Yes, Laura thought, it’s like a web. Whatever the secret, the real connections, we are inextricably woven into a huge web together, and detaching the threads, one by one, is hideously painful. As long as one still feels the tug, one is not ready to die.

I don’t think May Sarton is a very good novelist, and yet I seem to keep coming back to her fiction. Like the other novels of hers that I’ve read, A Reckoning has moments of tender, meditative loveliness–and yet (also like the others) it is curiously artless, even occasionally clunky. For all its faults, I was engrossed and moved by it, perhaps because (again, also like the others) it is palpably sincere, and also questing. I don’t know if this will make sense, but there’s something very human about Sarton’s novels: they seem very much the product of a person thinking things through. If her results were more aesthetically impressive or perfected, they might be better novels in some sense, but I’m not sure that would be an improvement–at least, not for me.

A Reckoning is the story of Laura Spelman’s death. When the novel begins, she has just been diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer. She is only 60, but she doesn’t really feel robbed of time: in fact, she thinks she has lived a full and complete life. What she wants now is to live through her dying on her own terms, which at first she thinks means without involving anyone else; soon, however, it becomes clear that this plan was misguided, partly because she quickly becomes too weak to care for herself, but also because she realizes that her death is not exclusively her own event. It inevitably affects everyone else in her life, from her children and grandchildren to the young woman whose novel she has been working on for her job as an editor at Houghton Mifflin.

“It is then to be a reckoning,” Laura thinks to herself in Chapter 1: with the time she has left, she wants to focus on what really matters, which means thinking about her life and the people in it and trying to figure out “the real connections.” As Laura sees it, it’s not a time for making amends or healing wounds: she is not sorry to leave her mother behind, for example. In her reveries, she ends up focusing particularly on women–those she has known and loved, especially her childhood friend Ella, but also women in the abstract, as she muses on the difficulties they face and the new opportunities she now sees for “sisterhood” (the novel was first published in 1978). Thinking about her sister Jo, who loved another woman but decided it was “more than I could handle ever again … and in my world too dangerous,” Lauren observes,

‘What I begin to see–Jo’s visit somehow clinched it for me–is that women have been in a queer way locked away from one another in a man’s world. The perspective has been from there. Jo thinks of herself as a man. All that is changing and perhaps women will be able to give one another a great deal more than before.’

She doesn’t mean sexually, though a recurring element of the novel is that times are changing for gay people in particular (the novel she’s editing is a “coming out” novel, and Laura continues working with its anxious author after leaving her job because she thinks it’s an important book). More generally, she thinks women no longer see each other primarily as rivals, and that this frees them up to be friends in an empowering and comforting way. “I think this whole journey towards death has been in a way joining myself up with women, with all women,” she tells Ella, whose visit finally releases Laura from the tug of life.

There are lots of small interesting things along the way to Laura’s death, many of them spinning off from this attention to women’s relationships, but also comments about families and marriage and, of course, about dying. Sarton shows Laura gradually receding from the world around her. It’s not portrayed sentimentally or euphemistically, but for all the details about nausea and coughing up blood, it’s also not a catalog of medical horrors. Laura is very aware of her illness as a physical encroachment on her body, but Sarton gives us the story of her death primarily as a mental and emotional journey. “It seems as though a person dies when he is ready,” the caregiver Laura hires explains to her when Laura asks her to share what she knows about death. A Reckoning follows Laura as she readies herself. More touching and, I thought, more profound than the goodbyes to other people are the moments in the novel that are just about Laura taking a few last opportunities simply to be herself (an ongoing theme of Sarton’s writing), listening to the music she loves, drinking in the beauty of spring flowers:

It had smitten her like love, with a poignant ache in all her being. She turned her head so she could see the light shining through the daffodils and watched it turning the petal’s flesh to a transparency, more alive than stained glass. Brahms and daffodils–life–life.

