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University Microfilms International 300 N. ZEEB RD„ ANN ARBOR, Ml 48106 8222149

Owens, Eloise Suzanne

THE PHOENIX AND THE UNICORN: A STUDY OF THE PUBLISHED PRIVATE WRITING OF MAY SARTON AND ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH

The Ohio Slate University Ph.D. 1982

University Microfilms International 300 N . Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, M I 48106 THE PHOENIX AND THE UNICORN:

A STUDY OF THE PUBLISHED PRIVATE WRITING OF

MAY SARTON AND ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

Eloise Suzanne Owens, B.A., M.A.

*****

' The Ohio State University

1982

Reading Committee: Approved By:

Professor Daniel Barnes Professor Morris Beja a __ , -rg Professor Richard Martin ---- Advisor Department of English In memory of Daniel J. Owens and Blanche Rittmaier ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author wishes to thank Professors Daniel Barnes, Morris Beja and Richard Martin for their reading of this study. Appreciation is also extended to Mr. Dan Daraerville for his reading of Chapter 2 and to Miss May Sarton for her encouragement and cooperation during the writing of this study. VITA

March 6, 1955 ...... Born - Cleveland, Ohio

1976 ...... B.A., Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

1976 ...... Undergraduate Fellow in English, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

1977 ...... M.A., College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia

1977 ...... Virginia State Graduate Fellow, Research Assistant in English, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia

1977-1979 ...... Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

PUBLICATIONS

"House, Home and Solitude: Memoirs and Journals of May Sarton." May Sarton: Woman and Poet, ed. Constance Hunting. Orono: U. of Maine (1982).

"Gilded Ladies: A Study of Decorative Art in the Works of Edith Wharton and Mary Cassatt." Presented at "American Women in the Arts 1880-1980." University of Pittsburgh, March 18, 1980.

"A Survey of Grading Practices in English 110." Moreover, vol. 8, no. 1, 1977.

"Lmagist" (poem). The William and Mary Review, vol. 15, no. 1, 1976.

FIE IDS OF STUDY

Major Field: American Literature to 1900. Professor Daniel Barney

Nineteenth Century British Literature. Professor Richard Martin

Twentieth Century Literature. Professor Morris Beja

Interdisciplinary Study of Literature and the Fine Arts. Professor Barbara Grosseclose

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... iii

VITA ...... iv

CHAPTER 1 ...... 1

CHAPTER 2 ...... 17

CHAPTER 3 ...... 92

CONCLUSION ...... 160

NOTES ...... 168

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 173

SECONDARY SOURCES...... 176

V Everything today has been heavy and brown. Bring me a Unicorn to ride about the town.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Now I become myself. -It's taken Time, many years and places; I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people's faces...

May Sarton Chapter 1

The 1980-81 publishing season is notable for the number of

journal/diaries published. During this period, the publication of

private writing, whether by famous or little-known writers, suggests

that as a literary form the journal is enjoying a particular

popularity today. A checklist of the year's "best" publications as

judged by the New York Time Book Review, lumps the

journal/diary/letters together under the broad category

"autobiography & biography," though there are important distinctions

to be made between the forms. However, a dozen titles appear which

represent some form of diary and letters, most notably Cosima

Wagner1s Diaries (Volume 11) ; The Diary of Richard Wagner; Henry

James1 Letters (Volume III); Self-Portrait of a Hero: The Letters of

Jonathan Netanyahu; Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Susan B. Anthony;

Correspondence, Writings, Speeches; Letters From Africa by Isak

Dinesen; The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien; and the "imagined

reconstruction" of Louise Bogan's diaries and letters, Journey Around

My Room (ed. Ruth Limmer). The publication of numerous memoirs has

prompted new critical evaluations of that form as a literary genre.

Critical commentary on the subject is piece-meal, spread out as it is

in reviews here and there, but such attention points to a growing

interest by writers and critics in the subject of private writing

"made public." How do we assess the form? What critical criteria

1 2

can we develop to address it as a literary form? Can we assemble

critical discussion of this kind of work in the same ways we evaluate

other forms— fiction and poetry in particular— or is private writing

a "literary" event at all? Such attention is warranted not only by

the sheer number of works appearing in print, but also by the quality

of the work.

Irving Howe, in his review of Native Realm; A Search for

Self-Definition by the 1980 Nobel winner Czeslaw Milosz, notes that

"Almost all good writers...improvise a terrain of memory or

imagination set at a distance from the intolerableness of our

world."1 The "terrain of memory" is, in fact, the landscape of

private writing. "Memoir" is a looking back, a selection and

recreation of experience. Whatever the distance between the events

told and the act of telling, the form assumes two things: the life is

worth recounting and the story of some value as story (or why begin

such a project at all?); the events recorded (typically, the life is

retold through the chronicle of "events") are selected for some

reason, some purpose other than simple chronology. The recorded life

is shaped by the writer's choice of material and, of course, by what

he or she excludes. The distance between the material of memory and

the act of storytelling and record filters the supposedly significant material from the insignificant. 3

Donald Hall describes two familiar types of memoir as he

considers Charles Tomlinson's Some Americans: A Personal Record .

Some writers erect monumental autobiographies that

detail childhood struggles for identity, failures and

achievements, until— 600 pages later— a hand describes

itself writing a final page. To the side of such pyra­

mids stand the smaller houses of memoir, in which modesty

is a method if not a conviction, in which writers concen­

trate on one area of their lives, or ostensibly on people

other than themselves. It is a sneaky form of autobiography.2

Another form of memoir may be simply, "a miscellaneous book that rambles from personal history to cultural essay," as Patricia Harapl's

A Romantic Education is described by Paul Z w e i g . 3 in either case,

the writer's memory may be misleading. As Barrett J. Mandel cautions

in his study of misconceptions about autobiography ("Full of Life

Now"), "I can 'remember' whatever I like about my life and then find 4

as I write my autobiography that the truth which ultimately discloses itself has little to do with these initial memories."4

The diary or journal is distinct from memoir, or the more general term "autobiography," because it is not a "memory" book.

While the diarist may not choose to write daily, he or she is committed to a progressive chronology, life recorded as it happens rather, than as it is shaped by memory. The diarist is certainly selective in preserving experience but because such writing is likely to represent spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment selectivity, it censors less and "remembers" more than the memoir. Francis Russell Hart, in

"History Talking to Itself: Public Personality in Recent Memoir," gives one definition of memoir that suggests further distinctions between this type of writing and the journal or diary.

Memoir is the autobiographical mode that thwarts

generic expectations in readers who go to auto­

biography for "that extra degree of privacy."

Memoir: personal history; the personalizing of

history; the historicizing of the personal. Memoir:

the personal act of repossessing a public world,

historical, institutional, collective. Titles such 5

as memoirs of my times, memoirs of San Quentin,

memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts, reflect on that

ambiguous genitive. The memoirs are of a person,

but they are "really" of an event, an era, an

institution, a class identity.5

Because '\nemoir" may include a much larger audience than the assumed personal, private world of the writer, the journal/diary is a much more confined work. If written solely for the eyes of the writer alone, its material and mode of execution work on entirely different assumptions.

Immediacy is a prime feature of the journal as compared to other forms of private writing, and if the published journal reproduces the original work as closely as possible, the form has the potential for preserving a sharper picture of detailed experience.

Likewise, because the journal is built up from daily detail, it is apt to be more "cluttered" with insignificant, trivial or simply dull material that the memoir might polish off or eliminate. The writer of the journal may be more noticeably inconsistent as he or she, recording life as it changes, changes. The journal may be, as Louise

Bogan wrote, "a futile and time-wasting occupation for a writer.

Temptations toward the inconsequential detail, the vaporous idea, and the self-regarding emotion are always present and can become overwhelming.The writer of the memoir is able to pull together 6

loose ends and resolve inconsistency to present a final product, a view or representation of experience, whether or not that coherence is "true" to the writer's life only in hindsight.

Daily records are not inherently more accurate in recording a life than other forms of writing. Different diaries have different intentions and are limited by the writer's purposes, sense of privacy, and talent. Anne Olivier Bell, for example, notes in her edition of The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume II, that, "When we consider the accuracy of [Woolf's] record of her own feelings we are confronted with truth of another kind. She does not set out in her diary to reveal her soul or her inner life."7 Certainly the most studied American journal, Thoreau's Walden, does not represent the daily, spontaneous recording of experience that it appears to preserve, since we know that the work was the product of many drafts edited over a long period of time. As J. Lyndon Shanley has made clear in his reconstruction of the text of Thoreau's work, "Walden is the result of a gradual re-creation of his experience rather than simply a recounting of that experience as he had entered it in his journal when it happened."8 of particular importance, however, is the relationship the published version has to the original journals.

While Shanley appreciates the polish and design of the published

Walden, Thoreau's editing and re-editing of material over the five or 7

six years he prepared the text "did not introduce a new element and create a new strain; it was absorbed by and used according to the nature of the original piece."9 Certainly one task of the literary critic of a published journal is to explore the character of the work

through what it appears to intend from the writer's viewpoint and what it displays to the reader as a published text.

On the other hand, the first editor of Emerson's journals,

Edward Waldo Bnerson, agreed to the journal's publication by Houghton

Mifflin because he felt these records "come nearer to the man than in the essays carefully purged of personality." Moreover, the scholar would be interested in the journals to "trace the growth of

[Emerson's] powers of expression in prose or rhyme, and the expansion of ... mind during the fifty years or more that the journals cover."10 The sheer quantity of material these journals offer certainly attracts that kind of attention. Interestingly, the

Harvard editors of the journals (Gilman, Clark, Ferguson and Davis) noted in 1960 that the essential practice of the first editions of the major ninetheenth century writers' private writing was to offer only selected material for publication, as was true in the

Emerson-Forbes issue of 1909. Publication of private writing meant that "essential privacy was not to be invaded, no one was to be embarrassed, texts were to be made grammatical and 'correct,'

'trivia' were to be eliminated."H The result, naturally, was a 8

published journal .which presented a "created image" of Einerson, an

"idealized type." Such an end could be easily explained by editors'

"preference for the ideal over the r e a l . "12 The restored Emerson journals of 1960 were something quite different from those published in 1909.

But an "ideal" image may be as much the intention of the journal/diarist as of an editor. Referring to Anais Nin's work,

Martha Rank Lifson ("The Myth of the Fall: A Description of

Autobiography") describes the writer as she "creates herself in her diaries, patching herself into a complex whole by means of poetry, posturing, costumes, quoted complimentsfrom her friends, mirror images, aggrandized self-descriptions and confessions of failure and sorrow." In this type of document, the journal/diary is best characterized as "self-conscious efforts at transformantion."13

Boswell"s London Journal is a different type altogether, though

Boswell "has the larger and serious purpose of making himself anew— into the man of London rather than the boy from Scotland— and of justifying his actions and plans to his correspondent, to his urbane self, to his disapproving father, and finally to the model and idol of his life, Samuel Johnson." Lifson summarizes Boswell's brand of journal as an "instrument of moral improvement."!^ William L.

Howarth's study, "Some Principles of Autobiography," defines three types of autobiographical writers: orators (Boswell included), dramatists, and poets. Each has distinct intentions and methods; 9

but, "they are all shameless liars and impersonators, slipping into

disguises whenever, like Boswell, they need to walk some midnight

Strand. But they dissemble obviously, with that disarming candor

that is honest about its own deceit."15

More recently, journals have been developed as therapeutic

tools for non-literary reader/writers in addition to their

conventional forms as literary pursuits. Depth psychologist Ira

Progoff's "intensive Journal" has become the backbone of an entire

program called "process meditation."16 progoff recognizes that

writing is a special form of thinking, a key to meeting "problems in

the external form" by drawing back to allow the writer to assess

experience "at a deeper level." Journal writing is the key process

because it forces the individual to "move away from the surface of

things" and ultimately to "move inward in order to return with a

greater resource to use in re-approaching the situation."17 The

result of such writing is the common experience for literary artists

and process meditators alike. For the artist, however, the

experience of writing remains a by-product of his or her art, not the

goal. The literary critic must be able to assess a published journal

as a whole work if it is to be appreciated as a literary

production. Considered as a whole, it has a time and place of being

(a historical context) in addition to a personality (the overtly psychological nature of its presentation). The patented Intensive

Journal is the most formally constructed example of its type, but it shares basic assumptions and features of the whole class of private writing. 10

What makes the publishable private record into a literary work

worth critical attention and evaluation? Much of the journal's

appeal for readers is the same as that of fiction— it is ultimately a

story, as Anthony Sampsom has pointed out in his review of The

Blackbench Diaries of Richard Crossman

Diaries are a special kind of addiction. The real

addict likes as much detail as possible so he can

indulge in total immersion. It doesn't matter if

there are hundreds of minor characters whose names

no one can remember, provided the central character

constantly develops with as many quirks, prejudices

and oddities as possible.18

This suggests that famous lives do well in the form (we recall the

six-volume set of diaries that form the foundation of Anais Nin's

reputation as a literary artist) but the writer of a published journal may be very little known aside from the phenomenon of his or her journal. It is particularly interesting to note the recent publication of a "journal's journal"— Ivan Doig's Winter Brothers: A

Season at the Edge of America. Doig found an old diary of one James

Gilchrist Swan in the University of Washington library after moving to the isolated frontier of the Olympia mountains on the Washington coast. Doig's reading of the Swan diary led him to pursue a winter 11

of matching nearly day to day the life of the 19th century pioneer,

thus producing a "double" diary. One might summarize Doig's work as a journal devoted to capturing and recreating history through the recreation of someone e.lse's journal as a kind of instruction manual for daily living rather than simply the appreciation of another life as discovered through a process of writing. As historical documents, journals have always been of interest, as in the past year we have newly "discovered" Flora Tristan's London Journal 1840 (translated by

Denis Palmer and Giselle Pinctel) and Pioneer Women; Voices from the

Kansas Frontier (collected by Joanna L. Stratton).

The most common type of published diary, however, is the work of a single writer, not necessarily the writer by trade (one recalls the fascinating Diary by Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky). Too often the published diary is "misread" as a confessional work and exploited for the material it offers to psychoanalysis. The diary by a writer established in other literary forms may be read as annotation to other works, a valid and useful function in certain contexts. The journal worth discussion on its own merits as a text must be more than a record of personality, however; likewise, the journal that functions for the writer primarily as an exercise book to limber the writing muscles for "real" writing (whatever that may be) is probably of limited interest to any reader other than the literary scholar.

Allen Ginsberg, in a recent talk on the subject of journals as genre, has suggested three features of the form that point to its literary 12

characteristics: the "literary" journal is a form in flux because it

is created in the spontaneity of a mind momentarily fragmented in the

usual condition of consciousness; the journal is primarily an act of

will as a form breaking out of the inertia of time (the quotidian

nature of its entries); and the "aesthetics" of the form are the

aesthetics of raw material.19 When we are dealing, then, with the

published form of a private journal, we should consider this last

point in relation to the apparent polish of the edited printed

version.

The journal should also be examined according to those features

one usually considers in connection with other literary forms. Style

can be studied in private writing in much the same way as with

narrative prose: diction, syntax, formal patterns of organization (at

the level of the phrase, sentence, paragraph, etc.) and punctuation

are all worth attention in even the most seemingly casual,

spontaneous or unedited examples of writing. Again, we are likely to

form comparisons between such features of the private writing of an

individual and other examples of writing by that person. One is

reminded, for example, of the value of such a comparison between the

private letters of Emily Dickinson and her poetry: her seemingly

idiosyncratic and occasionally mystifying use of the dash throughout her poetry is more comprehensible when found throughout the poet's letters and those of her family and close friends. The dash is given a different context when studied in both forms of writing rather than as an isolated feature of the poetry alone. 13

Several functions of the journal/diary mix in most published examples: diary as historic document; diary as storage bin for ideas, patterns, styles linked to documents outside the diary text; diary as therapy; and diary as entertainment (the anecdotal keeping track of time for the simple pleasure of "reliving" experience). The possibilities continue. Martha Rank Lifson simplifies all autobiography as "the pleasure of writing in order to read onself."20 ^ny one journal works within a complex of intentions and contexts of which a literary context may or may not be evident.

The most subtle feature of any published work, however, and the most difficult to judge on the reader/critic's part, is what might be called the journal's sense of "privilege." The context of privacy is central to the workings of the journal as it results in publication.

