The House by the Sea Read online

  The House by the Sea

  A Journal

  May Sarton

  FOR BEVERLY HALLAM and MARY-LEIGH SMART

  Preface

  WHEN I MOVED to this house by the sea in May of ’73 I had it in mind to keep a journal, to record the first impressions, the fresh imprint of a major change in my life, but for a year and a half the impulse to be silent and to live into this new place before speaking about it remained very strong. For months the sea was such a tranquilizer that I sometimes wondered whether I had made a fatal mistake and would never be able to write again. The Journal of a Solitude had been a way of dealing with anguish; was it that happiness is harder to communicate, or that when one is happy enough there is little incentive even to try to sort out daily experience as it happens? I became haunted by something I read years ago to the effect that when the Japanese were in a period of peace they painted only fans.

  Why, then, had I made the move, left Nelson and my friends there, left village life that had taught me so much, left “the hills of home,” the only house I shall ever own, the garden I had created with so much labor over fifteen years? Why move into a much larger house at a time in my life when it might have seemed sensible to pull in my horns?

  Such major decisions are made on instinct rather than reason, and in them chance plays a part … after all, it had been quite by chance that I landed in Nelson in the first place, for fifteen years ago I had looked in vain for a house by the sea—houses by the sea with any privacy, with any considerable land, were beyond my means. As I think it over now, I realize that the decision to leave Nelson had been ripening in me for over a year. I knew it was time to go, time for radical change.

  Of course there were reasons. My house was right on the village green, too exposed; too many strangers in the last years found their way to my door. At the end I began to feel I lived in a museum and had become a target for public curiosity—flattering perhaps, but hard to handle. If I turned such visitors away I felt guilty, and if I asked them in I felt invaded. Another reason was that both Quig and Perley Cole had died and, with them, two of the major friendships born of that place. But the most imperative reason was that I had been through a traumatic personal experience in Nelson in the last two years there, and the house itself felt contaminated by pain.

  Nevertheless I might have stayed on had it not been for an extraordinary act of chance, and an extraordinary act of friendship that made major change as easy as the opening of a door. Had the guardian angel been at work? It did seem so when my friends Mary-Leigh Smart and Beverly Hallam came over from Ogunquit, Maine on April 9, 1971, to pick up a monotype of Bev’s for her retrospective show. They were full of excitement as they had just bought an old estate on the coast near York and were in the midst of making plans to build a modern house right on the rocks. They described vividly the combination of open fields, rocky beaches, ponds, a swamp, and the big woods at the back, and showed me photographs, and I listened. Later in the day I told them of my depression and that I seemed to be at a dead end in my own life. Then Beverly, with a twinkle in her eye, said, “Take another look at the old house.” I still did not understand what she was suggesting. They had mentioned that there was a house on the place, but I had not really paid attention so I looked again at the photograph of a shingled, many-windowed house set back on a knoll against big trees, looking down to the sea across a long field.

  “Why don’t you come and live there, rent it from us, and settle in?”

  It was a staggering moment. Now that I might be able to move, would I dare? How could I leave Nelson, after all? Did I really want to?

  I arranged to go over and have a look. And once I had stood on the wide flagstone terrace and looked out over that immensely gentle field to a shining, still, blue expanse, the decision was taken out of my hands. I had to come. The landscape, not the house at first, was the magnet … after all, Mrs. Stevens, a character in a novel of mine who bears some resemblance to me, felt that the sea was her final muse.

  I had two years in which to dream myself into the change, sell Nelson, and pull up roots. And before the next year was out I had sold to Nancy and Mark Stretch, whom I felt at once would be the right people for the village—young, determined to live a country life and bring up the children they hoped to have in just such a village. Mark was then an apprentice to a cabinetmaker and would make the barn into a workshop.

  Meanwhile I went back and forth to Wild Knoll, measuring walls for bookcases, closing off one big porch to make wall space for the old Belgian furniture, laying a yellow rug in the library (to remind me of the yellow floor at Nelson), choosing colors for the rather dark kitchen, feeling my way into large spaces. Eleanor Blair suggested that I make one large bay window into a plant window, and that has worked better than I could have dreamed. It is really like a small greenhouse, filled with flowering plants all year long. My one anxiety when I first walked through the empty rooms, so large and full of light, was where to find the shelter I need for my work. And when I finally climbed to the third floor, there it was—a room paneled in soft beige-colored pine, under the eaves, the small windows looking down on the grassy path to the sea on one side and into the treetops on the other, for the house stands high on a knoll.

  “The grassy path …”

  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 is the signature of the place, and also perhaps of its former owner, Anne Robert.

  It was she who came here and turned a rather modest house into a lordly “summer cottage” by building out on each side the wings of enclosed porches, by laying the great terrace and its stone wall, and enclosing the formal garden with flowering bushes and trees. It was she, no doubt, who installed casement windows and had built the curving fence, a bower of purple and white clematis in June; she perhaps who planted the big pines, spruce, hemlock, and oaks at the back, so the house stands against, and is sheltered by, a small forest.