We know from Sarton’s memoirs and diaries that this is where she too found life, and no doubt that is why she writes about it so well on Laura’s behalf as she lies facing death and listening to Mozart:

Laura felt joy rising, filling her to the brim, yet not overflowing. What had become almost uncontrollable grief at the door seemed now a blessed state. It was not a state she could easily define in words. But it felt like some extraordinary dance, the dance of life itself, of atoms and molecules, that had never been as beautiful or as poignant as at this instant, a dance that must be danced more carefully and with greater fervour to the very end.

Such a peaceful, windless morning here for my seventieth birthday–the sea is pale blue, and although the field is still brown, it is dotted with daffodils at last. It has seemed an endless winter. But now at night the peepers are in full fettle, peeping away. And I was awakened by the cardinal, who is back again with his two wives, and the raucous cries of the male pheasant. I lay there, breathing in spring, listening to the faint susurration of the waves and awfully glad to be alive.

I really enjoyed puttering through May Sarton’s At Seventy: A Journal. It is much less artful than Plant Dreaming Deep or Journal of a Solitude — more simply a diary, recording the minutiae of her life, from gardening to poetry readings. She’s both thoughtful and observant, though, and along with her accounts of day-to-day events we also get her reflections on current events (she’s not a fan of Reagan’s America), on history (she’s especially preoccupied with the Holocaust), on aging and mortality, on friendships and lovers, on poetry and Virginia Woolf and her own novels and the selfishness of the writer’s life.

Sarton would have known (I assume) that the journal would eventually be published, so there are traces of self-consciousness sometimes, and there are also some hints of reticence about details that would be intensely personal. Overall, though, reading At Seventy feels a lot like hanging out with her for a year, through some tough times, some petty annoyances, and a lot of pleasures and even joys that make her “glad to be alive.” “The autumn of life,” she says on September 25, contemplating autumn’s coming “glory of crimson and orange and yellow overhead”

is also a matter of saying farewell, but the strange thing is that I do not feel it is autumn. Life is so rich and full these days. There is so much to look forward to, so much here and now, and also ahead, as I dream of getting back to the novel about Anne Thorp [The Magnificent Spinster] and to good silent days here when the hubbub of this summer dies down. And right now there are hundreds of good letters to answer and hundreds of bulbs to plant. I do not feel I am saying farewell yet but only beginning again, as it used to be when school started.

Once again I found myself fascinated with Sarton’s solitary life. She didn’t always live by herself, but it’s pretty clear by this point that she prefers, needs, solitude — not every moment (and she actually has a lot of visitors to her house in Maine, and does a lot of visiting and traveling herself) but as the default. After particularly busy periods, she’s always immensely relieved to be free just to live on her own terms, and to breathe, mentally, without the psychological distractions of other people’s company. I don’t know how she was able to live on her own, and on her own terms, for so long: can she have made enough money from her writing, and then from related speaking engagements, for the luxury of so much space and independence and autonomy, or did she inherit or otherwise come by the funds to support it? I haven’t read an actual biography of her, so there’s a lot about the concrete circumstances of her life that I don’t know. At any rate, there’s something really inviting about her descriptions of having her house all to herself, setting her own pace for meals and walks and work and reading and just being.

Of course, I’m not sure I would like that much solitude in practice (any more than Sarton’s friend Carolyn Heilbrun did), and I’m also aware how much it is Sarton’s writing that makes her life sound spacious and colorful and inviting. She writes beautifully about her house and her garden, with a poet’s attention to the rhythm of her words as well as to the shapes, sounds, and sights around her:

Nothing can change the happiness I felt when I went down this morning to get my breakfast at five and saw the marvelous light, as the sun, not yet risen, flooded the rooms with a kind of pale green, touching the paper-white narcissus and every chair and table with its blessing. This house becomes then a great shell filled with the incessant rumor of the past and I wander through its rooms, enchanted.

“I want to pause here,” she says at another point,

to celebrate asters, the low pale-lavender ones that dot the field now, starry among the long pale-gold grasses, the tall white ones that line the road in the woods, the deep-purple ones I found here in the picking garden, and the cultivated Michaelmas daisies, as they are called in England, that I have planted over the years in the border below the terrace. Some of these are almost a true blue. One of my favorites (Frikartii) is bright lavender with large flowers. They come when the phlox is over and always seem like a special gift of autumn. Rare in color at this season, they light up the garden and make a splash with the oranges and yellows of zinnias and calendulas in vases in the house, a new spectrum for me, and delightful.