Writing deposited in the private journal is often information intended to go no further than the writer's own reading. It is sheltered, in a sense, because of the form. Certainly the writer's choice of material for inclusion is influenced by the degree of assurance he or she has that the audience is controllable. This is not to imply that journals are primarily confessional in nature; rather, the context and form of private writing can result in a manipulation of audience whether the writer consciously censors ideas before they reach the printed page or not. The act of publication, then, can be interpreted as an act of intrusion— a breaking of the seal of privacy— even of the journal written purposely for 14

publication. How much a burden that becomes for the writer as the work is created can only be guessed. "Writer tells all" is not an assumption of any form of private writing, even of the most hidden work (the typical "literary find"— recall The Diary of Adele H.).

Background information, specificity of detail and character of

"finished" thought are indications of how that sense of privilege is working between writer, material, and audience. A final question is simple: just how private is "private" writing?

But diary or journal writing is the most intimate form of writing, and the sense of intimacy is retained in even in its published state. The reader's relationship to the work is mixed— he or she is partly an eavesdropper and partly a companion of the writer and the work. What we make of the form as readers is more difficult to pin down than the reading experience of a novel or poetry (we have no traditionally "taught" critical responses to the journal/diary), but our involvement with such a work is often more intense because of our surreptitious position as readers, as in the case of the published journal never intended for publication. We are more gullible, too, in taking as true whatever we read in private writing, especially when our interest in such work is directed towards the expose of the writer's personality. The value of the joumal/diary as a literary form is different in character, but not in degree, from other types of creative literarture. It, too, is a created literature accessible to critical study and evaluation. 15

This study examines the works of two writers whose published private writing is clearly in the category of literary art. Anne

Morrow Lindbergh's five volumes of diaries and letters span the years

1922-1944, but publication of the series began only in 1971 with

Bring Me a Unicorn, followed by Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead (1973) ;

Locked Rooms and Open Doors (1974); The Flower and the Nettle (1976); and War Within and Without (1980). Poet/novelist May Sarton has also published five volumes of private writing to date: _I Knew a Phoenix:

Sketches for an Autobiography (1959); Plant Dreaming Deep (1968);

Journal of a Solitude (1973); The House by the Sea (1977); and

Recovering (1980). For these writers, at least, published private writing has proven to be of great value to each woman's development as a literary artist. Their work is particularly accessible to critical study and illustrates the possibilities of the form as literary art.

In 1935 Anne Morrow Lindbergh published her first account of the Lindbergh explorations of the northern route to China in North to the Orient. Other accounts of her pioneering flights with Charles

Lindbergh followed with Listen! The Wind and The Steep Ascent. Her controversial meditation on war, The Wave of the Future, appeared during the most intense period of U.S. involvement in World War II.

Decades later she would be asked to write a very different meditation on the event of the first lunar landing— Earth Shine (1969). One novel, Dearly Beloved, appeared in 1962 and one volume of poetry, The 16

Unicorn, has been published (1972) but collects only poems written between 1935 and 1955. But her best known work is Gifts From the Sea

(1955), a visionary study of growth and personal fulfillment that continues to attract readers in its 25th anniversary edition. The body of May Sarton1s literary art is represented by 16 novels and 11 volumes of poetry (in addition to the Selected Poems and Collected

Poems 1930-1973) plus a book of "portraits" (A World of Light).

An examination of each woman's achievement as an artist and writer of published private writing does not begin with a clear cut methodology; the purpose of this study is not to establish or argue for one particular way by which to approach the topic of private writing and the implications of publication, nor does it result in an easy formula for testing the "literary" quality of such writing. The choice of Sarton and Lindbergh for study is not arbitrary or based upon quantity of material alone. Each writer is clearly a master of her craft. Ultimately, in the case of these two writers, the study of private writing becomes a study of two minds exquisitely attuned to the art of living consciously and of using that consciousness as the material of literary art. Chapter 2

"...let us remember the splendor of their youth."

Jean Stafford*-

Anne Morrow Lindbergh's diaries span twenty years of an

extraordinary life. They cannot be separated from the phenomenal

hero worship of her husband, Charles Augustus Lindbergh and as such,

fascinate us as we read with fresh interest the Lindbergh story. As

historical documents, they have an undoubted value. Most readers

have no memory of the sensational public events of the years the

diaries cover and may be coming to the story for the first time; we

cannot help but read them with a kind of sensationalized interest.

But these books are misread if reader and critics overlook their value as literary works of merit apart from such interest. The

Lindgergh diaries are the products of an extremely fine and dedicated writer. Indeed, though given little attention by conventional

scholarship, these volumes are exemplary of private writing crossing over from simple "life story" to literary art.

17 18

Publication of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's diaries began in

1971.The five volumes of diaries cover twenty years of writing and

offer a wealth of material for critical evaluation of Lindbergh's

work and her development as a literary artist.

The big events of Lindbergh's life are public record. The

diaries begin shortly before Anne Morrow met the national hero whose

solo flight of the Atlantic took place while the quiet Smith College

student dug into research at the college library for a term paper on

18th century literature, a paper which later won for her a literary

award. Soon after, her father (Dwight Morrow, U.S. Ambassador to

Mexico) hosted a visit at his embassy by Charles Lindbergh. What

followed for Anne Morrow was a meeting, courtship and marriage carried out in the full glare of a news-hungry, if adoring, public and a new life as one of the few female aviators of early aviation history. The Lindberghs' flights over the North Atlantic, Europe,

China and the United States in the 1930's opened up passenger routes and communication with new and often remote areas of the world; secret visits to Germany prior to the outbreak of World War II provided the U. S. government and Western Europe with vital 19

information about Hitler's army. As war became a reality, Charles

Lindbergh's drive for American isolation divided public opinion on

the Roosevelt administration's foreign policies and ultimate

involvement in war. After Roosevelt's repudiation of Lindbergh's

work on behalf of the national interest, the Lindberghs drew back out

of the public eye while Charles (denied a commission in the Armed

Services) served as a human guinea pig for testing high altitude

flight at the Willow Run Armaments plant at Detroit. Sent to the

Pacific to demonstrate newly developed fighters, Lindbergh actually

flew several combat missions as a civilian and would later be

restored to service as General Charles A. Lindbergh under

Eisenhower. These are the public records which frame Anne

Lindbergh's private writing. But the single event readers are most

likely to turn to in the diaries, and the event which resulted in the

most critical development in Anne Lindbergh's life as a writer, was

the kidnaping and murder of Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., the 19 month

old son whose fate is still an occasional news item. Hardly a year

goes by that we don't read of someone claiming to be the "lost"

Lindbergh child— a pitiful but cogent reminder that the Lindberghs'

lives remain central to American consciousness. We cannot separate

their lives from our history and if for no other reason, these diaries are permanently lodged on library shelves. 20

- But the purpose of this study is not to argue the diaries'

merit, or even their accuracy, as historical texts. Reviewers have

had bones to pick, particularly regarding Anne Lindbergh's portrait

of her husband during the very difficult war years when he was

accused of being anti-semitic. Selden Rodman, in his review of War

Within and Without, complains that the Anne Lindbergh he reads in

that period "is susceptible to anyone and anything that will justify

her husband's insensitivity."2 Points of historical record (what

Charles Lindbergh actually said at such-and-such a time) may or may

not mesh with what the diaries record (what Anne Lindbergh reports he

intended by his words). But such questions, even when clearly

answered, do not necessarily compromise the value of the writing.

What counts is that the events of Anne Lindbergh's life fueled a

talent for and dedication to writing. Even the poorest talent should

have made something of such a life. There is evidence in even the

very earliest writing from 1922 that a skilled artist is at the

center of the work. That is, the diaries exist not because of the

events of the life, but because a writer chose to work in this

particular form rather than expressing herself in other ways. It is

true that before 1971, Anne Lindbergh had published several works

(mostly accounts of her early travels and explorations with her husband) including her best-known work, Gifts From The Sea and a 21

slim volume of poetry, The Unicorn. But the diaries are the

masterworks. While not intentionally written for publication, they

have, in fact, become the core of her achievement as a literary

artist.

The act of publication makes no assumptions of literary quality

per se, but it does impose a certain transformation in private

writing as it "goes public." While it is true that the journal or

diary represents the most intimate form of personal communication, it

is also true that publication of such texts includes editing, a

process which may or may not compromise privileged information. The

reader of private writing wants to be able to sense when and where

text has been altered and for what reason. How true and clear a

picture of the writer or event is left in the edited text? How

spontaneous an act of writing is the published, edited work? Such

questions are particularly important if the reader is considering

stylistic features of the work. Punctuation or paragraphing, the

reader hopes, represent the writer's first impulse, not a third

party's decision to improve. But except in variorum editions, we must take the printed text and the writer's commentary on its printed

state as the best form of the private work. Lindbergh addresses this problem in her introduction to the first volume, Bring Me a Unicorn.

In explaining why she chose to publish her old diaries rather than write an autobiography or memoir, Lindbergh explains the crucial 22

difference between the forms: "At best— and its 'best' is very good indeed— an autobiography reveals a glimpse of life seen at the end of a telescope, from a single stance, that of a woman in the last third of life; at its worst, what sometimes emerges can be a glossed-over, retouched picture, mild, pleasant, and perhaps edifying but, on the whole,, static" (Unicorn, p.xv).3 William L. Howarth in "Some

Principles of Autbiography," makes a similar distinction as he defines the general term "autobiography."

...in autobiography vision and memory remain the

essential controls, time and space the central prob­

lems, reduction and expansion the desired goals....

During [the writer's] life he remains uncertain of

cause and effect, rearely sensing the full shape or

continuity of experiences. But in writing his story

he artfully defines, restricts, or shapes that life

into a self-portrait— one far different from his ori­

ginal model, resembling life but actually composed

and framed as an artful invention.4 23

On the other hand, she admits that during the period of her life when

she began writing the diaries, she was reluctant to be as honest and

open as she desired and that she consciously censored as she wrote.

I was warned by my husband-to-be, an intensely private

person who was determined to keep intact this most private

of all relationships: "Never say anything you wouldn't

want shouted from the housetops, and never write anything

you would mind seeing on the front page of a newspaper."

The effect on me of this injunction was smothering. The

lid of caution was clapped down on all spontaneous expres­

sion. The result was dampening for my kind of inner life.

I stopped writing in my diary completely for three years,

and since even letters were unsafe, I tried to write

cautiously or in family language and jokes.

(Gold, p.6)

Happily for her readers, Lindbergh loosened the lid and committed herself to accounting for as much of her true feelings and inner life as possible and the subsequent diaries rarely hint that material has been suppressed. Understandably, the tragedy of her son's kidnapping forced Lindbergh to reconsider her needs. Speaking of the winter of

1932: 24

The hand of grief released me from the hand of the

censor. There were other values, I was beginning to

learn, more important than discretion or even privacy.

As I discovered the following spring, in the abyss of

tragedy, I needed to return to a deep resource. I had

to write honestly. So one can say perhaps that sorrow

also played a part in setting me free.

(Gold, p.12)

We are not likely to find an even balance of candor and caution in the Lindbergh writings. We know from Lindbergh herself that some of the diary entries from the year or so after the kidnapping were destroyed before publication of the diaries was ever considered, but ample evidence of the writer's life during that period remains, "For after all, this is part of the story, as it is part of many people's hidden lives" (Rooms, p.xxiv). Lindbergh recognized the problems she faced in publishing accounts of events and people from old perspectives. For example, she felt the controversy surrounding

Charles Lindbergh's isolationist stance and its consequences needed to be viewed from the "inside"; she also admitTed that "Reading the diaries almost forty years later, I am appalled at my innocence of 25

politics and the violence of my indignation" (War, p.xxi). Of course, the great value of leaving private writing intact is not the possibility of embarrassment for the writer, but the reevaluation of the writing by both writer and reader. As long as both parties recognize bias as it informs the personal record and as long as change of mind or heart is allowed to express itself with the addition of introductions to the published text, then publication of dated material can be judged fairly. It is to Lindbergh's credit that she allowed so much of the "old" truths to be published in their original context. She leaves the reader little doubt of the value of the unretouched picture as published.

Why do people publish diaries and letters? If they have

had interesting lives, they may feel they can add a tiny

segment to the history of their times or put a missing

fragment of mosaic in the picture. In terras of the indi­

vidual there is the wish to give testimony to a journey

taken by one human being which might amuse, enlighten,

or explain other individuals to themselves. In the case

of an individual who has lived somewhat in the public

eye, there is always the hope of clarifying a record

that has been obscured by rumors and blurred by distorted images. And finally, perhaps, the writer seeks some kind of personal summation in order to discover for himself the true essence of a life.

(Unicorn, p.xv)

...in my life I have become sickened with images.

Fame always creates images around its victims or heroes.

...We have^been the victims— not entirely blameslessly— of images, over-sugary and bitterly sour, for almost thirty years. In the volumes, I wanted above all to dispel the images, both good and bad, to give our lives as they were— or, at least, as they seemed to me then, not now in retrospect.

(Flower, p.xvii) II

An important point to consider in the study of private writing as literary art is the writer's use of her material as simple communication and as composition. We might consider several points here that certainly apply to the art of Anne Lindbergh. The diary entry is closed communication: its writer is its reader. Moreover, the context of such writing is often shaped by a sense of expansive secrecy. In the diary form we expect thought and expression to flow more freely than in other kinds of personal expression, even in the letter. The diary may become a safe deposit for the most important and deeply felt experiences of life or it may be simply a junk drawer used for rehashing events and emotions. Development of thought and style are important considerations of the diary as art. In particular, the diary need not make reference to anything outside itself, so degrees of descriptive detail and levels of specificity of material may measure the writer's consciousness of audience or of the diary as a closed form of communication. Private writing, in its least artistic form, may seem totally unconcerned with problems of craft. The writer can be as idiosyncratic as she pleases; punctuation, sentence and paragraph construction will often not conform to the conventional expectations of prose. In a diary or journal, even the strictest of formal writers may drop her guard and let dashes serve as both periods and commas, leave sentences hopelessly fragmented, and free paragraphs to ramble wildly, page

27 28

after page. Whether such deviations are deliberate attempts to stretch the boundaries of form or are merely the result of laziness, the hope of the reader is that such "incorrect writing" will provide a safe haven for emotions and ideas that the writer could not express in an orthodox style. Lindbergh's writing, however, is notable for its polish in every context, whether bound to the confines of the diary page or in correspondence. Craft is, in fact, a primary feature of her work, a development partially explained by her family background.

Lindbergh18 writing began as a natural extension of family life. The Morrows were wealthy, educated people. Dwight W. Morrow, a partner of J.P. Morgan, served as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico at the time Anne met Charles Lindbergh. Her mother, Elisabeth Morrow, graduated from Smith College and once served as its interim president; she was an active supporter of American intervention in

World War II when Lindbergh headed the isolationist movement. The

Morrow households in Englewood, New Jersey and Browne's Point, Maine, were ones in which "an experience was not finished, not truly experienced, unless written down and shared with others," as

Lindbergh explains in her introduction to Bring Me a Unicorn

(p.xvi). Letters home from Smith College were much more than dutiful progress reports; they were finished compositions. These early 29

letters from 1922, before Anne Morrow met Charles Lindbergh, were centered on family— a concentration that would never really shift, though the shape of the family would certainly change.

While later diaries grew to include people, experiences and ideas much larger than the immediate circle of Lindbergh's parents, siblings, husband and children, it is clear that the family became a kind of assumed audience for her private writing quite early. She counted her mother and sisters (older sister Elisabeth and younger sister Constance) as her closest and most valued readers, apart from her husband with whom she always shared her most important work. Her letters, interspersed between diary entries, indicate the constant care with which she treated written communication, whether to herself alone or to others. Lindbergh's letters to her sisters are filled with the kind of detail and description, for example, that make the communication into something very like storytelling. Figurative language is carefully shaped to call attention to how the story is told, as in a letter to Constance about a flight in a new Lockheed plane in 1930:

It was one of those few moments in life when you are

absorbed and overcome by the utter perfection of a thing,

like seeing a perfect rider swing a perfect polo pony, 30

or watching the Panama Canal locks open, or hearing

Howard Samuel play Bach. The power, perfect control,

flexibility— a machine smooth as syrup and sensitively

obedient.

(Gold, January, 1930)

She, of course, chose details she knew her sister in particular would recognize, a communication tailored to the reader (her sister had, in fact, travelled through the Panama Canal and had heard Samuel play

Bach). In another letter from the same period, Lindbergh recreated a concert scene she attended alone (in disguise to avoid recognition— one of the very few times she was able to go out in public by herself). Much more than simple description was offered:

Well, I went and was tinglingly alone. It was

delirium. I came early, and I sat drinking it all

in— every bit (of the bustle and rustle and whisper

and glint of the moments before the artist comes in.)

