Novel Readings

Solitude has replaced the single intense relationship, the passionate love that even at Nelson focused all the rest. Solitude, like a long love, deepens with time, and, I trust, will not fail me if my own powers of creation diminish. For growing into solitude is one way of growing to the end.

There’s not really much new or different in A House By the Sea: like the other Sarton memoirs or journals I’ve read, it is a patchwork of records of her daily life (“At the end of the afternoon yesterday Raymond came to see how I was getting on, and we sat at the table in the porch and had a little talk”), reflections on people she knows, or memories of those she has lost (“The Julian Huxley I knew and loved is beginning to emerge again after the shock of seeing him, old and crotchety, last October”), a lot of fretting and some very occasional rejoicing over her writing projects (“I wonder sometimes whether the sea may not constantl defuse the anxiety without which poetry is impossible for me”), observations on the solitude that nourishes but also occasionally devastates her (“This morning I feel better for having let the woe in, for admitting what I have tried for weeks to refuse to admit–loneliness like starvation”), and descriptions of the natural world around the house she has moved to by the sea:

If there is one irresistible piece of magic here among many others, it is the slightly curving path down to the sea that begins in flagstones on the lawn, cuts through two huge junipers, and proceeds, winding its way down to Surf Point, through the wood lilies in June, to tall grasses in summer, the goldenrod and asters in September, leading the eye on, creating the atmosphere of a fairy tale, something open yet mysterious that every single person who comes here is led to explore.

It’s the last two elements that draw me to these books, which otherwise are such so committed to the everyday that they risk being as dull as uncomposed reality. At their best, they bring out the poetry of the quotidian–and Sarton’s own everyday life, too, sometimes has real drama, while her literary work and connections mean that her activities do become more interesting than they would otherwise be.

The House By the Sea seemed less engaging in those ways than Plant Dreaming Deep or Journal of a Solitude–like At Seventy, it is more incidental and miscellaneous. Still, there are many wonderful descriptions of nature and many moments when her observations about life, death, and especially solitude really resonated with me. The book covers a time that is not without its troubles–a dear friend succumbing to dementia, others to death, her own illnesses bringing constant reminders of her own mortality, importunate visitors, harsh winter storms–but she seeks and often finds strength and comfort in her quiet life and habits. “I have never been so happy in my life,” she says, thinking back over her first year and a half in her house by the sea:

I have not said enough about what it is to wake each day to the sunrise and to that great tranquil open space as I lie in my bed, having breakfast, often quietly thinking for a half hour. That morning amplitude, silence, the sea, all make for a radical change in tempo. Or is it, too, that I am growing older, and have become a little less compulsive about ‘what has to be done’? I am taking everything with greater ease. When I was younger there was far more conflict, conflict about my work, the desperate need to ‘get through,’ and the conflict created by passionate involvement with people. There are compensations for not being in love–solitude grows richer for me every year.