Remembering the “bleak rented rooms” she lived in years ago in London, she thinks of how

by arranging books on the desk, buying a few daffodils from a cart in the street, putting up postcard reproductions of paintings I loved and a photograph or two, by leaving a brilliant scarf on the bureau, the room became my room and I began to live in it, to live my real life there, to know who May Sarton was and hoped to become.

At Seventy seems like the journal of someone who knows just who she is and is living her “real life.” Her appreciation of what a lucky and beautiful life that is seems well-earned, and probably the most inspiring thing about this unpretentious and often rather artless book is her own self-consciousness about that, and her determination to live up to what she has found for herself:

To live in eternity means to live in the moment, the moment unalloyed–to allow feeling to the limit of what can be felt, to hold nothing back, and at the same time to ask nothing and hope for nothing more than the amazing gift of poems. A love affair at this point is not in the cards, but poetry is here, and that is all that matters.

Reading this made me feel uncomfortable that I have never been moved by any of her poetry. And The Magnificent Spinster, into which she is putting a great deal of herself over the year this journal covers, is the one of her novels so far that I put aside unfinished. (I’ve only read two others, The Small Room and The Education of Harriet Hatfield.) Maybe it’s time to give it another try, if only to honor her effort and thank her for the other happy reading she’s given me.

The Education of Harriet Hatfield is an awkward novel, struggling–or so it seemed to me–to maintain a difficult equilibrium between the human stories it tells and the didactic message those stories are designed to convey. The awkwardness is palpable, I think, because Sarton doesn’t trust her readers enough to infer her message from the stories, but instead makes it an insistently explicit part of her characters’ conversations, or her narrator’s commentary. The characters, especially Harriet herself, have the same distinctive individuality that marked the people in Sarton’s The Small Room, and the story itself is engaging and rich with thematic and political potential. Harriet, who has lived for many years with the somewhat overpowering Vicky, decides after Vicky’s death to use her inheritance to open a woman’s bookstore in the Boston neighborhood of Somerville. She has no business experience and no specific agenda except that she hopes the store will become a gathering place for women of all kinds as well as a repository of books by, for, or about women. What she hasn’t anticipated is that opening the store will also open up her life, both by challenging her to rethink her own values and relationships, and by exposing her–and those values and relationships–to the sometimes hostile scrutiny of her new community. Harriet realizes belatedly that her economically privileged life with Vicky has sheltered her in many ways, but particularly from any pressure to define or defend their relationship. She thinks of it in the context of the “Boston marriage,” shying away from the label “lesbian” (“That word always makes me wince,” she remarks); she feels strongly about women’s need to express themselves and take strength from each other, but she does not consider herself a feminst. But her naivete about herself and her store is immediately challenged, by supporters who applaud her venture for being something she never quite imagined it as, and by opponents who target her with graffiti, hate mail, and, eventually, vandalism and violence. “Dear manager or whoever you are,” reads the letter that first forces her to see herself through the eyes of hate:

This was a clean blue collar neighborhood until you and your ilk arrived. Now it is full of filthy gay men and lesbians. This is a warning. We do not want your obscene bookstore and we will do everything we can to get you out.

Harriet is a reluctant and unlikely revolutionary. But she comes to see her very conventionality as her strength: she is seen by all around her as a “lady,” and she decides that by coming out she can counter stereotypes and provide what she thinks of as one version of an “exemplary life,” an example to prove the point that gays and lesbians are people too. If that conclusion sounds a bit shallow or trite, I fear that impression is fair to the novel, which is preoccupied with showing examples of gays and lesbians who are Perfectly Nice People living Unobjectionable Lives despite being misunderstood, insulted, or actively discriminated against. Some subtlety is in play because to some extent it is Harriet herself who is gradually enlightened, losing her anxiety about labels, realizing that the privacy she and Vicky valued can also be seen as avoidance, perhaps even a form of repression or denial–not sexually, but politically. It’s a shock to her when an interview with her about the threats against her and her shop appears under the large headline “Lesbian Bookseller in Somerville Threatened,” but by the novel’s end she has embraced the changes this involuntary exposure brings to her life. ‘It has been in some ways excruciating,’ she tells the private detective finally called in to find out who is behind the attacks;

