sarton's literary harvest.

She was born in Belgium and came with her family to the United States at the age of three. Her father is George Sarton, the world authority on the history of science, professor at Harvard, and for a time at the American University of Beirut. She did not accompany her parents to Lebanon during her father's work there, and so knew of it only images that tickled her imagination — of flowers filling our land, blossoming from the thorns, bursting out of the rocks. She studied in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the theater captivated her while still young, so she took up its study and worked at acting in New York for several years, until she published her first collection of poems in 1937, and it met with much approval from the critics; whereupon she abandoned the stage never to return and devoted herself to writing, alongside her repeated journeys to Europe. In 1940 she made a tour through the various American states lasting eight months, in which she lectured at a good number of colleges, and which was for her, as she put it, a "coming of age as an American," "for until then my heart had been divided." (She said that years ago, but her heart is divided to this day, as I shall mention shortly.) She then made other tours, lecturing on poetry and reading selections from her writings; she took part in writers' conferences, worked for a year in what is now known as the American Information Office, and at present she teaches English literature and writing at Radcliffe College and Harvard University.

I met her at her home, where she lives with her father, in a green suburb of Cambridge. And in the garden, where a red cat, leaping at every sparrow, kept troubling the silence of the flowers, we spent an afternoon she had set aside for The Woman's Voice, despite the hundred and eighty term papers piled on her desk and the various duties she had to finish before sailing, three days later, for France, Belgium, and Switzerland. We spoke a little of our present-day literature and of woman's place in it; she had found it curious that my interest should be in writing about America's women writers and not its men, so I assured her the reason was that the series is written for this women's magazine — or that is part of the reason! And she was astonished to hear that our women who write poetry today number three: a Palestinian, an Iraqi, and a Jordanian, with not a single Lebanese among them.

The talk branched out, and a large part of it turned on the problems that confront the poet. She holds that the poet's fundamental problem in our age is politics, and the degree to which the poet ought to let himself be affected by it. Among the modern poets are some who were created to write lyric or reflective poetry, yet who insist on tinting their writings with the politics of the generation and its times, or on making their literature a trumpet for a state or a doctrine, and the result is a blight upon their poetry — have you not seen how this current swept away even Stephen Spender and Archibald MacLeish? And yet the poet must not close his eyes to the pressing problems of the age, nor leave the managing of them to the men of politics and government. The poet's dilemma is to know when to speak his word and when not to speak it: nothing is more harmful than the poet's throwing himself into the arms of politics — unless it be his divorcing her. Is not the poet a human being before he is a poet? Is he not one unified whole, and no mosaic? The contemporary writer must bear the burdens laid upon him and the many responsibilities that await him: has not the lesson of Germany sufficed to warn us — the day the writers fell silent at the beginning of the Nazi era and turned their backs on its tyranny, so that when it spread, they were forced, and the whole country was forced, into silence forever? May Sarton said all this with force and fervor; she holds that the writer has a mission that may not be neglected. And if it strikes you that despite this she writes nothing but lyric poetry, and that her string vibrates only to the creation of love and the whisper of beauty, she reminds you that she performs her duty in practice: she is a member of the executive committee of the American Civil Liberties Union, which fights against persecution in the land of liberty. She said: Would you believe that we struggle to guarantee to citizens the simplest rights and the first of freedoms — to guarantee even to writers and thinkers the right to live and the freedom to speak and to think?

The poet in America is worse off than his European colleague: the field of work before him is narrow, the avenues of publication are not easy for the unlucky and the unknown, and his social position is nothing to be envied. She said: That is why, when I am asked about my work, I answer that I am a teacher; and if I declare that I am a poet and writer, I follow my declaration with an apology! She holds that all writers feel something of the kind even if they do not declare it, and she goes so far as to claim that the poet has no standing in America! Yet she believes this hardship may bear ease as its fruit, and that a literature wrapped in prosperity, never inoculated with adversity, is prone to decay: if it grows, it grows only to crawl, not to leap.

And the state of the woman poet is harder than the state of the poet; the material necessities that stand in the way of both are more within the man's reach than within the woman's. What is the woman writer to do to live? Teach? Here she herself teaches, and she finds that this occupation harms literary work and blunts its edge; therefore she has resolved to leave teaching after a year and give herself wholly to writing. She said: If I must, I will work in a factory all the hours of the day, but never again will I go back to teaching or to similar "intellectual" employments! Add to this that marriage, which means more to a woman than it does to a man, is a more toilsome obstacle for the woman poet than for the man. For what woman — in this place and this time, when servants have all but added a fourth to the impossibilities — what woman is given the chance to write creative literature worthy of life, when she must attend to all the affairs of the house, and care for, say, two children by day and her husband by night?

And if May Sarton must face these problems because she is a poet, and a woman poet, there stands before her another problem as an individual: she cannot feel within herself that she is an American. She was not born in America but came to it from a European country. But are not all Americans "foreigners" in America? Have not some of those who came to America as she did become distinguished writers? Yes — but the matter is a matter of feeling: she is American in domicile, in tongue, in writing, and in passport, but European in her longings; she lives in America and thinks of Europe; here she lies down to rest, but there her dreams go wandering. It is for this that I said the "coming of age" she imagined she had reached in 1940 was only a wish. And here are her novels, every one of them, even those not yet published, with their events set entirely in Europe; and say the same of the majority of her poems. How could it be otherwise, when she believes that the American heritage is foreign to her, and that it is almost nonexistent, so that it cannot, things being so, conceivably influence her production?

Yet if you look into May Sarton's poetry, you will find only in a little of it any trace of this unrest that possesses her. It is sweet, flowing verse, brimming with life and love and beauty and rapture. She believes in lyric poetry, in personal subjects within it, and in short poems; among Europe's poets she prefers Yeats in England, Valéry in France, and Rilke in Germany; and she detests the deliberate obscurity that cripples a large part of modern poetry. For this her poetry stands nearer to readers than the poetry of many of her contemporaries, and it carried to them the breath of an east wind in a season when the winds had fallen still — or, when they stirred, blew wild.

*

The piece published with this article is taken from the collection The Lion and the Rose, which appeared four years ago and held the yield of "ten years of the heart's blood and the mind's labor." In this collection, as in the other volumes, are a number of love poems that may stand among the finest love poetry of the past quarter-century.