And I looked at the people who were not alone and I

pitied them. For each person had to share his impres­

sion with someone else...And then, too, it seemed that,

for instance, an intimate couple would be too bound to

their everyday life to be really free to sink into the 31

evening (back to everyday duties) by a fine thread,

starting— well, from the back of his neck. "Really,

John should have a haircut." And he by the scent of

perfume on her arm: "Always getting a new perfume,

and they're so damned expensive."

(Gold, January, 1931)

There is attention to sound in word choice: "bustle," "rustle,"

"whisper," "glint." The first two nouns rhyme and lead to the soft

"wh" sound of the third, puncutated by the hard "g" and "t" of the final word. Lining up the four with simple "and's" in between creates a hypnotic rhythm. She positions herself squarely at the center of the description but quickly dissolves her voice into the imagined conversation between the couple she observes. The personal voice is transformed into an omniscient narrator and character-maker. Even in brief snatches of letters there is evidence of a writer always conscious of the vehicle of her thought, as in a small revelation Lindbergh shared with Elisabeth in a note: "1 think there must be shut cupboards in one's mind; you think you have forgotten things and yet they are there, safe and perfect.

Sometimes, of course, you lose the key'. But still, everything is there" (Rooms, October, 1933). Her impulse is always to visualize experience through familiar devices: metaphor, analogy, comparison. 32

The shift of pronouns from "I" to "you," even briefly, moves

away from the particular towards a more inclusive position— the

position of the reader, in fact. Lindbergh's description is always

finely tuned to her reader and often startlingly visual. Her

particular gift, even in her earliest work, was an ability to explode

the visual component of an idea at the level of the sentence. It

rarely took her more than a sentence or two to create a memorable

"picture" of thought, as in a letter to a friend during the war:

"No, it is not true that individual suffering is diminished against * the background of the war. On the contrary, it exaggerates it, as

though the great blaze threw up gigantic shadows from the smallest

flickering doubts before it" (War, January, 1941). While Lindbergh's

storytelling sense occasionally took over in her letters, it filled

the pages of her early diaries. Finely crafted description,

attention to detail and style characterize the daily writing.

Characterization and scene development turned much of her daily

experience into bits and pieces of creative prose. Consider, for

example, a very early note to herself about a storm one night at

school: "A tearing wind last night. I woke up and it was roaring

down— I heard it coming like a great wave or a river breaking over

its banks, and in a panic closed one window" (Unicorn, November,

1927). We immediately sense a young writer's knack for turning experience into dramatic material. 33

"Tearing wind," "roaring down," "river breaking," "panic" rush

together to recreate a moment charged with energy. The scene is all

one piece. It does not build on earlier scenes or lead beyond the

fleeting moment of the storm.

Later, while travelling across the country to join her parents

in Mexico for a school break, she recorded what she saw from her

train window with that same attention to fixing the moment rushing by. She indulges in exaggeration for dramatic effect by attaching a

startling simile to the end of the description, as though punctuating experience by pushing it as far as it would go.

It would be so terrible to have something happen and

find oneself left behind here in this desolation. It

is worse at the station. It doesn't seem real when one

goes by it— the train rattles and convinces one that it

(the train) is the only reality, but when we stop and

it is still for a minute and one looks out and sees and

hears a pig scratching around, that little bit of motion,

of external motion and sound shocks one with the horrible

realization that this place is realI That it exists,

that is was there before you streamed into it and (deso­

late thought) that it will be there when we have left it 34

far behind. That pig scratching in front of the mud

house...we rush by— just black darkness outside. Where

have we come from? Where are we going? It is like dying.

(Unicorn, December, 1972)

As exaggerated as the conclusion of her experience seems to us, it

was very likely the true response the student writer had to what she

saw and felt, a writer receptive to living and responding to life in

what can only be called "literary" fashion. Again, the scene she

describes works perfectly well by itself. It does not serve to

illustrate anything larger or beyond the implications of its own

details.

The best example of the young Anne Morrow working consciously

to make literary material out of daily experience is a particularly

well-developed record of a day at a friend's house, unremarkable for

the externals of the experience but unusual in the subtlety of the writer's perception of a psychological transformation she undergoes.

It is the kind of revelation we meet again and again in modern

literature, but there is no pretense in the diary that this is a literary event. And here, as in earlier letters, the personal voice dissolves into omniscient narration.

A day at Helen's: a big, summery, chintzy house,

empty and still and cool. And Helen playing Brahms and Cesar Franck. A still, perfect moment, framed neither by time nor by space but higher apart, alone there. Still, caught— the drops of water from the eaves swelling, about to fall, but now whole, crystal­ line, perfect. These moments are so rare, so few, for anyone— those moments of perfection. Music seems to make mine, to make things stand still....I kept looking at the flowers in a vase near me: lavender sweet peas, fragile winged and yet so still, so perfectly poised, a world in themselves, a whole— perfect. Is that, then, perfection; I, only occasionally, like that moment.

For that moment. For that moment I and the sweet peas had an understanding.... If one is happy— if it is sunny and there is the smell of cut grass and the hum of bees- that moment acts as the door to other moments akin to it

It opens a long vista of sunny afternoons with the smell of cut grass and the hum of bees. That moment touches hands with all its little sisters. One can see nothing else but those moments. But if one is unhappy at the moment when one considers, one is inevitably reminded of all the times one has felt just that way. They seem interminable, stretching back as far as one can see, leering at one with exactly the same face down long 36

aisles, as in reflected mirrors. These two vistas

seem absolutely unconnected— sealed passages with no

cross doors, and only one entrance.

(Unicorn, July, 1927)

The style and content of the scene are reminiscent of Woolf and

Proust, two writers Anne Morrow was studying at Smith and continued

to read with admiration throughout her life. The scene is set with

colors, shapes and sounds pinpointed in the first two or three

sentences. A symbol is found— the suspended drop of water remarkable

in its perfection— which draws the reader into the personal realm of

experience through an intimate voice: "Music seems to make mine"

(i.e., moments of perfection). The writer as character begins to

move through the scene as she studies the flowers and reaches a

critical moment of understanding when she and the sweet peas fuse.

This point of crisis is suspended as she draws back from the scene.

A shift to the pronoun "one" allows the writer to be in the scene

observing its details while considering them in relation to something

outside of the scene. Conditions are drawn: "If one is happy," this

is so, but if "one is unhappy" this is true. The revelation ends with a striking image: "sealed passages with no cross doors, and only one entrance." A very abstract and difficult subject— the subjective experience of time and, quite possibly, the nature of the meditative experience— is treated here with sensitivity and rare insight. In fact, in Bring Me a Unicorn, we find passage after 37

passage which reads as something closer to poetry than prose. It is true that Lindbergh dabbled in poetry as a student and would eventually publish one volume of her verse, but one finds her experimenting early in the private writing with bits and pieces of description, even brief dramatic scenes, that remain undeveloped as either form. These are practice runs, it seems, for the beautifully crafted prose developed throughout the years of her work.

Lights through the mist and over the water and no

sound except now and then quite personal impudent

horns from tugs. Those lights, pathos on the water.

The slow ponderous dignity of our turning ship.

Elisabeth, wistful, looking back.

(Unicorn, August, 1926)

Nasturtiums— vivid, firelike colors, so that one can

almost warm one's hands at them. Or shutting one's

eyes bright spots everywhere, as from looking at the

sun. It is strange to see such static brilliance,

such cool brilliance: poised, detached flames on their

smooth green stems— a green white.

(Unicorn, July, 1927) 38

Bach...Here, here at last, perfection— absolute, cool,

instantaneous— and its intangibility. Its beauty slip­

ping liquidly away, while one listened in rapture and

in tears.

(Unicorn, November, 1927)

In all three passages she is consciously trying to remove herself from the events she watches or is part of, thinking, perhaps, that personal intrusion might somehow limit the value of the recorded experience. "One" is artificial in the context of the private diary when the writer is quite clearly the "one" implied. Lindbergh seems to hesitate in the writing of this period to truly own the feelings and ideas she was carefully preserving. She also relies on very casual syntactic patterns to organize the numerous bits of description she assembles (signs of a young writer searching for her own patterns perhaps). Single words or brief phrases line up as a string of associations leading to an often dramatic impression at the end of the passage: her sister caught in a backward glance, a startling color combination ("green white") or a rush of emotion

("rapture and...tears"). Dashes and commas glue the pieces together. But the results are not disappointing— we simply recognize a writer evolving a sense of style and making from her wealth of perceptions as rich a record as possible. 39

When she allowed her own voice to mark its place as the center of experience, she did so with passion, and there was always a danger of letting the intensity of the emotion overcome the craft of the presentation, as when she learned of a school friend's suicide at

Smith:

The frightful sense of tragedy— not tragedy but a

dry, bleak despairing horror all the time; not tears,

just that dry, black and bleached landscape. Is there

anything beautiful, is there anything good, anything

lovely in this world, if such things can happen?

(Unicorn, February, 1928)

But the effect could be justified.

The two planes in the dusk nosed up in the same

direction, like great monsters ready for fight,

spitting fire and roaring. The throb of the engine

through one's body. Suddenly, a tall, helmeted man

shaking our hands: good-bye. The engine roared, a

cloud of dust and blank gray darkness, then above our heads wings dipping in salute. And up and out—

black wings against the gray of morning, toward that

bright star and the mountains!....All my life, in

fact, my world— my little embroidery beribboned

world is smashed.

(Unicorn, December, 1927)

The event was Anne Morrow's first meeting with Charles Lindbergh. Ill

John Chamberlain noted in the National Review an apparent lack

of literary consciousness in Lindbergh's first diary. Examining

Bring Me a Unicorn he asks:

Where...did she gain the character that was to see

her through tragedy, and the fortitude to stand against

the crowd when public pasions were running high? It

could not have been from a literary education that,

surprisingly, does not seem to have included Dreiser,

Sherwood Anderson or even Floyd Dell or Scott Fitzgerald.

She knew nothing of the muckrakers, nothing of the likes

of Lenin. The truth would seem to be that the normal

culture of her girlhood operated independently of a

literary culture.5

While her earliest diaries rarely refer to other writers or to whom she was studying in school, writing was a subject often addressed.

Very early, for example, she clarified for herself the value of

"seeing" through written expression. It might be truer to say that

literary culture for the young Anne Morrow was less a matter of whom she read but of how she was learning to take her own experience and

41 42

transform it into a pointed expression of something much deeper than

simple observation.

Why is it that you can sometimes feel the reality

of people more keenly through a letter than face

to face? Is it because the letter is focused

spirit while in a conversation the dross of matter

is too in evidence? The very body of a person is

a barrier.

(Unicorn, May, 1928)

"Focused spirit" is perhaps the best way to describe her writing as

she presented it. And if writing was to her a vital link between herself and other people, it was an even more important means of experiencing herself and of shaping the character, Anne Lindbergh.

At times, the identity of the character is marked by an objective

voice, but behind the voice is someone looking at herself. A party aboard J.P. Morgan's yacht in 1927 provided the perfect

setting:

The joy of being there almost invisible in this

sparkling world, able to watch and listen to the

most brilliant, charming men in the world, and a

sense of the utmost fairy-tale luxury— everything

done in exciting, magnificent style, so much grander 43

than a party of young people. It was as if a child

when watching all the long-legged black coats and

stiff fronts, and the gleaming, glistening, gowned

ladies radiant with powder and laughter and little

jeweled bags— as if suddenly from watching at the

cloakroom door one was allowed downstairs into the

dining room, invisible but present...one could safely

stay in one's shell; one did not need to talk, one

had only to smile and watch.

(Unicorn, July, 1927)

The event is worth recording because the experience was a vehicle for

a literary account of herself. An intriguing feature of these

diaries is the process by which the writer attaches experience to

herself as writer and character and thereby created a style of

presentation that represented more than simple communication. There

is little feeling of intimacy in these passages, for example, which

is the expected quality of the diary or letter. Certainly, the

reservation one hears in her work is partly the result of a fear of

publicity. But there is ample evidence in the diaries of the same

kind of manipulation of voice and audience that the novelist or poet engages in.

As the reader passes from Bring Me a Unicorn to Hour of Gold,

Hour of Lead, he or she recognizes a maturing artist at work. 44

Two overwhelming events of her life take place during this

period (1929-1932): her marriage to Charles Lindbergh and the

kidnapping/murder of her first baby. Perhaps no other period of the

diaries is so engrossing as this in terms of simple historic

interest, but it is here that the literary art really takes shape as

well. As a literary work that attempts to capture something^like

"truth" and "life," we should expect of this writing the same keen

qualities of observation, presentation, insight and evaluation as of

other literary forms. Documented experience, no matter how personal,

should be crafted in such a way to minimalize its significance as

"news event" and offer evidence of a consciousness at work which can do more than watch and record. The literary event is the

transformation of private, personal material into something else,

something broader than even the impact of one woman's grief, and that is what Lindbergh did with the extraordinary events that followed.

The diarist, Anne Morrow, was quickly confronting a new dilemma as Anne Lindbergh. Stephen Spender's generalization about writers of autobiographical forms ("Confessions and Autobiography") defines her precise situation at this time.

...unless one is to onself entirely public, it seems

that the problem of an autobiographer, when he consi­

ders the material of his own past, is that he is con- 45

fronted not by one life— which he sees from the outside—

but by two. One of these lives if himself as others

see him— his social or historic personality— the sum

of his achievements, his appearances, his personal

relationships. All these are real to him as, say, his

own image in a mirror. But there is also himself known

only to himself, himself seen from the inside of his

own existence. The inside self has a history that may

have no significance in any objective "history of time.

It is the history of himself observing the observer,

not the history of himself observed by others.6

Anne Morrow1s announcement of her engagement to Charles

Lindbergh erupts in a letter to a friend on the last page of Bring Me

a Unicorn and carries with it an unusually somber picture of the

happy event. The 21-year old Morrow closes by telling her friend not to congratulate her or wish her happiness: "...it's gotten beyond that somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor— I will need them all" (Unicorn, 1928, undated). There is a sense of exaggerated emotion; this is a dramatic declaration constructed as much for effect (the reader suspects) as for communication. And in one of the very few letters published between Anne Morrow and her fiance, we hear the voice of a persona, a literary personality. You know always what I am feeling underneath—

deep, deep. You will understand and forgive that

foam of irritation on top of the sea....I think one's

feelings and thoughts, the real true deep ones, are

better focused when you get away because they are

detached from their stale associations: one's desk

room and bed and mirror. They become clear and just

themselves, the way colors of a sunset or a birch

grove seen upside down become clearer, because the

colors are dissociated from their familiar forms...

there are field and fields of smooth rich green

shiny-leafed corn and of rain-colored wheat coming

up level around the trunks of occasional trees in

the field, like water....! feel smoothed out and

level like that— just as still and fresh and grace­

ful as one of those cornfields. (I think there is

great peace in level things, like the level line of wheat or the lines on a beach from waves or the horizontal lines of beech trees.)

(Gold, April, 1929) 47

There are beautiful images developed here and great care is taken to elaborate details of the scene. But it is just this care and elaboration that moves the writing away from simple personal emotion

("You know always what I am feeling underneath") to a more abstract sense of that emotion. There is quite a leap between the first statement of the passage and the last, which considers a very subtle psychological relationship between emotion and perception ("there is great peace in level things"). And, of course, the "one" that takes over for "I" as soon as the writer's consideration of her experience turns metaphorical moves the experience away from the self towards a universalizing of experience. "Self" as expressed in even the most intimate writing as this is a literary concept. As much as self is a created entity, it functions as character.

During the period of Lindbergh's "Hour of Gold," the two years of early marriage and motherhood before the winter of the kidnapping

(the "Hour of Lead"), we sense the development of a personality caught somewhere between literary character and personal identity.

As the wife of Charles Lindbergh, she was learning to fly and navigate while accompanying her husband on transcontinental flights 48

to map passenger routes and, shortly after the birth of her son, routes over Alaska. She had written to her sister of her relationship to Charles Lindbergh: "I have been hanging on to his hand in the darkness for such ages, it seems...." (Gold, February, 1929).

Scarcely a month later, the new Mrs. Lindbergh again lamented,"I miss the vivid realization of things that come from being alone and still"

(Gold, March, 1929). The transition from family life to marriage led her to deeper realizations about the strength of her own personality and the value of her writing. As she tried to describe her first long trip with Charles Lindbergh and the difficulties of learning to mix with new people and new work, she allowed a more immediate voice

(the subjective "I" and "you" rather than the distanced "one" of the earlier writing) to assess the experience.

It has been amazing to step from one circle concen­

trated on one specialized work— seeing nothing else,

and seeing the world from that angle— to another con­

centrated on another specialized work. At the Maduxes'

it was all airlines and planes and engines; at Pecos,

ruins, etc.; at the Edisons1 (in New Jersey), scientific

inventions, etc. I wonder sometimes if they are all 49

different worlds or the same seen from a different angle,

the way you can look through a window with different-

colored panes and see a green world, then a yellow

world, then a red world.