‘but I have to admit that it is giving me an education I had missed. It has forced me to be honest about myself. That is a salutary thing. I can identify for the first time with any persecuted minority and’–here I can’t help laughing–‘I know it is absurd, but I am proud of being in the front line. Because, you see, I am safer than most gay people are. By that I mean I am more or less self-supporting and no one else, except Patapouf [her dog] has been intimately involved. So I can dare without fear of hurting.’

The story of Harriet’s education is a good one in many ways, and the earnest intentions behind the novel’s broader agenda are unobjectionable–but those who need the lesson it teaches are, surely, hardly likely to pick up the novel, which is perhaps why I started to find its preachier moments so tedious, even though the individual stories that are woven in with Harriet’s have plenty of intrinsic interest and are often deftly indicated, like the story of Martha, the unhappy wife who longs to be an artist and paints uncomfortable dark pictures of trees with encroaching roots. I liked the bookstore stuff the bes. Like many bookish people, I have totally inaccurate but cherished fantasies about what it must be like to run an independent bookstore (yes, this despite the tales I’ve heard from actual bookstore owners like Colleen of Bookphilia!). I would love to have a store like Harriet’s nearby, where tea is served in the late afternoon and all kinds of interesting women hang around and find support and friendship. Sarton is honest enough to make it clear that Harriet’s business may never make money, that it’s only her inheritance that enables her to embark on this adventure. Knowing that Sarton and Carolyn Heilbrun were friends, I was amused to see Harriet recommending the Amanda Cross mysteries to a customer. Also, recalling Heilbrun’s chapter on Sarton in The Last Gift of Time, I remembered her saying that Sarton hated criticism and resisted editorial advice. The Education of Harriet Hatfield is a book that might have benefited from some advice, particularly if it had led Sarton to let Harriet go through her internal and political transformations without talking about them so much and so laboriously.

Reading May Sarton’s The Small Room was a disorienting experience, at once intensely familiar and disconcertingly alien. The protagonist, Lucy Winter (is there a deliberate echo of Bronte’s Lucy Snowe?), is an English professor at a small women’s college. Brought in on a temporary appointment that she is led to believe may lead to a tenured position down the road, she rapidly becoms entangled in a complicated web of personal relationships and pedagogical challenges. I wrote ‘professional challenges’ initially, but to me one of the most conspicuous features of Sarton’s version of academia is how unprofessional it seemed, and how little the working environment of Appleton College resembles my own university environment–which is why it is particularly interesting to me that at Tales from the Reading Room, litlove reports that to her, the novel “seemed to be talking directly to me about my life as it was spent in the university.” (You can read other responses at the Slaves of Golconda site, too.)

Starting with the familiar aspects, Lucy faces, and beautifully articulates, the emotional highs and lows of teaching. When a class is going well–when the students become engaged–things fly along. When they don’t, when they are, as Lucy sees some of her freshmen, “as passive as fish,” a peculiar kind of despair can set in because (as the novel emphasizes in many of its aspects) teaching is always very personal to the teacher: you have chosen work, accepted a vocation, based on a passionate commitment to values you suddenly realize, in those moments, are insignificant or worse to many of those to whom you expose yourself daily just be standing there in front of them.  How can they be so indifferent, you wonder?! How can you move them, connect them to the excitement you feel coursing through you? Though Lucy is later (and probably rightly) ashamed of giving in to her rage, her speech to her students after a particularly dispiriting marking session certainly struck a chord:

‘Here is one of the great mysterious works of man, as great and mysterious as a cathedral. And what did you do? You gave it so little of your real selves that you actually achieved bordeom. You stood in Chartres cathedral unmoved. . . . This is not a matter of grades. You’ll slide through all right. It is not bad, it is just flat. It’s the sheer poverty of your approach that is horrifying!’

