I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
I’m reading poet and novelist May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude right now, published in 1973 when she was 61 years old. It covers a year of living by herself in rural Nelson, New Hampshire, where she bought her first house. The journal covers September 1970 to September 1971. She wrote it after her memoir Plant Dreaming Deep was published to acclaim and popularity. The memoir spanned her purchase of the Nelson house and the eight years following, as she renovated it and learned to live in a rural town.
In the first entry of Journal, dated September 15th, Sarton writes:
The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?
I think of these pages as a way of doing that. For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation.
I find lately my meetings with other people are more collisions than conversation, as I want only to leave and return to writing, or to painting, or to assembling.
Later Sarton continues in the same entry:
I live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word, a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many.
Margot Peters’ biography of May Sarton confirms that Sarton was, indeed, almost impossible to live with due to her self-absorption, mood swings, and temper. In her review of Journal of a Solitude, blogger Victoria Best at Tales from the Reading Room uses Sarton’s example as a jumping-off point for investigating what happens when anger and destructive emotions are suppressed rather than expressed by a creative woman:
In her book The Creative Feminine and her Discontents, Juliet Miller writes that ‘for a woman to get in touch with her creativity it is crucial that she confronts the daimon of destruction and aggression.’ Women, Miller argues, can struggle to own their inner violence and negativity for a number of reasons. They might be afraid of displaying characteristics that they have never presented publicly before, or showing loved ones an incongruent inner self. They might prefer to turn anger inwards and wound the self, believing that ‘this matters less in the scheme of things than bearing the unknown results of expressing their anger or forcefulness towards another.’ Or, confronted by so much brutality and aggression towards them in their daily reality, they might possess instead ‘a strong desire for a peaceful internal world.’
I had the experience of expressing myself in my book assemblage in a way that felt extremely uncomfortable. I felt I was saying thing by it that I knew others didn’t want to hear or confront. When I dropped off the work at the show, one of the curators asked me to explain it “in my own words” (but I had already explained it in my own words in the submission, though limited to just 100 of them). I could see that not only did she not get it, she didn’t want to get it, because my subject matter — the adulteress experience — was not something she thought appropriate for an exhibition about censored books and unheard voices. Or, perhaps, I am imposing all that interpretation onto her, and it is just my inner cultural monitor who said, “you should not make art like this.” It did express some anger and destructiveness, at the bind that I and other women have found themselves in, being exhorted to at once be docile in marriage but also expressive in love.
Later in her blog post, Best continues:
The culturally prescribed form of female relating involves women holding space for their loved ones and meeting their needs seamlessly and selflessly. But a different dynamic occurs between the creative woman and the world. The artist’s main relationship is with the watchful stranger, the audience or reader or viewer who is unknown and who may not be easily appeased. Rozsika Parker in her essay ‘Killing the Angel in the House’ grapples with Virginia Wolff’s idea of the obstructive angel who tries to ruin her creativity by insisting that she please her audience. Parker takes up the notion that aggression is required to stand firm against possible disapproval. ‘Whether we write, paint, garden or sew we never simply make a thing; rather we enter into a mixture of relationships with, for example, contemporary practices, with our own creative history, with materials, with colleagues and of course with imaginary audiences and internal figures.’ To be creative is to run the risk of outraging any or all of these interlocutors. It requires a certain aggressive strength to insist on the importance of one’s voice and the singular form of one’s art.
While I don’t have much of an audience, my work regularly comes into contact with people I hardly know: I submit it to juried shows and get accepted or rejected (without any real idea why — did they find it strong? was it because I was an officer of the art group so they had to? did they just need another piece of that size?); I present it in shows when accepted or when they are open to all; I share it online; I share it in one-off places such as when I shared Snow Bound with my professional photography instructor and classmates.
I’m not sure that I bring aggression exactly, but more authenticity and unapologetic assertion. It’s uncomfortable, although I do not have anything like the audience or critical attention that Sarton had (and apparently craved).
I have not yet finished reading Journal of a Solitude, in fact, I’m barely into the October entries.
Best summarizes the outcome of Sarton’s living in solitude (and reflecting on it through memoir and journaling), referring to a short documentary film that was made about Sarton in 1979, in which Sarton says she has become “enamoured of solitude… my last, great love.”
Best writes, “solitude had turned into the relationship Sarton always wanted, one in which she could live under her own unfaltering, attentive, forgiving gaze and in the act of creativity she loved.”
That’s a very lovely though and way to wrap it up, but I do wonder, reading about Sarton’s many love affairs (with women, for the most part — she came out as a lesbian in her writing in 1965), if solitude was a consolation prize to her not what the core of her being sought. She also sought critical acclaim, something similar to being seen and appreciated by a lover. It was not enough for her to simply create; she had to be recognized to feel complete.