(Gold, August, 1929)

"Ways of seeing" are central to the Lindbergh's writing and all the

more important when the writer allows herself to do the seeing rather

than a disembodied voice of literary convention. Even so small an

event as her acquaintance with a rural family during one of the

cross-country trips became significant for a new-found perception:

"They [the children of a mountain family] really moved me quite a

little— at least that sensation of stopping in your mind, a kind of

still island in the stream of thoughts and emotions. You have to stop and pay attention to it and you're not quite sure what it means to you, but you go on thinking about it" (Gold, August, 1929).

At this time she was also learning the importance of solitude

for herself as a writer and as an individual who was consciously constructing a new life. She was soon so caught up in the activity

and publicity of being Mrs. Lindbergh that home and family were in danger of disappearing. "Family" meant the Morrow home at North

Haven, New Jersey, with all its safety and closeness. "Literary" life 50

was an extension of this circle of mother and sisters so readily

appreciative and understanding of her keen desire to write— and write well. Marriage had, as yet, not given her that same sense of support

and for all the excitement of Charles Lindbergh (the man she loved more than anyone else in her life) as a writer she struggled to find

her place. No matter where they travelled, she found herself always

looking back to home— the source of her art— as when, in the spring

of 1929, she found herself in Mexico again.

No, what I want just now is North Haven. Wind

to blow all the stiffness and a cool thick sea

mist that pricks your face softly, deliciously,

when you walk in it— and loneliness. I mean sea

loneliness, not the desert loneliness that you

might get here that is so dead. The loneliness

you get by the sea is personal and alive. It

doesn't subdue you and make you feel abject. It's

a stimulating loneliness.

(Gold, March, 1929)

By September of that year, homesickness began to outweight other thoughts, as she wrote to her mother. 51

I am writing to you in the desperate feeling that

we will never get to North Haven....I have counted

on it overmuch all summer long: the quiet, the

apartness and all of you and the feeling of being

completely alone and natural and oneself instead of

the usual constraint with everyone else.

(Gold, September, 1929)

But simple, quiet family life was rushing towards crisis, an extraordinary period which the journals tracked with heart-breaking diligence. As Lindbergh could see many years later, what began in horror led, eventually, to a crucial emotional and spiritual release.

In biographies and autobiographies there is always

a turning point in life when the young person emerges

from the matrix of his background....For it is self-

discovery which enables him eventually to form his own

structures and rules, always keeping some of the old,

but adapting them to his own life and character. What

are the accidents, the desires, the forces, one wants

to know, that free him?

(Gold, Introduction, p.3) 52

For Lindbergh, self-discovery and "freedom" came at the cost of extreme anguish and months of torment. As we read of the events of

March, 1932, we witness as engrossing a transformation of character and recreation of self as any recorded. It is a profound reading experience and a very painful one as well. The journal becomes that

"matrix" against which we judge the emerging character of Anne

Lindbergh.

Anne Fremantle's review of Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead in

America, notes that in this volume, Lindbergh "progressed from a shy virgin to a mature mater dolorosa, who remained open and vulnerable."7 The New York Review of Books critic, Margot Hentoff, noted that until the kidnapping, "there had been no sense that the diaries and letters had been written by anyone real."8 More to the point, Alfred Kazin recognized that a "whole simplistic 'American' idea of life died with the Lindbergh baby. One question this book does not answer is how much it died for the Lindberghs themselves."9 Lindbergh wonders the same thing in her introduction to the volume.

I must admit that in rereading the letters of the

last months of 1931 I am aware of hurrying through

them (or was life itself hurrying?) They seem unreal. 53

It is as if, in looking at my life, I were watching a

swift-flowing stream, satin smooth on the surface,

rushing headlong to the sheer drop of tragedy.

(Gold, Introduction, p.11)

In fact, the letters she recovered from that period seemed to her to have the "emotional unreality of hallucination" (Gold, p. 211)

As one begins to read the daily reports of the "case," as

Lindbergh came to refer to the ten week search for the baby and the ensuing trial of Bruno Hauptmann, the reader is aware that it was, perhaps, the writer in Lindbergh that carried her through the horror of those months. Through the control of communicating details of the situation to her family who, she was afraid, were getting only the distorted newspaper accounts, she forced herself to come to grips with the reality of it all. In the account to her sister of the first weeks of the kidnapping, the literary personality took over, choosing her words carefully and attending to her presentation of materials. And despite the anguish that resonates throughout the letter, one senses the writing mediating between despair and control.

Time has not continued since that Tuesday night.

It is as if we just stepped off into one long night

or day. And I have a sustained feeling— like a high 54

note on an organ that has got stuck— inside me. The

time since then has been all in one mood or color, no

variation, no come and go fundamentally. It is just

that night elongated. Of course, it has superficially

been different. Every second, like a dream the whole

scene swings, melts, changes. Personalities change

from black to white, faces look different, the tempo

of the activity speeds up and slows down, but always

that high note that got stuck in the organ Tuesday night!

(Gold, March, 1932)

The drama is here as it was in the earlier writings, but the expression is more complex, more detailed and thus, more pointed. In an even more poignant moment several weeks later, Lindbergh noted in her diary: "The eternal quality of certain moments in one's life.

The baby being lifted out of his crib forever and ever, like Dante's hell. C.'s face, carved onto time for always" (Gold, March, 1932).

And again, "He has already been dead a hundred years" (Gold, May,

1932).

In those first few weeks after Lindbergh knew for sure that her son was dead, the struggle to reason and to express her deepest feelings pushed her to write more intimately than she had before. 55

For perhaps the first time, we hear conflicting voices in the writing

as, on the one hand, Lindbergh could discard the necessity for facing

facts of the murder and pursuing the Case to its end, as she

concluded one night: "Justice does not need my emotions." Yet, that

same diary entry dwelled upon details of a dream that would recur

with variations throughout the year following the trial:

I dreamed...! was walking down a suburban street

seeing other people's children and I stopped to see

one in a carriage and I thought it was a sweet child,

but I was looking for my child in his face. And I

realized, in the dream, that I would do that forever.

And I went on walking heavy and sad and woke heavy

and sad.

(Gold, May, 1932)

The imagination piques and teases, even in grief, and the artist

aware of even the smallest detail, turns again and again to private moments of writing to release and explore her deepest self: "A long

night— spasms of emotion, uncontrollable, all pictures, memories— and

I begin to realize I must reconstruct all of him, every incident,

every act, every word— I must go over it all emotionally— before I

can accept this grief and incorporate it into my life" (Gold, May,

1932). 56

It is often astonishing in the passages how controlled and polished the writing is. Page after page, Lindbergh writes in as carefully crafted prose as one will find anywhere in her work. We hear the strength of the personal voice ("I" is never far from the heart of the writing) as we have not heard earlier— and always,

Lindbergh shapes her material for dramatic effect. Typically, a passage will end with a stunning, terse comment, devastating in its effect. It is precisely this kind of maneuvering on the part of the writer that undoubtedly saves these accounts of the kidnapping from falling into maudlin, incoherent ramblings. Consider, for example, the "simple" account of a conversation between Anne and Charles:

C.1s grief is different from mine and, perhaps,

more fundamental, as it is not based on the small

physical rememberances. There is something very

deep in a man's feeling for his son, it reaches

further into the future. My grief is for the small

intimate everyday person. How much of it is physical

and can be allayed by another child? "And I hoped

so I would bring that baby back..." We both feel

we are starting over again. I remember my second

thought. I thought, "If this is true, I'll never 57

believe anything again." A complete wiping out of

faith in the goodness and security of life. C. says,

"It is like war."

(Gold, May, 1932)

Instead of paraphrasing, Lindbergh uses direct quotation and weaves several scenes together, bridging a time gap between that first night of the kidnapping and the time of the writing (three months later).

The sum of all these parts is a tightly packed scene of fewer than ten sentences that carries with it the most disturbing question the

Lindberghs would face throughout the whole affair— could faith ever be found again? Grief will be turned over and over in the pages of this volume and the ones following. She asks again and again, "How deep will it eat into our lives?" (Gold, May, 1932). Her pages are filled with exquisite scenes of profound sadness coupledwith acute awareness and control.

It is still and cool, dark with lilacs, rain on

the terrace and on the pearl-gray sea. The smell

of wet ground, of the tide, and the quiet sound of

waves. C. and I might be coming back from our honey­

moon three years ago. It is so peaceful, like that

evening— only I am old, but I understand nothing more. 58

Perhaps one can count only on the present instant or

on eternity— nothing— nothing in between. These

raindrops and ... the planets.

(Gold, May, 1932)

I feel as though I wanted just to sit in the sun,

outdoors, and let waves of green cool leaves and waves

of small insect sounds, small rustlings and stirrings,

pour into me, fill up all the wrinkles and cracks,

make a smooth blank cool surface over everything.

Then let impression and thoughts come back clearly

on that satin surface.

(Gold, May, 1932)

Lindbergh touches only briefly in the diaries on death as a

subject for contemplation, as though dwelling on it too long might

carry her too far away from the center of control. Even though she

often tells herself she feels she is about to break down, the writing

in no way reflects a consiousness on the brink of crumbling. Again,

interposed between the emotion and expression of the experience is an artist firmly shaping her work; a collection of much more than simple 59

"impressions and thoughts" or a string of days. There is, in fact, a

kind of extravagance of imagery when Lindbergh writes. She cannot

bear to pay attention to the publicity of the trials for, "We quiver

when we're touched" (Gold, June, 1932). Her "madness" is carefully

detailed: "My mind and spirit unanchored and tossed about and

terrified so easily, as if anything could topple me over" (Gold,

June, 1932). Writing to her family:

It is as though all of us close to this had lost

our faith and once it was smashed we were vulnerable—

anything could happen. As though your faith, a beauti­

ful shimmering armor of glass, protected you infallibly

as long as it was whole. But it's so fragile— once

it's gone to pieces you have nothing. But Dwight and

Con have theirs. Can't you see Con sheathed in smooth

and gleaming amethyst and gold, and Dwight in sparkling

sapphire?

(Gold, June, 1932)

But Lindbergh could always find beauty in even the most disturbing moments, a gift which shaped the private writing into sharply crafted prose: 60

At night the different things in my mind lose their

identity but not their emotional content. They are just

as poignant and just as real even though they become, in

dreams, different-colored ribbons twisting among them­

selves. Then in the morning, waking up, I untangle them...

(Gold, June, 1932)

Having an audience, however (as in the letters), stifles a good bit of the deeper feelings she gratefully lets go in her writings to herself. There is occasionally a sense of delusion in what she writes for others.

Dear Mother, I wish you could see the rambler

rose with six pink roses on it, and the lilacs

that looked dead, sprouting out of the clay; also

my big blue bowl full of Madonna lillies and

larkspur (from Englewood) in the dining room.

And orange tiger lillies balancing the Ming horse

in the living-room alcove place. This is another

house now— one in which there was tragedy years

ago.

(Gold, July, 1932) 61

To herself she admits, "I don't believe I can ever live in this house in freedom and sanity. That window, that side of the house, the

approaches— I shall always be trying to know just what happened in terror and curiosity and misery" (Gold, June, 1932). So the journal, at this point, remains the only safe haven for the deepest emotion.

The reader is also aware of those moments when Lindbergh's response to experience is essentially a literary response, though no less sincere or powerful for being so. Again, it is the writer we respond to, not simply the bereaved mother as she scribbles to herself, "Emerson on his deathbed saying, 'That beautiful boy.'

Heartbreaking. I hope it is true" (Gold, August, 1932). There is also an entire literary tradition close to her that she can consider as she tries to make sense of her life.

Begin to realize Proust's conception of time.

Time is not a string in sequence like so many

beads you can count off and forget. I will never

get past that night, because it is in me. I shall

be near it or far away from it according to mood.

Mood controlled by sensation and association.

Nearer at night than morning, nearer in winter

than in summer, nearer when the wind is howling

or when I hear a child breathing peacefully asleep.

(Gold, September, 1932) 62

Sometimes it is the stark simplicity of the experience as Lindbergh

relates it, that touches us most deeply. In these moments, pared

away from particular literary associations, we hear Lindbergh's voice

as clearly as she will ever speak in these volumes. The effect for

most readers, I think, is devastating.

All ray life I will be looking back to that winter

as the winter of my life. We had him.

(Rooms, January, 1933)

All it took, in the end, was three words. V

Locked Rooms and Open Doors is really a continuation of the kidnapping and Lindbergh's recovery from it. Of this volume, Anne

Fremantle notes that Lindbergh's "is such an agonizing sensitivity that she seems, at times, flayed alive, every nerve of body and soul raw."10 Lindbergh wrote in 1974 of this volume:

The habit of writing almost daily in my diary...

probably saved my sanity. If I could write out moods

which could be admitted to no one, they became more

manageable, as though neatly stacked on a high shelf.

Brought to the aseptic light of the diary's white page,

the giant toadstool withered.

(Rooms, p.xxiv)

No matter how disordered and depressed Lindbergh felt her writing to be at this time, the literary consciousness so evident in her earlier work remains. It is her literary consciousness that mediates between experience and sanity, a consciousness capable of assimilating and ordering the darkest experience. The voice that remains constant throughout these writings is not the voice of the bereaved— it is the voice of the philosopher, and herein lies the mark of the maturing artist. We recognize it in the crucial distance maintained in the dramatic structure of a conversation.

63 64

Terrible night. "Do you think about it so much,

Anne?" All the time— it never stops— I never meet

it. It happens every night— every night of my life.

It did not happen and It happened.... That terrible

feeling, that pushing against a stone wall, that

insisting, "No, it didn't happen,*it didn't happen"—

and then always, like a bell tolling, like a clock

striking, inevitable: "It happened."

(Rooms, January, 1933)

It is a voice of reason and, finally, reaffirmation:

It isn't that the anniversary is so terrible in

itself. It is the recall of that eternal baffling

mystery of death, the knife edge that one cannot

understand— so fine, so sharp, so invisible, and so

definite. The knife edge of "Yesterday I had him—

today I have not."

(Rooms, October, 1933) 65

It is raining and cold. I sit at the desk and look

out at the dark cedars; my feet get cold in spite of the

gas fire, but I finish my log. Great relief— now it is

all behind me mentally and emotionally and I am and must

start over again.

(Rooms, October, 1933)

The emotional release from tragedy and the maturity of vision

Lindbergh achieved brought her to new understandings of her role as a

writer and as a woman. Considerations of the conflicts inherent

between the responsibilities of wife, mother, public figure and

artist were inevitable. At the time the diaries were written,

Lindbergh did not consider herself a feminist and has never attached

that label to herself in regarding the whole of her work. Her Gifts

From The Sea (1955) must be recognized as feminist in perspective.

But the diaries, too, reveal Lindbergh's rather sheltered

self-discoveries of issues and dilemmas that women writers around, before and after her stated as frankly feminist. In the National

Review, Patricia S. Coyne summarized the distinction she saw between

Lindbergh's work (Locked Rooms and Open Doors, in particular) and other women's writing: 66

...[A]n...important difference between this book and the

typical feminist approach is that Mrs. Lindbergh thinks

of her problems as coming from within herself. Her con­

stant lament is that she is not stronger, braver, more

capable, where a modern feminist would have blamed social

conditions. Mrs. Lindbergh blames her own character...

there is a refreshing absence of the modern whine. 11-

More important, perhaps, is Coyne's recognition of the literary tradition Lindbergh most closely followed as she "harks back to an earlier, transcendental age, when an artist felt that he could take a flower or a seashell or the pattern of the trees against the sky and find wisdom and strength and peace." The Lindbergh of the diaries is, in fact, a Thoreau whose, "strongest theme is the author's attempt to disengage herself from society, to find a peaceful place."12

The two issues at the heart of Lindbergh's work, the dilemma of the artist at home in the world and the woman as artist, cross— particularly as one reads from Locked Rooms (1936) to The

Flower and the Nettle (1939). There is little difference, for example, between Lindbergh writing of her desires to be "faceless" and to "despise myself for not being able to overcome my environment... to manage [my] face-to-the-world" (Rooms, 67

October, 1935), and her attempt to formulate a construct of art and life which gives clear positions to women and men.