Unrealistically, after her rant her students break into applause. ‘That was wonderful,’ one of them says; ‘Why didn’t you get angry before?’ (My own expectation is that the students who actually needed to hear the rant would be absent that day, and the others would be offended at being yelled at when they had in fact tried hard on their assignments.) The ideal contrast is meant to be shown, I think, in the long account of her colleague’s seminar on Keats, which Lucy attends to watch “a master of the art” of teaching. The class begins with “a painful, stumbling series of unrelated questions and answers” then under the teacher’s guidance becomes “something like a fugue,” and finally “the summation flowered.”

Lucy’s remark about giving the work “little of [their] real selves” goes to the heart of the book’s interest in both teaching and learning, which turns on the question of how personal an activity either can or should be. That teaching is inevitably personal is pointed out at several moments, along with the problems that then arise of whether it is necessary or possible to confront each student in a sufficiently individual way without losing one’s own way and then failing, after all, to teach them. “How carelessly she had criticized her own professors down the years!” Lucy reflects.

How little she had known or understood what tensions drove them on and tore them apart, what never-ending conflict they must weight and balance each day. For she had come to see that it was possible, if one worked hard enough at it, to be prepared as far as subject matter went . . . but it was not possible to be prepared to meet the twenty or more individuals of each class, each struggling to grow, each bringing into the room a different human background, each–Lucy felt it now–in a state of peril where a too-rigorous demand or an instantaneous flash of anger might fatally turn the inner dierction. . . . . How did one know? How did one learn a sense of proportion, where to withdraw, where to yield?

And she guessed, not for the first time, that there could be no answer ever, that every teacher in relation to every single student must ask these questions over and over, and answer them differently in each instance, because the relationship is as various, as unpredictable as a love affair.

The plagiarism case that provides the crux of the novel’s plot becomes the test case, perhaps the limit case, for this problem of proportion, as the different parties involved in resolving it are brought to believe that the appropriate response is not the one mandated by college policy but one that reflects a more personal (psychological) understanding of the student’s action. “Teaching is first of all teaching a person,” Lucy realizes, and the college’s decision (against the vigorous opposition of one of its most important trustees) to bring a psychiatrist on staff represents a commitment to this highly individualized approach.

It also, or so it seemed to me, suggested a recoil from what had seemed like an ideal, both for Lucy and in the book more generally: the image of the teacher as (in Lucy’s indirect words), “a keeper of the sacred fire.” The novel invokes an inspirational model of teaching, one that relies on the power of the teacher’s personality and on the development of students as acolytes. That a student might get singed (or worse) by that “sacred fire” seems to be one of the lessons of the plagiarism case, as the student involved is being closely mentored by one of the college’s star professors and caves under the pressure of her expectations. This, presumably, is an example of someone not finding that sense of proportion, not seeing “where to withdraw.” Is Lucy’s relationship with Pippa, an accomplished but less conspicuously brilliant, student meant to stand as an alternative model, one in which a more cautious or impersonal or self-conscious approach to teaching ultimately is better for learning? The advice Pippa found useful is hardly “sacred flame” kind of stuff:

“I did what you said. I kept making outlines, discarding wonderful stuff because it wasn’t necessary. You said, ‘Keep the center clear.’ And you said, ‘If you get into a panic, spell things out 1, 2, 3.’ . . . You smile, but all that helped.”

Still, at the end of the novel Lucy’s motivation for staying on at Appleton is not practical but emotional, or at least visceral: “If I stay,” she tells her colleague, “it will be for love.”