  I feel her presence everywhere and it is a wholly beneficent one. I like to think she would be glad to know that someone is working in her garden again, planting bulbs and tree peonies and azaleas, keeping it all alive. She loved this place and her love of it and happiness in it have been contagious.

  I knew from the first moment, in May of ’73, a few days after the move that “I have slipped into these wide spaces, this atmosphere of salt and amplitude, this amazing piece of natural Heaven and haven, like a ship slipping into her berth.” But it was a year and a half later when I felt ready to start a journal. It was designed to be the record of my happiness here. But a journal cannot be planned ahead, written as it is on the pulse of the moment. I could not know that in 1974–75 I was to lose three of my oldest friends, nor that in the spring of ’75 I would be nearly incapacitated by a long siege of virus infection in my throat. So what began in joy ended by being shot through by grief and illness, although the leitmotif is still the sea, and the house by the sea, and the garden by the sea.

  When I first decided to come, I also made the very important decision to bring a dog with me, my first dog … this house is far more isolated than the house in Nelson. I was to be here alone for the first year while Mary-Leigh and Bev’s house was a-building, and a dog, I felt, would be just the companion I needed. Also, I had fallen in love with Pixie, a Sheltie belonging to the Frenches up the road in Nelson, and had begged them to let me have a p
uppy when she had her first litter. In this way Tamas came into my life, Tamas Sea Island March Wind, to give him his full name. At three months of age he began to live with me, sleeping beside me at night and playing in a playpen by my desk while I worked. When he was six months old, he and I went to school together, so that by the time we moved into this big house, he was a very gentlemanly well-behaved dog.

  I was totally ignorant about dogs. I had fallen in love with one special dog, Tamas’ mother, but knew nothing about the breed except that they were sensitive and beautiful. But luckily for me Shelties (Shetland shepherds) are by nature guarders not hunters, so Tamas can be let out safely at all times, even when I go away for half a day, and will never run off. He also shepherds Bramble, the last of the wild cats, whom I had tamed at Nelson. For her, his arrival as a small barky puppy was traumatic. For three weeks she would not come up on my bed and stayed out most of the time. But Tamas learned, learned not to bark—how moving it was that afternoon when he approached Bramble, sitting beside me on a couch, and swallowed his bark! I saw him do it, saw the impulse come, and then be quelled. And for a while that day they sat side by side, and then, little by little, became fast friends.

  Every day we set out together in the late morning after the stint at my desk is done, and walk through the woods, making a large circle on dirt roads, around the swamp and home again. They both sleep on my bed at night, Bramble coming in through the window when she wants to and often leaving before dawn. Solitude shared with animals has a special quality and rarely turns into loneliness. Bramble and Tamas have brought me comfort and joy.

  There is another member of the family who comes here for a day or so every month, Judith Matlack, with whom I shared a house in Cambridge for many years, and who is now in a nursing home in Concord, Massachusetts. For thirty years or more she has been the closest thing to family in my life. Without her presence, even though her mind is failing and she has no memory of all our journeys to Europe together and all our summers in Nelson, there would be no Christmas and no Thanksgiving, and I would feel like an orphan. This journal is a partial record of what it is like to experience senility close to home.

  In the years at Wild Knoll my life has expanded rather than narrowed. Not only is this house larger and more comfortable than the Nelson house, but my life inside it has changed. I find myself nourished by the visits of many friends, friends of the work who have written me for years and finally turn up from South Dakota, or Ohio, new friends, old friends who are passing by, for everyone comes to Maine sooner or later! I try to see them one at a time. I mean every encounter here to be more than superficial, to be a real exchange of lives, and this is more easily accomplished one to one than in a group. But the continuity is solitude. Without long periods here alone, especially in winter when visits are rare, I would have nothing to give, and would be less open to the gifts offered me. 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.

  Wild Knoll

  October 1976

  The House by the Sea

  Wednesday, November 13th, 1974

  AT LAST I am ready to start a journal again. I have lived here in York for a year and a half, dazzled by the beauty of this place, but I have not wanted to write about it until today. Perhaps something cracked open in Europe (I went over for a month in mid-October); for the first time I can play records, and poems are shooting up. For two years I have not been able to listen to music because opening that door had become too painful after the hell of the last two years in Nelson. But I have been happy in this place from the very first day. And every day since then I have woken at dawn to watch the sun rise.

  I am living under a powerful spell, the spell of the sea. But in one way it is not as I imagined, for I had imagined that part of the spell would be the influence of the tides, rising and falling. But I do not see the rocks or the shoreline from my windows; I look out to the ocean over a long field, so I am not aware of the tides, after all, nor influenced by their rhythm; instead, I am bathed in the gentleness of this field-ocean landscape. Without tension, it has been the happiest year I can remember (and, after all, I did manage to write a short novel).

  The refrigerator has pots of freesia and daffodil bulbs in it to stay cool for a month or two and then come out to the plant window, which is really like a small greenhouse. It is lovely now because of a white cyclamen and three Rieger begonia, one bright red, one greenish white, and one salmon pink. When the morning sun streams in, they glow in their transparencies.