Isn't is possible for a woman to be a woman and yet

produce something tangible besides children, some­

thing that stands up in a man's world? In other words,

is it possible to live up to women's standards and

men's standards at the same time? Is it possible to

make them the same (as the feminists do)? I have

finally, through many stages, come round to the con­

clusion that for me, it isn't. Because, really, deep

down in my heart, I don't honestly want to be a "woman

writer" any more than I once wanted to be a "woman

aviator" (perhaps this is "sour grapes"!) It involves

sacrificing things I am not prepared to sacrifice. Not

that I do not believe in women writers and fliers and

doctors, etc. Not that I don't believe they can equal

men— if they care to— in some fields (the feminists

have proved to us that they can) but because I think

in doing so they sacrifice just those advantages and

qualities that are truly feminine. I do not mean 68

simply the "children, home and fireside" most people

talk about in those endless arguments of "career vs.

home-life" for women. For a lot of women do succeed

in combining the two. But I think they do it (if

successfully) at the price of a pigeonholed life— a

man's life. Because in order to compete with men

they must concentrate their energies into a narrow

line. And I think in doing that they deny themselves

the special attributes and qualities of women.

(Flower, January, 1937)

Clearly, Lindbergh was struggling as much with herself as with

anyone else. Her ambivalence towards other women was fueled by a

deep-seated insecurity about herself and her confusion with the roles

she was trying to play in her own family circle. Lindbergh often

labeled experience as definitely "masculine" or "feminine": there was

"men's talk" and "women's talk," "men's work" and "women's work."

Men's work, for instance, could be visualized as "straight lines,"

while women's work was "a spoke in the wheel without which, perhaps,

the wheel won't go round as well, but not an end in itself, not a

'straight-line' objective" (Flower, Jaunuary, 1937). She could not

divorce questions of women's work as artists from women's work as wives and mothers. 69

Her perspective of other women, however, was not so negative as

it might be read today. Her way of understanding women achievers was

to attribute "male" characteristics to them, as she does in her description of Amelia Earhart.

She is the most amazing person— just as tremen­

dous as Charles, I think. It startles me how much

alike they are in breadth. Charles doesn't realize

it, but he hasn't talked to her as much. She has the

clarity of mind, impersonal eye, coolness of tempera­

ment, balance of a scientist. Aside from that, I

like her.

(Gold, January, 1930)

Ironically, the best surprise during this meeting was when both women discovered they were reading Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.

Furthermore, Lindbergh's acute awareness of herself and what she saw as her own weaknesses often generalized to her perceptions of all women, to no intended disparagement of others. A particularly telling commment noted in her diary admits her frustration over the years with living so secluded a life with Charles Lindbergh that she never had a close and sustained female friendship outside of her relationship to her sisters and mother. There is more than a little bitterness as she writes, "Men kick friendship around like a

football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass

and it goes to pieces" (Gold, January, 1933).

When the Lindberghs fled to England in 1935, they settled at

country house owned by Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West.

After meeting Sackville-West, Anne Lindbergh couldn't help

denegrating herself in comparison to a woman she found fascinating,

admirable, but confusing as well. She notes the reaction between

Mrs. Nicholson and Charles:

It is like metal meeting metal, almost as though I

could hear it ring! I felt like a child, though,

terribly young and pale, as if she had lived so much

more than I and suffered much more and learned much

more. I do not feel that way with most women, I feel

older, usually. Then, too, I felt curiously feminine,

terribly frivolous and feminine, and half the time as

if she weren't a woman at all.

(Flower, March, 1936)

And of Mme. Alex Carrell (wife of the scientist Charles Lindbergh worked with in France as they developed the heart perfusion pump), she wrote: 71

She has a woman's emotion, quick intuition and under­

standing, and yet a man's breadth of mind, breadth of

view, clarity of vision, impersonality of attitude (the

scientific attitude).

(Flower, April, 1936)

Lindbergh's need to discriminate betweem men and women remained constant throughout the years of the diaries.

During this same period, she grew increasingly aware of the divisions within herself that kept her separated from the work she longed to continue, her work as a writer. Again and again, the diaries record moments when Lindbergh was able to step away from her family and the concerns that kept her from writing to moments of contemplation that brought her life in focus again. It is the process of writing that sharpens each scene, framing the moment through retrospection.

Then I went down lower and sat on a ledge in some

ferns and heather where I was just at the height to

see under the tops of the pines, out between the red­

dish brown trunks, over covered walls and fields to

the rocks and the sea, everything seen through and

framed by the trunks of the pines. I wondered why

it was so much more beautiful than the view on top,

and decided it was that wonderful combination of the 72

"near and the far." Sun on the pine needles and also

sun on the sea far beyond. And I thought about the

frames and how important they were. They weredirec­

tion and emphasis and a lens. And 1 wondered if that

is not what women are meant to be— the near, framing

the far.

(Flower, August, 1936)

It was at this time, too, that she came to enunciate what the

"fundamental problem of art" had come to be for her, the "struggle of any human being trying to fit into his mold and make it living"

(Flower, May, 1936). She was slowly finding her place as her diary charted her progress.

Sometimes I become Jon [her second son] and feel

with him the excitment of finding a hollow "house"

completely covered by the overhanging branches of

pine or under high bushes. Only the flicker of

light and specks of grass seen through the leaves—

but no one can see youl Safe, hidden, covered—

delicious childhood feeling. Everything quiet, even

those flickering leaves, spying on you, keeping the

secret with you, in league with you. Sometimes I 73

walk up and down for hours and think out why there

is so little understanding between generations, should

a woman be satisfied to be "just a mother" and wife,

etc.! While Jon picks up acorns. Sometimes 1 fight

pangs of envy and depression by trying to put myself

into the oak branches against the sky, or the smooth

effortless glide of sea gulls, or the exciting beating

of wings of other birds, or clouds— the whole sky

racing by the still pines. Those days when the sky

is so more compelling than the ground.

(Flower, January, 1936)

The diary entry finishes the experience, in a sense. We read here of a personality engrossed in not merely a contemplation of her world, but of a struggle to merge with all its forms. In writing through the scene, detail by detail, the world is captured— if only momentarily through the artifice of the written word— identified and preserved.

Through a published diary, the reader may also come to an appreciation of the writer by a recognition of the inconsistencies and conflicts of the life as much as by the polish and order of the literary presentation. Lindbergh had been as honest as she could be in refusing to make over or suppress her diaries and letters. It 74

would be easy to fault her for the naivete of her thinking on issues

which one feels she should have grasped in different ways. But

"should" is irrelevant in the private life recorded as it is

happening. We might expect a character in a fictional world to behave differently or even the writer of an autobiography, writing

by looking back and selecting experience. Lindbergh's diaries must be considered honestly as the recording of a developing consciousness which, at times, failed to reach the deepest awareness we expect in a woman writer today. Lindbergh stopped to summarize the values in her

life midway between the kidnapping and the outbreak of World War II, for example. Her entry is a kind of credo for what she believed most strongly. If she "failed" to see the real disparity between her sense of women as artists and her own image of herself, she could, at least, make clear her own priorities.

That the most ordinary everyday living is delicate,

as breathtaking, as difficult, takes as terrific

physical and mental control and effort as walking as

a tightrope. That marriage is the most interesting,

difficult, and important thing in life. That every­

thing that I am trying to live and be and do is nothing

if I cannot somehow give it to Jon. That writing is

only important in that it gives me the balance required

to live life as an art....It is important to me not

because I think I can write great things and give them

to the world, but because it happens to be the lens 75

of me, clarifying me to see things and to think, and

to concentrate what's in me and therefore to live better.

To compete with "writers" or "artists," to work at their

speed, level, etc. is impossible— and not for me. 1

must have my own measure.

(Flower, July, 1936)

To put it quite simply, Lindbergh's particular measure was what the pages of her diary were creating for her— a continuity of thought and experience unique to the needs and talents of its writer. And to its writer, the issue of art was nothing if not the issue of living well, balanced and aware. VI

In a letter to her mother in September, 1929, Anne Lindbergh wrote: "I read Forster's Aspects of the Novel on the way down. Some

reporter got the name and it caused a lot of comment. 'Are you doing

any writing, Mrs. Lindbergh? I noticed you were reading,' etc., and I

replied, "No...' What will they say when they find The Egoist in my bag? Or Crime and Punishment or No Love by David Garnett?" (Gold,

September, 1929). While self-conscious of the publicity she was apt to stir with anything she did or said, Lindbergh enjoyed sharing her reading experiences with the few close contacts she kept who could appreciate and understand her enthusiasm for literature and writing.

Frequently, letters to her sisters included snatches of information about reading and criticism.

I have just finished Orlando...not exciting but

absorbing: you merge into it, so that when you walk

out of it you still have bits of it sticking to you

....Of course, it is beautifully written, more beau­

tifully and more carefully than any of the others,

and, in a sense, in a more orderly fashion. The com­

parisons, the similes, the descriptions are beautiful

and satisfying. Orlando himself— herself— delights

me. I think it is beautifully done, so that it is

76 77

all of one piece— consistent and convincing and con­

secutive (and that I think is a triumph). But didn't

it seem to you to lack economy— to be too rich, too

full and too rich to have the clarity that the others

have? Not half as many clicks, not that crystal under­

standing of relationships, and not, somehow, the vision—

not a kind of burning core in the center that To the

Lighthouse had.

(Unicorn, December, 1928)

As one might expect, Virginia Woolf remained a staple of Lindbergh's

reading and became much more personally interesting as the Lindberghs became associated with Vita Sackville-West (the "real" Orlando) and

Harold Nicholson.

It is significant, too, that much of Lindbergh's interest in literature came from the reading of other writers' private writing— Rupert Brooke's Memoirs (which she was reading in 1926), J " " 11 Chekhov's letters, Katherine Mansfield's letters (both in 1929),

George Sand's letters to Flaubert (1943). Much of her reading, of course, became a search for solace during the very dark periods of her life— poetry mostly (Hopkins and Clough are named). But the primary influence on the development of her sense of self as a writer— a crucial development for her sense of purpose outside 78

her role in family life— came from Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

Saint-Exupery, a pioneer flier as well as writer, became a model for her when she read Wind, Sand and Stars in 1939, a memoir of his flights across Africa ("It is all I ever wanted to say and more of flying and time and human relationships"). But he became an even more immediate presence in her life when he came to visit the

Lindberghs at their home outside New York City at the beginning of

World War II.

Saint-Exupery was caught in America when war broke out and was not able to return to join the French Resistance for some time. But in August of 1939, the Lindberghs learned he was staying in New York and brought him to their home for a brief stay. It took only those few days for Anne Lindbergh to recognize a "kindred spirit" and it proved to be a meeting that deeply affected her work ever after. The publishers of Lindbergh's account of their North Atlantic flights,

Listen! the Wind, had asked Saint-Exupery to write an introduction for the French edition, which he had done shortly before coming to the U.S. and before his introduction to Anne Lindbergh. At their meeting, Lindbergh was amazed that this, "was the first time anyone had talked to me purely on my craft.11

Not because I was a woman to be polite to, to

charm with superficials, not because I was my 79

father's daughter or C.'s wife; no, simply because

of my book, my mind, my craft. I have a craft I

And someone who is master of that craft, who

writes beautifully, thinks I know enough about

my craft to want to compare notes about it, to

want to fence with my mind, steel against steel.

(War, August, 1939)

The full impact of their meeting was felt as soon as he

returned to the city, soon to leave for France and to war.

Lindbergh's diary records as much of the experience as she is able to recover. But the "shock of recognition" of herself as an artist connecting to another artist bared a part of her she had not clearly seen before.

I hardly know, looking back, which are my thoughts

and which his, for he would start a train of thought

and I would go off on a line of my own, jumping ahead,

finishing his thought, whether correctly or not I can't

tell. All of this, of course, is not accurately stated,

because it has been translated and filtered through my

mind. I wonder if it would not be the same if I met

any of the people whose minds have touched mine in books —

Rilke, or Whitehead (but no, I could not talk to him), 80

V. Woolf (when I most admired her)....Perhaps my excite­

ment comes because so rarely do I tap that world (my

world— even if I am not a master in it— world of artistic

vision). I have not yet found my circle, my friends, my

nation....When one finds a person who has the same

thoughts as yours you cry out for joy, you go and shake

him by the hand. Your heart leaps as though you were

walking in a street in a foreign land and you heard your

own language spoken, or your name in a room full of

strangers.

(War, August, 1929)

While she was to lose communication with him when war pulled him back to France— and the Lindberghs into a deeper isolation from friends in

Europe and in America— she continued to pour over his work as it appeared and, ultimately, took him to be her "particular reason" for writing. Saint-Exupery became a larger than life presence. By 1942, he was flying secret missions over Africa and little was known of his exact whereabouts or what might be happening to him. But Flight to

Arras (another memoir) began to appear in the Atlantic. Lindbergh reacted to this work as spiritual revelation. 81

It seems to me the expression of a wholly undivided

man. It carries in it all the anguish of our age,

personal and general, it cuts itself off from none of

it, it rejects nothing, not even sin. It carries it

all, like a Saint Christopher. I was very moved, and

felt— irrelevantly and suddenly, at the end of it— "I

am forgiven." I do not, of course, mean this in any

personal way. The point is that somehow in the act of

reading that beautiful credo of spirit I was forgiven.

I was readmitted into a company from which I had been

banned. I was no longer exiled. This is, of course,

only the old religious experience of being put "in

grace." One should, I know, get it directly from God,

from meditation or prayer, with no intermediary of

poet, writer, or medium. But I-find myself unable—

except rarely— to do this.

(War, February, 1942)

By the fall of 1944, Anne Lindbergh had published The Steep

Ascent (an account of the European flights). Shortly after, she learned that Saint-Exupery1s plane had disappeared over southern

France and that he was presumed dead. Though only one more death in a series of losses over the decade (father, son and sister 82

Elisabeth), this deathtouched her in a way others had not. It

signaled the end of an intense professional relationship she would

not share with anyone else again outside the confines of her own

family.

Of what use to write if he were not there to read

it, perhaps, sometime, somewhere? And my last book,

which had gone out like a letter to him and never

reached him, of what use was that? Mo one could

really understand it, not as he would have. You

write, and if there is one person in the world who

you are sure will understand it is enough, and what

you write glows with some kind of inner life, some

life of its own. It has an ear to hear.

(Mar, October, 1944)

The death of Saint-Exupery, however, was also the culmination of several self-discoveries which would lead Lindbergh back to her dedication to writing. Life in England had been calm and settled. A move to Brittany in 1938 (the Lindberghs bought an island estate,

Iliac, off the coast) brought Charles Lindbergh the opportunity of working with Dr. Alex Carrell; but as Europe rushed headlong into war, Anne Lindbergh again faced the dilemma of finding "home"— this 83

time not knowing for sure even what country it might be in. Even

Paris became too dangerous and the Lindberghs reluctantly left for

New York in the spring of 1939. Of course, Iliac would be lost

during the war, but even more unsettling was the shock of returning

to a way of life Anne Lindbergh found difficult and "foreign."

I feel on the whole rather shocked by the material

shell of America, the impact of it as you first land.

The speed, the brightness, the flash and advertisement.

Nothing solid or real or quiet (at least in New York).

I feel outcast by it and a stranger. I know I shall get

accustomed to it, get acclimated. But I don't somehow

(sneakingly) want to. I want to hang on to France, the

maturity of life there, the sense of tasting and touching

and relishing life as it goes by. Here you can't. It

goes by too fast. And yet, I don't want to be one of

those strange homeless creatures— "a Henry James American."

(War, April, 1939)

In 1936, 1937 and 1938, the Lindberghs had visited Germany at

the request of the American government. Charles Lindbergh later

reported what he saw to the governments of England, France and the

United States: Germany's military preparations could not be equalled 84

in Western Europe. Theirs was a force powerful enough to move

quickly wherever they chose and with devastating consequences. Upon

returning to this country at the outbreak of World War II, Lindbergh

began what was to be the most controversial political movement of the

period as he counseled Americans (through radio speeches and

writing) to stay out of the war. He felt the only viable position

for the U.S. in the face of such power was isolation. War at any

cost was unacceptable. His public position brought about the old

publicity crisis Anne Lindbergh had escaped during their residence in

Europe, and also turned the few close friends they shared against

them. For Anne Lindbergh, war at home meant a deeper retreat within herself. The journal became the intimate of her often desperate, anguished self-searching. The "war within" was no less intense or threatening for her than the war they had fled in Europe.

I am afraid of this turmoil we are facing...

I see no place for me in that, no place for the

moderates, no place for the middle ground...I who

do not want to take sides, I who do not want to

fight, who do not want to force myself— even intel­

lectually, even spiritually, even emotionally— on

another human being....It is because of Charles 85

that I am afraid. Can I follow him? How can I

follow him? That is the nightmare— separation

. from him.

(War, August, 1939)

Separation from Europe, from friends and from country seemed

inevitable. War meant that "the light of the world has gone out and

it will be impossible to see through the gloom" (War, September,

1939). Even the private moments were becoming bitter.