So what about this interesting novel was alienating, when its central issues (distance, vocation, integrity, pedagogy) are also central to my own life? The main thing is simply that its focus on such intense, personal relationships between teachers and students, and its emphasis on teaching as “teaching a person,” may seem natural in a small college when you have “twenty or more individuals” in a class, but at a simply pragmatic level, it’s impossible (and self-destructive) to teach much larger groups on that model–or so I have come to believe. For instance, I know my own teaching load is not nearly as heavy as it gets, but I just received my teaching assignment for next fall and it is one class capped at 75 students, another capped at 40, and another capped at 20. Next winter I’ll have a class of 75 and a class of 40. There will be some overlap of students among these classes, but as they are all at different levels, there won’t be a lot. And there will be some students I’ve taught before–but again, not a lot. So of the students in those 250 spots, probably 200 will begin their courses as strangers to me. At many Canadian universities (and indeed in other departments at Dalhousie) a professor might easily have 250 students in just a single course (we have been looking at moving to classes of 150-200 for some of our offerings but have, sort of ironically, been held up by the total unavailability of big enough rooms). I’d love to “teach a person,” and I try to make opportunities to turn names and faces on my roster into individuals I know something about, but in practical terms, there’s only so much I can do. And there’s a lot I need to do just to manage these numbers: I can’t be endlessly tweaking policies to accommodate, as they do at Appleton, the math genius who isn’t completing other work.

I also work in a much more bureaucratic environment than Sarton depicts. If I find a student has plagiarized, there’s a process I have to follow, and the student union (which votes, in The Small Room, on Jane’s fate) has nothing to do with it. There are policies for almost everything, in fact, including appropriate lines for relationships between students and professors, and my syllabus gets longer and longer as the administration issues more and more edicts. Last year we had to include specific statements about attendance and missed work in response to the university’s rapidly developed H1N1 strategy. The Small Room suggests a world in which decisions about students’ futures are debated and decided among small groups of people all of whom know the student’s history, record, and campus relationships intimately. That world may exist somewhere, but it’s not mine.

I’m not entirely convinced, either, that I’m sorry it isn’t. As The Small Room eloquently dramatizes, the price is high for teachers who take on their students’ whole lives rather than just their academic work. There are great risks of arbitrary or uneven judgments, too, when personal feelings are permitted so much play along with subjective notions about who does and who doesn’t deserve special treatment. There are problems, as well, with the idea of teaching as something “sacred”: the novel holds to what now seems an old-fashioned view of literature as a kind of secular prophecy (hence, for instance, the Chartres cathedral comparison Lucy makes), and the Keats seminar culminates in insights about Fanny Brawne’s life and personality, the professor’s scholarship giving her the wisdom to speak “from a cloud,” a “creative power,” a “mystery.” This is no longer what we imagine is the professor’s role, or the role of scholarship.

And yet, having said that, having acknowledged that the world of Sarton’s college is not the world of the modern multi-purpose, highly professionalized, bureaucratic university, I also have to admit that I felt some yearning for her world. Many (maybe most)? of the professors teaching literature in these big impersonal schools started down that career path because, like Sarton’s teachers, they felt a fire burning in their head–because they were in love. For many of us, learning to live and work in the university as it is now constituted (in North America, at least) has been a disillusioning and dispiriting process–though even so, for many of us, it’s teaching that still brings us closest to that inspirational flame. I may not be able to know or teach all 250 students a year as individuals, but over time I do get to know a lot of them, and it’s tremendously exciting to be part of their development. For every time you want to (or, ahem, actuall do) yell at them, as Lucy does, to stop holding themselves back, there are times when their enthusiasm and curiosity rise up to meet you and you feel the thrill and the responsibility of being their guide and companion in something that matters. So much about the discourse of education today seems to disregard the value of that connection to the whole person–it’s all about outcomes and measures and productivity and, of course, jobs after graduation. Is that really what we want? We as teachers? or as parents? as students? If Lucy’s view seems dangerously personal, the current obsession with students as consumers seems dangerously limited and limiting. If we can’t ever hope to teach students as people, or to be people ourselves when we teach, who will ever, in the end, actually learn anything worth knowing?

One final note: I happened to be working through Death in a Tenured Position this week in one of my classes and I notice that it is dedicated to May Sarton. Carolyn Heilbrun (who wrote the novel under her pseudonym Amanda Cross) also wrote a couple of essays on Sarton that are included in her collection Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women. I think there are a lot of connections between Heilbrun’s book and Sarton’s–but I’ve run myself out of time and gone on long enough for this post, so I hope to write something on those connections, and maybe onHeilbrun’s work more generally, next chance I get.