  For over a year I have had Scrabble here so that when Judy came to visit from her nursing home, she would find her old pussy to welcome her. She was one of two speckled sisters Judy and I shared before I moved to Nelson, and whom I had as summer guests after the move.

  Scrabble has always been a strange difficult personality, often not to be found, secretive, remote, furious when picked up, yet longing for love. She had the deepest look in her golden eyes of any cat I have known. It was a look as from person to person. She has been a haunting presence in this house because she lived upstairs on the third floor in my study—she was terrified of Bramble and Tamas and they had learned never to go up there. So she was with me during work hours, but I knew she needed more love than I could give, needed to sleep on my bed where Tamas and Bramble sleep. So she had become a constant anxiety, a tug at the heart, more than I had realized.

  Last Saturday I had her put to sleep. She had not eaten for days—a visit to the vet and medicines did no good—so I made the hard decision. I was not at all prepared for the volcanic eruption of woe when I left the vet’s. I was crying so much I forgot to pay the bill and had to go back, and all the way home I could hardly see to drive. I felt cracked in two.

  In some ways the death of an animal is worse than the death of a person. I wonder why. Partly it is absolutely inward and private, the relation between oneself and an animal, and also there is total dependency. I kept thinking as I drove home, this is all inside me, this grief, and I can’t explain it, nor do I want to, to anyone. Now, six days later, I begin to feel the immense relief of no longer being woken at five by angry miaows, “Hurry up, where’s my breakfast?” from the top of the stairs, no longer having to throw away box after box of half-eaten food because she was so finicky, no longer trundling up three flights with clean kitty litter—but, above all, no longer carrying her, a leaden weight, in my heart. She was the ghost at the feast, here where everything else is so happy.

  But, oh, my pussy, I wish for your rare purrs and for your sweet soft head butting gently against my arm to be caressed!

  In these last two years I have had to witness too much decline, and in Europe also I was saying good-bye to friends in their eighties and nineties. Perhaps I cried so terribly because Scrabble had become the symbol of all this—of the breakup about which we are helpless, which we have to witness in others, and in ourselves, year by year. How does one deal with it?

  Saturday, November 16th

  A SERENE DAWN. I saw the sun first bathing my bureau in rich orange light, sat up, and caught the red disc just as it stood for a second exactly on the horizon’s rim. It is so silent all around that a moment ago when a single wave broke I was startled by its gentle roar.

  Two days ago I felt marvelously free because I had taken care of most of what had been badgering me on my desk since my return, a joyful sense of released power about everything I did. But life has to interrupt, of course, and Richard Henry, a Unitarian minister came overnight, so I never did get back to that feeling.

  I have seen R.H. several times and we always connect, but this time I was troubled by something frail about him, something withheld, as if we never quite reached the nub of anything we talked about. I felt that the kind, imaginative man one meets is not the real person and that the real person has bee
n dimmed … but by what? Professional responsibility? The weight of other people’s lives?

  I suppose animals are so precious because all these complexities are not involved in our relation to them. Our response is direct and simple and so is theirs. What a joy it was as we walked down to the rocks yesterday when Bramble suddenly erupted, tail lashing, leaping into the air as Tamas caught sight of her and then racing off with him! As always Tamas was a great help with R.H.; he is so loving that any guest here feels immediately “taken in” and cherished by his eager glances and wish to be caressed.

  I have just found again a letter from Eugenia, my Chilean friend (a psychotherapist), with whom I had two deep-thrusting talks in London. I wanted to reread this letter. Something in it at the end reached me like a blessing. We have been friends for thirty years, but there have been few meetings lately because of the ocean between us. She is racked by the Chilean agony, is in constant touch with the refugees, and suffers from the split within her family, some of whom are for the Junta. She says,

  “Later you will know what this trip did. What you will not know is what it did for us.

  “When I saw you first I did not realize how much of me was still there and still alive. It was an avalanche of feeling. Parts of oneself that one does not dare touch were still there, as alive as ever. Other parts I know to be alive because of my work. As a resounding instrument most of these are touched everyday but one can only use them as it needs to be. One’s head is always around floundering, and in the recognition of one’s feeling one recognizes the patient’s. This is not the same as allowing oneself to be touched and responding spontaneously as one needs to. And with so much loss I thought all this was gone. For one year I could not listen to music and for many months I have kept people at bay. I do not want them to get near and intrude into a process of reconditioning oneself with loss. And I really thought I no longer loved, personally, persons. But I do. And that is a wonderful feeling to have and I am grateful to you for it. Reading your article about Le Gallienne I found so much that is similar in my work, to the theatre, the valuation of silence, the length and intensity of silence; the right word in the right tone at the right time. All calculated if you like but all really based on a genuine understanding and feeling. In other words the technique has to become part of oneself and the discipline has to be there. When I stop for a few weeks, I feel at first like a rusty instrument, uncertain about my own sounds, uncertain of the pitch.