The truth is hard to stay faithful to, hope creeps

in, dreams creep. Little by little one is lured on

into a false world, onto a false ledge, and when that

is knocked from under you, you go to another. I want

to steel myself against these hopes, these dreams.

(War, September, 1939)

But the diaries and, indirectly, the letters, worked to shelter the

conscious life and guard against the "false world." War mayhave brought a new urgency to the task of creating and maintaining the

"front" which "is in each individual's mind" (War, January, 1940), but one sees clearly throughout that Lindbergh's literary construction of the world was, in fact, the viable alternative to a 86

world in which one less gifted than she might have lived in chaos and

despair. Words could and did mediate between physical or emotional

collapse and spiritual survival. Beyond the horror and physical

destruction of war, she found solace in the strength of sheer

intellect and noted, in writing to her former creative writing

teacher at Smith College (Mina Curtiss), "it helps to feel that other people are living awarely in the mind and in the spirit— when so much mind and spirit is being destroyed" (War, January, 1940).

Lindbergh's particular crisis as an artist seeking order amid physical chaos and security in isolation reached a turning point in the diaries that must certainly be read as a version of the universal

"dark night of the soul." At the height of U.S. involvement in

Europe, long after Charles Lindbergh's "America First" isolationist movement had failed, Anne Lindbergh wrote a decisive passage, a personal ultimatum for a life threatened by the loss of all she held most dear.

I feel so on the brink of something. That everyone

is scattering to the four corners of the earth. That

all is in a flux. That there is no time. That— as we

pass for an instant on the road— we should make our

contacts real. "Speak quick and tell me— what is in

your heart 1" I suppose it is my long exile that has 87

given me such a sense of the preciousness of human

contacts. And also the sense of impending separation.

The old life breaking up, new lives of enmity and of

loyalty.... It is a separation of life and death, and

they must not be separated. I must see them together.

The pull to life is stronger than the pull to death.

That is why I married C. That is what I want to live,

to give my children, and to write. Will it be permitted?

(War, January, 1943)

Again and again, Lindbergh struggled to hold the vision together against overwhelming forces she could not convince herself she could control. "Will it be permitted?" is the question of an artist who has not fully taken responsibility for her life in all its parts.

But the great fear of "separation" was partly quelled by the simple discipline of the diary because the diary could collect the bits and pieces of disparate emotion and make from them a whole picture.

Writing, in fact, had more than just a power to heal.

Writing, of course, the sheer concentration, is

exhausting. To write, I have decided, is to be

possessed by the Demon Lover the ballads talk of.

In ordinary life you look sane. You act sane. Just 88

as sane as any mother of four children, any wife.

But once you start to write— No. You are posses­

sed. You think incredible things. You say incre­

dible things. You are another person. You even

love other people. You don't love your children

and your husband at all. Maybe now I've written it

out it won't worry me so. For it does. I want not

to be separated but all of a piece.

(War, February, 1943)

Again, writing is a way of laying out the pieces andd, finally, seeing them whole.

During the winter of 1943 Charles Lindbergh was testing war planes at the Willow Run Ford plant in Detroit, his family living very quietly in Bloomfield Hills. Anne Lindbergh found solace in

Kafka's The Castle ("...how I understand his everlasting sense of exclusion, of wanting to belong, to be accepted") and spent more time alone walking the grounds of the house, writing in a trailer bought especially for her and struggling to make all the pieces of wife, mother and writer fit. New realizations evolved.

I stand a long time until I feel the wind has blown

some of the bitterness away. I realize standing there

that I have had three big things to fight against in

my life. The first was just sorrow (the Case), the 89

second was fear (the flights), and the third is bit­

terness (this whole war struggle). And the third is

the hardest.

(War, February, 1943)

With loneliness, or at least a new sense of solitude, Lindbergh moved

towards a deeper vision of life. It involved, as such things must, a

kind of violent severing of old relations, at least those which would

not "permit" the self Lindbergh wanted to salvage. Significantly, it was the literary self, the character reflected in the reading and writing, which spoke most clearly.

One does, unhappily, outgrow people. Not their

hearts, ever, but their minds....One grows resentful

and uncomfortable in the boxes they tend to try to

fit you into. And one is embarrassed and uncomfortable

for them. "Oh, I am so sorry I cannot fit into your

box. Maybe part of me can still fit into it— an arm

or a leg." But no, it never works. One doesn't fit

at all and one tosses about unconsciously and breaks

the windows and chimneys.

(War, March, 1943)

The literary self is dramatized, one way of making herself understood. And by spring of that year, Lindbergh recognized that 90

the struggle was not one which could be shared with anyone, not even with Charles: "I must start again...I must find my place in this period. I must do it alone" (War, April, 1943). What the struggle led to was an extraordinary moment of vision in which the woman and the artist pulled the disparate fragments of bitterness, separation, war and sorrow into a whole. The experience was of mythical proportion.

I stand a long time on the top of a hill and look

down over the orchard, to a willow on the sky line

and lovely feather clouds raying out behind it. The

orchard, the willow, and the sky are suddenly beautiful

and significant. Not beautiful only— for I almost

always see beauty. It is another vision. They are

significant, they mean something. It is not ordinary

any more. I see it as significant— of what? I don't

know— of itself perhaps. I see the archetypal orchard,

the archetypal willow tree, I see— "A tree, of many,

one." And then suddenly there is a flicker, a breeze

blows, some indistinguishable thing has changed, like

those kaleidoscopic boxes full of bits of colored

glass. You shift it slightly and the pattern falls—

suddenly it is gone. It is no longer a pattern, no 91

longer the archtypal orchard, no longer "a tree of

many, one." I am standing on an ordinary hill, looking

at an ordinary orchard I have seen a great many times.

It is accidental— no longer significant. And I am

getting cold in the wind. I turn and go home, still

happy with my vision.

(War, November, 1943)

The vision of the archtypal tree— the peak of consciousness granted

by— what?— a maturity of vision, intuition, purposeful looking. It

is a moment of comprehension framed by literary convention. That

Anne Lindbergh could grasp its significance and capture it in words is the result of more than simple "grace" or understanding. It is the result of a literary imagination prepared to "see" and experience with a drive to preserve the experience and make real the event.

And it is, perhaps, this shattering culmination of vision of the archtypal world that is Anne Lindbergh's ultimate "masterpiece"— a masterpiece of both craft and consciousness.

The achievement of the Lindbergh diaries is, finally, the spirit of wholeness, of a process struggled through and completed, and of resolution that marks the point at which the "story" ends. As a writer, Lindbergh has broken out of the flux of time and experience through the literal realization of days and years set down in the pages of her diaries. As an artist, she has culled revelation out of chaos and preserved for us, her readers, the lessons of a lifetime. Chapter 3

I am ready to grant that the journal written for publication

demands a certain art and craft...balancing the intensely pri­

vate (and the taste that demands...how far to go? What to

explain?) and the day to day living'with animals and plants

and the sea, balancing the philosophical against the specific.

t Here I think I have done well, have perhaps discovered a mode

for myself that works....It is a free form as nothing can be

structured or foreseen as in a novel. The novel is far more

difficult, more complex, and requires a more sustained imagi­

native thrust. But it may be that my best work is in neither

of these forms but in poetry and in the memoirs.1

May Sarton's work as a writer encompasses both poetry and fiction, but she has chosen to publish private writing written for publication and has, in fact, produced one volume of autobiographical "sketches"

(J[ Knew a Phoenix, 1954), one memoir (Plant Dreaming Deep, 1968), a book of portraits (A World of Light, 1978), and three journals

(Journal of a Solitude, 1973; The House by the Sea. 1977; Recovering,

1980). While she has enjoyed steady attention from reviewers and

92 93

bad many years of university affiliations as a visiting

poet/novelist, Sarton has not attracted scholarly criticism until

quite recently. There have been no studies at all of her private

writing, yet she clearly excels in this form. The point of this

discussion is not to prove which is "better"— Sarton1s poetry,

fiction or private writing— it is an attempt to consider the private writing as a particular achievement and to explore its significance as a form of literary art.

What is of particular interest are the three journals, but a few comments should be made about the autobiography and memoir as they inform the later works. Knew a Phoenix is subtitled "Sketches for an Autobiography" and was clearly intended to be only that.

Much of the work serves to explain the European in Sarton, who was born in Belgium but raised in the United States. The book is divided into two broad sections: "The Fervent World" and "The Education of a

Poet." The first is particularly valuable for the light it sheds on

Sarton's middle years (the period of the journals) as it traces the clear and pervasive threads of family life and home which become central themes in the later works. Indeed, the journals might be partly understood as the writer's search for home and for the creation (re-creation) of that lost world of family so richly detailed in the sketches. She recalls, for instance, the intensity of a "memory" she grew up with that was not hers at all, in fact. 94

"Wondelgem," [the Sarton house in Belgium] the

name itself sounded like magic to me as a child.

It was quite literally in another world, since I

did not remember it myself...a little girl who, in

Cambridge, Massachusetts, heard the peculiar tender­

ness the word evoked in my mother's voice, as if

the walls of the tiny apartment where we lived opened

out at its sound into a great garden, into a still

airy house with roses climbing all over it, and

inside, the walls covered with books.

(Phoenix, p.65)2

The reader comes to realize that "house" and "home" have special meanings to Sarton and are keys to understanding her sense of

"creativity" and "imagination." Sarton did visit the house in

Belgium once when she was seven years old when her parents returned to take stock of the aftermath of war. Her memory of that visit, vivid so many years later, is significant.

Like a dream this journey has no beginning. We are

there at the gate...I can feel all through me my

mother's beating heart. We push open the gate, and

are in Sleeping Beauty's garden....One hardly dares to touch it, for it may not be real. And I am nothing,

an observer, nothing but eyes. It is my father's and

mother's moment, the long poignant look back into the

lost past....At first, my mother and father must have

felt only their life together violated, trampled down,

made ugly and filthy in every possible way. The dream,

so beautiful and mysterious while we stood outside, had

turned into a nightmare....But just then my mother cried out, "Look, George!" She had lifted out of a pile of rub­ bish a single Venetian glass on a long delicate stem,

so dirty it had become opaque, but miraculously intact.

How had this single fragile object survived to give us courage? It went back with us to Cambridge and it was always there, wherever we lived. And now it is here, in my own house, a visible proof that it is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure, and become sources of strength, like my mother. The dream fades out into a story, perhaps a legend.

(Phoenix, pp.80-81) 96

Horae and family are enduring features of Sarton's work in

several ways. I Knew £ Phoenix is a kind of revelation (as much for

Sarton as for her readers) of whole patterns of life as she grasps

connections between the Old World of her parents' youth and the

poet's America; in particular, Sarton clarifies her role as daughter

and artist— two clear voices of the private writing. A book of poetry found in the Sarton library, for instance, symbolizes a generation of relationships.

And as Mabel Elwes [Sarton's mother] chose this

present for the man she was to marry, she an English

girl, he a Belgian young man— a book of poems cele­

brating the New World— she was being carried forward

without knowing it into a pattern that is now clearly

visible. They were to become Americans, these two,

and the foreign poet a compatriot. They were to have

one child, who would find the book and the incscription

after their deaths, and see in a flash the whole cycle

of their lives, its apparent violent distortions, its

inner harmony— its beginning in a garden in Cambridge, 97

Massachusetts, where my mother's English genius flowered,

from the earliest snowdrop under the pine to the sequence

of asters and chrysant mums through November.

(Phoenix, p.98)

The remaining "sketches" in the autobiography take the reader through

Sarton's education, apprenticeship in Eva LeGallienne*s Civic

Repertory Company, one year alone in Paris ("It is already the past,

the irrevocable past"), and work with the Apprentice Theatre (in

1933). In 1936 came an "opening into the intensities of a private

life, of time, of solitude, of poetry." By 1937, Sarton was in

London where she first met Virginia Woolf at the home of Elizabeth

Bowen. I Knew a Phoenix ends on a recollected note of condolence

Sarton had sent to Leonard Woolf at his wife's death. The event

capped, and perhaps sealed, a critical period in Sarton's life. The

sketches of Phoenix touch memories, images and patterns Sarton chose

to share from her childhood and early adult years as a young woman

groping toward a commitment to writing. But it is neither a life

story intended to sum up the writer's past nor a form of writing that

Sarton would repeat.

J[ Knew a Phoenix was reissued in 1968 (a sign of her growing

popularity at the time Women's Studies became popular) and soon

after, Plant Dreaming Deep appeared, a memoir of the year Sarton moved from Cambridge to the tiny village of Nelson, New Hampshire 98

(1960). The sketches of Phoenix move freely between the very distant past (her parents' lives) and her childhood, each chapter reading as a portrait of one person or of an event. Plant Dreaming Deep is a

sequential narrative and of particular interest to the later journals

for the central presence of the house as character. We immediately recognize that "home" and "house" are, naturally, metaphors of particular importance to Sarton1s life as an artist, thus continuing a thread from the sketches. The opening chapter of Plant Dreaming

Deep, in fact, is titled "The Ancestor Comes Home," an examination of heritage and the quality of the past in the present. Hanging an oil portrait of a distant Belgian ancestor in the Nelson house, Sarton makes clear, "I knew I was performing a symbolic act, and this is the way it has been from the beginning, so that everything I do here reverberates, and if out of fatigue or not paying attention, I strike a false note, it hurts the house and the mystique by which I live"

(Plant Dreaming, p. 15). In short, the year of Plant Dreaming Deep might be described as the writer's attempt to make real the

"mystique" of her life.

At the time of her father's death (several years after her mother's) Sarton did not consciously choose to seek a new home for herself (especially in a part of the country where she knew no one), but by 1960, she recognized she had reached a time when owning a house by herself was "the hunger of the woman." She wondered, in particular, "If 'home' can be anywhere, how is one to look for it, where is one to find it?" The solution was to resettle. Sarton moved 99

to the village of Nelson and bought an ancient farm house to

restore. Ironically, someone asked her at the time why she had

filled such an "American" house with old Belgian furniture; Sarton

replied, "I have brought all that I am and all that I came from here,

and it is the marriage of all this with an old American house which

gives the life here its quality for me" (Plant Dreaming, p.25).

Sarton1s American house became, in fact, her real American roots.

As a memoir of that first year in Nelson, Plant Dreaming Deep details the typical daily chores and responsibilities Sarton took on as householder, but there is always attention given to even the most physical of experiences as philosophical or metaphorical keys to understanding the artist's life. In choosing to purchase an old, run-down house in need of rehabilitation, Sarton notes that she "saw the house as becoming my own creation within a traditional frame, in much the same way as a poet pours his vision of life into the traditional form of the sonnet" (Plant Dreaming p. 34). But her analysis is not just a truth recognized in hindsight; the point of the entire memoir seems to be the documentation of a life consciously constructed as an expression of the writer's work— that is, of literary work. When Sarton painted her forty-foot long floor bright yellow, it became a spiritual feature of the house, a plane of sunlight transforming the darkest of New England winter days (Plant

Dreaming, p.36). And when she hung a seventeenth-century mirror above a chest of drawers, she noted a particular transformation in . the room, and in herself. The mirror has always delighted me because what­

ever it reflects seems to sink down through layers

and layers of time as through water, so one's own

face becomes someone's face long ago, and the flowers

I set there, especially peonies or sbirley poppies,

take on a magic solubility in the reflection as if

they were floating away through time, as indeed

they are.

(Plant Dreaming, p.49)

The house is always a vision of the past merged with the present— Sarton's bridge, so to speak, between a "lost" world (of

Europe, of parents) and a world of her own making.

I suddenly realized that what I had brought with

me into the house itself, were making it possible

for the first time since the death of my parents to

evoke their joy. For the first time the joy that

surrounds them in my mind could be rooted again, and

had a place to root in. The long grief rose and

melted away as I have so often seen mist do over my

fields in the early morning....The beautiful signs

of a continuity almost erase the irony that without 101

their early deaths 1 could never have invested in

such a house at all, for I was able to do so only

because of what I had inherited. But now I knew,

in a way I had not before, that what I had inherited

was life-giving and life-restoring, and would be so

to the end of my life and perhaps beyond.

(Plant Dreaming, pp.48-49)

Finally, Sarton realizes another metaphor for the house and herself— the house as ship: "I did not know where the ship would take me, but I knew it was snug and beautiful, and I knew that its passenger was both inward and outward bound" (Plant Dreaming, p.50).

Taken together, the early chapters of the memoir raise several issues for the writer. The fundamental appeal of "home" and "house" grew out of tension between past and present (a fairly simple idea) complicated for Sarton by a yearning to establish, or at least recognize, her place in an American home— a place much different in character for her than for her immigrant parents. For the artist, the conflict was really an old one: Old World vs. New, the search for a reconstructable past, the recognition of self in a created heritage peculiar to the experiences of a writer seeking roots. In other words, Sarton dealt in her early private writing with all the major dilemmas of classic American literature. The building or rebuilding 102

of a house could become a spiritual journey lived not just as

metaphor for the artist's life, but as a spiritual life made real.

Sarton was aware, early in her memoir, that this was true.

I have been torn by all the lives I- live here

and the difficulty of choosing any one at any

given moment. Those first days I often chose

"inside"; the house had to be rebuilt first as

a physical being— that job was not nearly accom­

plished— but just as important was the intangible

structure, the way things chose to happen day by

day, or the way I chose to make them happen, as

I began, quite consciously, to build the meta­

physical frame.

(Plant Dreaming, p.56)

The memoir is important in relation to the later journals

because it is the beginning of Sarton*s conscious and detailed

exploration of that '^metaphysical frame" and, most important, of

"self". Indeed, the title of the first journal, Journal of a

Solitude, follows from a comment we read in Plant Dreaming Deep:

"People often imagine that I must be lonely. How can I explain? I want to say, 'Oh not You see the house is with me. And it is with, me in this particular way, as both a demand and a support only 103

when 1 am alone here'" (p.59). Sarton'a sense of self, of the

physical/metaphorical nature of house and home, of even the condition

of solitude, are expressed most clearly in Plant Dreaming Deep. The

memoir sets up conditions and questions which the later journals meet

head on. So "solitude" as a literary subject really grows out of her

earlier consideration of the environment of "home" at Nelson.

...there are inner reasons for being highly tuned

up when one lives alone. That alertness is also

there toward the inner world, which is always close

to the surface for me when I am here....The climate

of poetry is also the climate of anxiety. And if I

inhabit the house, it also inhabits me, and sometimes

I feel as if I myself were becoming an intersection

for almost too many currents of too intense a nature....

No, it is not fear, but an exceptional state of aware­

ness that makes life here not exactly a rest.

(Plant Dreaming, p.60)

Environment is created as much by the writer's sense of "alertness" and the act of making external the inner spirit of solitude as a very physical feature of "home" and house. For Sarton, writing intensifies that "state of awareness" and one senses that even as she 104

writes her memoir that atmosphere of pointed attention remains.

Ritual becomes a necessary and often symbolic feature of her day and, predictably, another extension of the physical/psychological nature of the house.

In that first week I established a rite about

supper. When I sit down at the deal table, there

are flowers; there is a bottle of wine, and the

table has been carefully set as if by a good ser-

vent. There is a book open to read, the equivalent

for the solitary of civilized conversation. Every­

thing has been prepared as if for a guest, and I

am the guest of the house.

(Plant Dreaming, p.61)

The house as a physical structure is also the meeting place between solitude and society. It is a bridge with traffic flowing both directions— the world streaming in and the self retreating, as it were, to shelter.

How brief yet how full that first encounter between

my new life and its first guests! So much greater, 105

then, the sense of absence when the house and I

found ourselves alone together after they had gone.

It was my first experience of the transition back

to solitude, the moment of loneliness, the shadowy

moment before I can resume my real life here....For

alone here I must give up the world and all its dear,

tantalizing human questions, first close myself away,

and then, and only then, open to that other tide, the

inner life, the life of solitude, which rises very

slowly until, like the anemone, I am open to receive

whatever it may bring.

(Plant Dreaming, p.69)

In fact, solitude becomes a very real, physical, emotional and spiritual feature of Nelson life. It is what gives shape to Sarton'8 life— and, by extension, the house.

Solitude itself is a way of waiting for the

inaudible and the invisible to make itself felt.

And that is why solitude is never static and never

hopeless. On the other hand, every friend who comes

to stay enriches the solitude forever; presence, if

it has ever been real presence, does not ever leave.

(Plant Dreaming, p.71) 106

Writing appears to be the result of that flood of inspiration Sarton

discovers when she is able to retreat alone, but it is also one way

to break through the sense of confinement such isolation can bring,

even if it is self-imposed.

Plant Dreaming Deep is also a memoir about growing into middle

age. For a single woman living alone in a rural area, winter could

be a period of intense emotions swinging first to depression then to calm and joy. Sarton recognized that a move to the country was(

"deliberately cutting life back to the marrow," but while the woman as artist sensed, at times, an acute anxiety about coming "to the median and still...so far from the real achievement one had dreamed possible at twenty," she felt firmly that "against all that felt unfinished, stood the house" (Plant Dreaming, p.87). Winter was also the time when the artist's "demons" seemed particularly real: rage, self-doubt, failure.

This demon sometimes comes to tell me that,

because I was born in Europe and I have no

definite American social background to work

from, I am disabled as a novelist from the

start. Sometimes what he has to tell me is

that I have been fatally divided in loyalty

between two crafts, that of the novel and that

of poetry.

(Plant Dreaming, p.88) 107

Ultimately, Sarton found that the question of maturity as an artist

intent upon new success was bound up in particular pressures she felt

as a woman alone.

She [the single woman] is not buttressed by a

family and the responsibilities of a family, nor

on the other hand, by the Rule and the Community

which support a religious. She has made a choice

that cuts her off from a lot of things most people

consider life, for the sake of something else, some­

thing both chancy and intangible. No wonder anxiety

is the constant attendant of such a one!

(Plant Dreaming, p.91)

But, as she would express many times, "Through all the anxieties, hazards, losses, depressions and moments of elation, I had a strong and life-enhancing support in the house itself" (Plant Dreaming, p.93). Ultimately, "house" is not only "home," but "family" as well.

What the reader must remember is that Plant Dreaming Deep as a memoir is a looking back over nearly ten years of seasonal change, growth, happiness, loneliness— facets of life lived consciously and intensely. Although Sarton was trying to recapture just the first year of her life at Nelson, she was assembling bits and pieces of 108

that life from a special vantage point years after the fact. Her

life from that period could, perhaps, more easily "make sense" in a

coherent fashion when assessed from that distance. The journal

written for publication is less apt to succeed in holding such a

picture together. It admits petty eruptions of daily trivia,

distraction, disconnected sensibility. But is is also more likely to

preserve the fine detail or the small aside which can make that form

of writing a more immediate experience for the reader. The

distinction is important, and Plant Dreaming Deep serves its purpose

as the memory of conscious life.

I cannot say that I have been exactly happy here...

too many of the people I love never come here, or come

rarely. I have wept bitter tears in this house. At

any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.

Life here has been, from the start, a challenge. And

that is the point— not, perhaps, happiness, but life

lived at its most aware and intense.

(Plant Dreaming, p.94)

It is a valuable work by itself for what we "remember" along with

Sarton of her first year "alive on the edge of nowhere." 109

When I first arrived, everything was an adventure,

and it is that adventure that this book recounts.

But already that exuberance, that time when I was

in a perpetual state of wonder, curiosity and some­

times dismay and fear is changing. ' The romantic

period in my life here is coming to a close.

(Plant Dreaming, p.185)

But the adventure "recalled" through memoir was only giving way to a

different form of literary experience. Four years later the journals would begin. II

The 1973 publication of Journal of a Solitude was called by the

reviewer in Publisher* s Weekly, an "interesting small book."3 Like

Plant Dreaming Deep, the Journal covers one full year of Sarton's

life. This reviewer, while complimentary of Sarton's honesty ("to

the point of bluntness"), felt that the private writing conveyed "a

sense of self that will appeal to many women readers." That the self

explored happened to be a woman should not limit its appeal,

however. A broader appreciation of the work as an often painful

delineation of days and weeks in an artist's life would recognize

that, although some of the experiences of that life result from

particular issues in women's lives, it is by no means a "woman's

book." Another reviewer, Phyllis Meras, complained of "too much

intensity," and criticized Sarton for being at times "mannered and

excessive."4 This is, indeed, a brooding work— but one particular

value of the published journal is its frankness and immediacy. As

readers we should be aware that the daily and scrupulous recording of

life may be a much darker work than the memoir or autobiography whose

sources are memory. Sarton chose to begin her journal in mid-September of 1971 at a time when she was returning to the house

at Nelson after a long summer of commitments elsewhere. She was

relieved to be alone with the house again and

110 Ill

recognized a great need for solitude ("friends, even passionate love,

are not my real life"), and the period began with disruption.

The ambiance here is order and beauty. That is

what frightens me when I am first alone again. I

feel inadequate. 1 have made an open place, a

place for meditation. What if I cannot find my­

self inside it?

(Journal, p.12)

The reader is warned that Sarton intends to use her journal as a weapon, as it were, to wage private battles. She notes the many friends she has acquired with Plant Dreaming Deep, for which she is grateful, but looks to changing the "false" image she felt she had created in that book.

The anguish of my life here— its rages— is hardly

mentioned. Now I hope to break through into the

rough rocky depths, to the matrix itself. There

is violence there and anger never resolved. I

live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the

reason that I aman impossible creature, set apart

by a temperament I have never learned to use as it 112

could be used, thrown off by a word, a glance, a

rainy day, or one drink too many. My need to be

alone is balanced against my fear of what will hap­

pen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence

if I cannot find support there.

(Journal, p.12)

The memoir had not been entirely untrue, of course, but the screen of

memory can filter out the harshest of details, even when the writer

does not intend to. Sarton's choice of the journal as the next form

for her private writing was, therefore, a means of "correcting"

herself on the one hand, and on the other, of dealing more directly

with the difficulties of her life in as immediate a form as possible.

Because the journal was always intended for publication, Sarton

had a clear audience in mind while writing. She must certainly have

edited her work and revised it before publication, perhaps deleting

or changing some material, but the final work presents itself as a

substantially "untouched" work. Self-censorship, when and if it

occurred during the project, is more likely to have taken place

during the daily writing. Writing with publication in mind certainly

"shaped" the work towards a specific goal— that of purposely

revealing and pursuing the darker parts of the writer's life. Sarton had taken "solitude" to be the subject of her work and it is through 113

as examination of her episodes of depression, anger or frustration

that she believed the "true" image of her life would become clear.

We are reminded at the beginning of the Journal, for instance, that

"there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as

there is nothing to help balance at times'of particular stress or depression" (p.16). In Sarton's terms, solitude was a condition of living, not a temporary predicament and often became the source of acute distress.

When an elderly couple approached her door hoping to be able to meet her, for example ("friends of the work" as Sarton labels her readers), Sarton was horrified to find herself pouring out her troubles to them, perfect strangers: "Here the inner person is the outer person. It is what I want, but that does not make me any less absurd" (Journal, p.22). The physical isolation of the village compounded the inner tension of living alone. But there were neighbors (also part of Plant Dreaming Deep), and Sarton learned to value particular friendships with a deepness that perhaps only one who lives alone can appreciate. But, "any meeting with another human being is collision for me now," she admitted, and often her life seemed best characterized as a series of interruptions. She could freely admit that the "fierce tension in me, when it is properly channeled, creates the good tension for work. But when it becomes unbalanced I am destructive" (Journal, p.29). 114

So the Journal becomes an unpredictable work. Just as Sarton

seems completely emeshed in days of dark humor and high tension, she would break into gentler considerations of small details, as she did on one October morning: "the ash has lost its leaves and when I went out to get the mail and stopped to look up at it, I rejoiced to think that soon everything here will be honed down to structure" (Journal, p.34). A memoir might have lost such a detail, but the moment recorded in the daily journal, fixed indelibly on the page, provides a distraction from inner turmoil for both writer and reader. The moment, in fact, leads her to ask, "Does anything in nature despair except man?" Her plight is compared to the animal caught in a hunter's trap whose only goal is survival.

Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate

trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and

remember that nothing stays the same for long, not

even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all

pass. Let it go.

(Journal, p.34)

There are circles of thought in the journal that run from loneliness and dejection to suprise and revelation. Because the journal form so 115

often catches the writer at unpredictable moments, experience is

never expresssed as a final evaluation; it is more likely to be built

up of recurring emotions and predicaments, underscoring the truth

"that nothing stays the same for long."

Journals can easily deteriorate into scraps of feelings and

events of passing interest, but the good writer will use the form to

pursue directions of thought,, not just collect them. Sarton, for

example, often uses her daily record to flesh out a scrap of thought and so discover within it a more intricate discourse, as she did with the concept of "wholeness."

It occurs to me that this is often a masculine

attribute (my father had i.t, not my mother) and that

perhaps it goes not only with dedication to noble

ends, but with a certain simple-mindedness— the

people who hew to the heart of the matter, who get

hold of the big ideas....We are whole or have inti­

mations of what it means to be whole when the entire

being— spirit, mind, nerves, flesh, the body itself—

are concentrated toward a single end. I feel it when

I am writing a poem....Wholeness does not, of course,

necessarily mean being right in a deduction or an

action. It does not mean being divided in spirit 116

by conscience, by doubt, by fear....It may also go

with limited sensibility or a sensibility limited in

some areas. When I said above that women were rarely

as whole as men, I felt I must go back and think some

more. It is harder for women, perhaps, to be "one-

pointed," much harder for them to clear space around

whatever it is they want to do beyond household chores

and family life. Their lives are fragmented....

(Journal, pp.55-56)

In entries like this, the journal becomes a kind of collection of

essays devoted to topics prompted by daily experience. To "go back

and think some more," is a particular opportunity of this form. Here

Sarton does not address "wholeness" explicitly in relation to her work as an artist and as a woman, but we read her "pointed" criticism of "fragmented" lives and feel, perhaps, that for Sarton, the private moments spent with the journal were a means of "clearing space."

Certainly the writer clarifies thought and through it, revises her sense of experience. To use a journal in this way, the writer must feel that the private concerns can be public material: "One must believe that private dilemmas are, if deeply examined, universal, and so, if expressed, have a human value beyond the private, and one must also believe in the vehicle for expressing them, in the talent" 117

(Journal, p.60). So it is not merely the act of writing that creates

from the journal a literary work— it is also the writer's sense of herself as a literary subject that creates a context for publishable work. The literary context for private journal writing also comes

from a recognition of creativity in daily' experience and in the expression of it, whatever its source or form. Sarton confirms for herself the value of "digging deep" into depression and private dilemma because "there is nothing we do that is without meaning and nothing that we suffer that does not hold the seed of creation in it"; for Sarton, in fact, writing is an act of "creating the soul"

(Journal, p.67).

Journal of a Solitude is frequently its own subject. Sarton is constantly aware— and so her readers will be too— that she is using her writing to clarify as well as record her life. And publishable journals can have it both ways: the journal is a "safe" place for explaining the most personal of thoughts without concern for an audience until actual publication occurs; once published, it does become involved with audience but is shielded by the very nature of its form.

How one lives as a private person is intimately

bound into the work. And at some point I believe

one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating

some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, 118

and come out with personal truth. It we are to under­

stand the human condition, and if we are to accept

ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extra­

vagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of

the self to its full capacity for action and creation,

both as human being and as artist, we have to know

all we can about each other, and we have to be

willing to go naked.

(Journal, p.77)

The journal, then, is a way of stripping away restraint in acceptable form.

It is also a record of days, and the reader should not miss the occasional reference to subjects only partly explored or explained.

One gathers that the year of this journal was a difficult one for

Sarton in many ways which physical isolation compounded. She writes guardedly of "coming into the most fulfilled love of my life" during the period, but it is never taken up for long except as food for a broad statement about love.

For of course one is never safe when in love.

Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for

there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why 119

go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what

more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in

any form, than any relationship which can call out

and require of us our most secret and deepest selves?

(Journal, p.80)

We will not learn much more about Sarton'8 "most secret" self. She

will keep the identity and circumstances of this relationship below

the surface of the published writing. But the reader of the complete

set of Sarton journals will eventually learn that this was a

relationship with another woman (never named). Sarton1s avowed

homosexuality was a difficult truth to express. This journal barely

touches upon the topic, but Sarton notes how much freer she is to

consider the subject in the pages of her private record than in even a novel (she had recently published Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids

Singing— the story of a middle-aged writer, like Sarton, discovering certain truths about herself and her relationships). Sarton is dedicated throughout her writing, however, to exploring the possibilites of love in middle age. Her reflections in the Journal suggest how constrained she had been in her fictional work and how bitter, perhaps, the truth about herself could be. ...[T]he revolt against puritanism has opened up

a new ethos where sex is the god, and thus the

sexual athlete is the true hero. Here the middle-

aged or old are at a disadvantage. Where we have

the advantage is in loving itself— We know so much more; we are so much better able to handle anxiety,

frustration, or even our own romanticism; and deep down we have such a store of tenderness. These should be the Mozartian years. On the surface my work has not looked radical, but perhaps it will be seen eventually that in a "nice, quiet, noisy way" I have been trying to say radical things gently so that they may penetrate without shock. The fear of homosexuality is so great that it took courage to write Mrs. Stevens, to write a novel about a woman homosexual who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive; to portray a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disgusting, without sentimentality; and to face the truth that such a life is rarely happy, a life where art must become the primary motivation, for love is never going to fulfill in the usual sense. But I am aware that I probably could not have "leveled" as 121

I did in that book had I had any family (my parents

were dead when I wrote it), and perhaps not if I

had had a regular job. I have a great responsibility

because I can afford to be honest. The danger is

that if you are placed in a sexual context people

will read your work from a distorting angle of vision.

(Journal, pp.90-91)

The reader senses that even here Sarton feels restrained, fearful that the journal's "honesty" be taken as a distortion of her life.

She would certainly be aware that as a private document, her journal might be read particularly for her "confession." But she uses her journal well. She has room here to expand upon the complaint, enlarging the context of her subject to reach a neutral ground her readers could recognize with sympathy, regardless of their reactions to homosexuality. Thus, the passage concludes:

Love is one of the great enlargers of the

person because it requires us to "take in" the

stranger and to understand him, and to exercise

restraint and tolerance as well as imagination

to make the relationship work. If love includes 122

passion, it is more explosive and dangerous and

forces us to go deeper. Great art does the

same thing....

(Journal, p.93)

Of course, Sarton hopes ^er readers will recognize her work— even

this personal collection— as art and suggests that we "all do make

some attempt to bring together the private and the public person

through the work of art" (Journal, p.100).

Other less explosive subjects are daily concerns of the journal, housekeeping and gardening in particular. The continuity these activities bring to Sarton's days as a woman living alone carry over into the writing, so that continuity of subject in the journal becomes a continuity of form. She writes, for instance, of her need for structure as in daily physical activity; but the journal is structure too. Both hold together the emotional fragments the woman alone must face: "1 have been thinking about the fact that, however terrible the storms may be, if one's life has a sufficiently stable and fruitful structure, one is helped to withstand their devastating aftereffects" (Journal, p.84). Writing is at least a contrast to the physical demands of the house and grounds, and the journal is the best creative framework for that part of her life.

It is also a filter for other people's ideas, a holding-tank . for bits of wisdom discovered or remembered. 123

1 slept and woke and thought about this journal.

There are obviously certain themes that recur and

must be continuously explored. Around them, over

the years, 1 have accumulated the wisdom of other

minds. I do not want this to turn into a common­

place book, but when it is a matter of touchstones,

it may be appropriate now and then to draw on this

store.

(Journal, p.88)

She goes on to recount a passage from Flannery O'Connor she had found herself returning to over the years. It had served her well on many occasions in moving her "from shame after anger to the sense that one has to forgive oneself, to that moment on one's knees when the tears of relief pour down." The act of copying down the passage in her own journal seemed to be not only a reminder and conservation of thought, but a cathartic as well.

In addition to the journal's first subject, solitude, the reader soon pieces together a second topic central to an understanding of Sarton as a writer and of the journal as a coherent work of "chains of thought." Sarton comes to the realization that the essential characteristic of consciousness is meditative. She does not use that word specifically and does not practice what is 124

commonly labelled "meditation" in a spiritual sense, but she clearly

experiences meditative states and revelations through the writing.

Solitude is a beginning, but simple physical isolation is an

ambivalent condition— at times refreshing and.at times intensely

disturbing. Sarton comes to understand her "separateness" in a way

that accurately describes the meditative state: "We are aware of God

only when we cease to be aware of ourselves, not in the negative

sense of denying the self, but in the sense of losing self, in

admiration and joy" (journal, p.99). Attention to life in even its

smallest details through writing becomes a kind of dissolution of

self as consciousness is drawn inward and outward simultaneously— the self turning deeper within and, in a sense, losing self-consciousness through the discipline of writing. It is a positive experience that leads to revelation.

I feel myself get sucked down into the quick­

sand that isolation sometimes creates, a sense

of drowning, of being literally engulfed. When

it comes to the important things one is always

alone, and it may be that the virtue or possible

insight I get from being so obviously alone— being

physically and in every way absolutely alone much

of the time— is a way into the universal state of

man. The way in which one handles this absolute 125

aloneness is the way in which one grows up, is

the great psychic journey of everyman.

(Journal, p.107)

Solitude is, in fact, a psychic journey for Sarton which leads her to

a higher, more intense "absolute aloneness" she can grasp as a kind

of ultimate experience apart from the physical separation she maintains in her life. She comes to term her existence a "self-made

solitary confinement"; thus, solitude takes on new meaning— a

"fabulous gift from the gods" (Journal, p.109). She also has the maturity to recognize that the truths she discovers about herself can be considered philosophically, but are not intended as guidelines for living, certainly not as instructions to "women artists" as a group, though Sarton is always aware of the tensions peculiar to women's art. She has paid what she considers a very high price for such truths:

Mine is not, I feel sure, the best human solution.

Nor have I ever thought it was. In my case it has

perhaps made possible the creation of some works of

art, but certainly it has done so at a high price

in emotional maturity and in happiness. What I

have is space around me and time around me.

(Journal, p.123) 126

Oddly enough, Sarton cries bitterly a few weeks after writing about

this understanding and her acceptance of these values when a friend

tells her that "what 6he thinks altogether new in my work— is to talk

about solitude." Sarton feels "as if a prison door were closing";

worse still, she seems resigned to consider the subject as a kind of

last resort, of making the best she can "out of despair" (p.134).

The lessons are difficult.

Journal of a Solitude begins drawing to a natural close as

Sarton contemplates a move from Nelson to the shore of Maine. She is at a turning point, recognizing that "we fear disturbance, change" but senses that "Nelson these days becomes very luminous and real because I am slowly coming to a decision to leave it" (Journal, p.148). She grows resigned to the darker side of her nature and the disappointment in love and relationships which the Journal has been very much about: "I have longed for one person with whom everything could be shared, but I am slowly making my peace with the knowledge that this will never happen." Still, there is momentum to go forward, even if in reaction to work, loneliness or disappointment.

At times, she sounds fretful: "I felt cluttered when there is not time to analyze experience. That is the silt— unexplored experience that literally chokes the mind. Too much comes into this house...."

(Journal, p.160). So the house that began as a refuge, a new beginning, a way to reshape the self and recreate "home," is undone.

She reminds herself of her intentions in keeping the journal and in creating it specifically for publication. 127

One reason 1 felt impelled to keep this journal

for a year was because I think that Plant Dreaming

Deep has created the myth of a false Paradise. I

want to destroy that myth. In fact, I see my func-

to in as quietly destroying myths, even those of my

own making, in order to come closer and closer to

reality and to accepting reality.

(Journal, p.176)

The house in Nelson had, in fact, become a myth. Ironically, Sarton seems to have become caught in a dual trap with both her writing and her home. Robert F. Sayre defines the condition in his study of

"Autobiography and America."

The "American book"— be it novel, poem, or auto­

biography— builds an ideal house (like Thoreau's),

a house of fiction (like James's) that is an improve­

ment on the shabby, imitative, or mundane houses in

which we are born. The autobiography is, or can be,

that second house into which we are reborn, carried

by our own creative power. We make it ourselves,

then remake it— make it new.5 128

For Sarton at this point, what has been created in both her written

life and physical environment has begun to deteriorate. Sadly, the

journal has also "recorded, whatever 1 may have wished not to speak,

of, a steady decline in ray relationship with X" (Journal, p.183).

Sarton begins to "dream only of disappearing, taking another name,

settling into some place where no one would recognize me or care"

(Journal, pp.200-201). As a journey towards understanding the deeper parts of herself, the journal draws together a bittersweet lesson.

Perhaps the greatest gift we can give to another

human being is detachment. Attachment, even that

which imagines it is selfless, always lays some

burden on the other person. How to learn to love

in such a light, airy way that there is no burden?

(Journal, p.201)

The final entry (September 30th) is not so much a summation of

Sarton's life during that year as it is a tentative breaking off from old ties (to house, myth and all) and old lessons.

This journal began a year ago with depression, with

much self-questioning about my dangerous and destruc- tive angers, with the hope that self-examination

would help me to change. 1 made great efforts at

control and sometimes 1 succeeded...! begin to have

intimations, now, of a return to some deep self that

has been too absorbed and too battered to function

for a long time. That self tells me that I was meant to live alone, meant to write the poems for

others— poems that seldom in my life have reached

the one person for whom they were intended...So perhaps we write toward what we will become from where we are....

(Journal, p.208) Ill

In 1973, May Sarton moved from Nelson to York, Maine, where she

took up residence in a house on the coast, Wild Knoll. Two journals

have been published since that time: The House by the Sea (1977) and

Recovering (1980). While the dark period’ in Nelson heralded a need

for change, Sarton found her new proximity to the sea inspiring as a

clear break from old associations and sorrows. The new home and land

required special attention, particularly gardening. A new landscape

(the rocky shore and sea) required new perceptions. The first of the

Maine journals is a "happy" book overall as new beginnings and new hopes shape the writer's work. Recovering is a far different

record— quite literally the account of a mental and physical recovery

from life-threatening illness. Taken together, these journals do not so much complete a story as they do bring it full circle. As in the earlier works, Sarton's writing is a journey of middle age and the fear of declining creative powers. But her private writing is also always concerned with universal subjects realized through details of daily life. Sarton's gift as a writer and sensitivity to the private life as literary material remains constant throughout the later journals. She begins:

130 131

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 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 there is little incentive even

to try to sort out daily experience as it happens?

(House, p.7)

To "sort out daily experience as it happens," then, was one intention in writing— writing as a thinking tool. Sarton admits, too, that because of personal difficulties during the last two years in Nelson,

"the house itself felt contaminated by pain" (House, p.8). And, as we've learned from her earlier work, "house" remains a crucial construct, a blend of home, family, solitude, and even isolation.

The writer's relationship to her physical environment is still and always the heart of her relationship to art. But the move was not abrupt; Sarton was coaxed to Maine by friends who knew of Wild Knoll 132

and, as Sarton explains, she really "had two years in which to dream

myself into the change" (House, p.9). "Home" is an imaginative

construct, and the shift of scene from New Hampshire to Maine brought

about a new need for documenting, of telling again the story of

"home" and "house." But, as she quickly warns us in her Preface, the

new journal became a much different document in spirit than she had

expected.

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.

(House, p.11)

During this period, Sarton's close friend (with whom she had lived for many years before the first move to Nelson) grew increasingly incapacitated and was moved to a nursing home. While Sarton continued to bring her to the house in Maine for visits and holidays, 133

she slipped further away. As a result, "this journal is a partial

record of what it is- like to experience senility close to home"

(House, p.14).

The closing paragraph of the Preface focuses once more on the

one subject that ties together all these journals as literary

explorations of an acutely sensitive consciousness growing towards

the mature years of life.

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 relation­

ship, 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.

(House, p.14)

But The House by the Sea is, by no means, the end. It is a deepening of the artist's focus on her life, painful as that perspective may be. 134

Landscape is a key feature of Sarton's work. In New Hampshire, the job of creating home became a job of restoration and rebuilding.

The physical reality of the house itself loomed over much of the daily chores and carried over into the writing. Wild Knoll, a spacious house set back from the shore and surrounded by woods, pulled the writer's focus further away from the confines of house and yard; from Sarton's front door, a direct path meanders through tall grasses (the "wild knoll") and runs headlong into the rocky surf below— a stunning sight.

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 tides, rising and

falling. But I do not see the rocks or the shore­

line 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 land­

scape. Without tension, it has been the happiest

year I can remember....

(House, p.18) 135

When a gale wind whips up the sea to a fourteen foot tide, Sarton ventures out to view the magnificent violence churning all about the rocks and feels the fury "was like an answer to prayer, the outward storm playing out what might have become an inward storm had it not absorbed all the tensions, as it did" (House, p.32). The landscape is cathartic, a touchstone for emotions as well as a filter for the worst of them. The poet's eye turns outward. "Space," she writes,

"has to be defined in some way in every art" (House, p.38); for the writer becoming accustomed to new spaces beyond her doorstep (quite literally, but emotionally too), definition is a process of extension. What grew so deeply inward during the writing of the

Journal was here pushing the limits of private space as far as the eye could see. Outer and inner landscapes joined in her sense of personal boundaries. In fact, during the early months of the new journal, Sarton expresses herself in metaphors clearly drawn from the new surroundings. In December she writes:

It's a season when one gets spread out almost too

thin in too many human directions, but come January

first I am determined to batten myself down, tighten

up, go inward. I feel the day must be marked by a

change of rhythm, by some quiet act of self-determi- 136

nation and self-assertion....We are overextended.

Time to pull in the boundaries and lift the drawbridge.

(House, p.44)

The artist as ship and the artist as battlement. Oddly enough,

Sarton's image of the self pulling away from land to "tighten up, go

inward" is a drawing away from the house on land. The eye looking

out to sea from the doorway of Wild Knoll is now the eye casting off

from the rocky surf, leaving the house behind. Perhaps a subtle

substitution is evident here: the house at Nelson with all its

painful associations is really the house on the knoll. Sarton's

voyage inward through the new house is a drawing away from the past towards the sea, which is inspiration and the return of poetry.

Thanks to the sea, to Europe...to GodI...I am

writing poems again. I can play records. Now I

am going to put on the Bach cello suites, played

by Tortelier. They have accompanied me through

many days of work in the past. Let it all begin

once more, the step-by-step joyful effort to

lift a poem out.

(House, p.49)

The sea (water) symbolizes all art. It is creative energy itself. 137

1 haven't yet formulated a way of handling

three enterprises at once— this journal, the

book or portraits of which Bowen is the first

[A World of Light], and poems. But the only

thing is to immerse onself very fast as if a

plunge into icy waters and hope to find one

can swim one's way to safety! And that 1 am

about to do.

(House, p.50)

In response to a friend's comment that the sea "is always in motion" while "mountains are still," Sarton notes firmly, "I do not think of

the sea as motion so much as a great openness" (House, p.170). And

for someone intensely focused on the privacy of her life, the

sea-change from Nelson could only lead to growth inward and outward with a vision that relieved some of the intensity of solitude: "The sea has erased the pain" (House, p.177).

The journals are also records of a creeping awareness and sensitivity to aging. Much of the time, solitude presses the issue, but Sarton often returns to problems of her isolation (fears of falling or becoming suddenly ill with no one to help) as they relate to her powers as an artist. Naturally, she fears losing her creative talent with age, but she is discovering new gifts as well. 138

Certainly, the journal's vitality as a literary work attests to a cretive spirit alive and working well.

Growing old...what is the opposite of "growing"?

I ask myself. "Withering" perhaps?- It is, I assume,

quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow

into. But there is also an opposite to growth which

is regression, in psychoanalytic terms going back to

infantile modes of being. And maybe growing old is

accepting regression as part of the whole mysterious

process. The child in the old person is a precious

part of his being able to handle the slow imprisonment.

As he is able to do less, he enjoys everything in the

present, with a childlike enjoyment. It is a saving

grace...I can't stop doing what I have always done,

trying to sort out and shape experience. The journal

is a good way to do this at a less intense level than

by creating a work of art as highly organized as a

poem, for instance, of the sustained effort a novel

requires. I find it wonderful to have a receptacle

into which to pour vivid momentary insights and a way

or ordering day-to-day experience.

(House, p.28) 139

The journal, then, by recording experience (clarifying, naming,

analyzing) serves as one way of holding onto experience; through the

act of writing, time is slowed or at least controllable. For Sarton,

whose sense of creative power is waning, the journal's function as a

discipline eases the tension and frustration of the "dry well." She

clearly does not intend to wither.

Death is not an overwhelming concern for her, nor is it a

particularly noticeable concern of the private writing collected to

this point. Sarton does not dwell on the deaths of friends nor does she express repeated worries about her own mortality. It is, however, the subject of one particularly developed passage written at the beginning of the new year. The snows were deep and, again, isolation seemed so much more intense.

...[B]y the time one is sixty there is a deeperanxiety

that has to be dealt with, and that is the fear of

death...or rather, the fear of dying in some inappro­

priate way, such as long illness requiring care....Why

talk about it? I say "talk about it" because these are

things we bury and never do bring out into the open.

And what is a journal for if they are never mentioned?

To a very great extent the quality of life has to do

with its delights and anxieties. Without anxiety life 140

would have very little to savor. But one does get a

sense of the extreme fragility of everything alive—

plants, animals, people— all threatened, all so easily

snuffed out by overwatering, a predator, a heart attack...

But for the last few years I have been highly conscious

that from now on I am preparing to die, and must think

about it, and try to do it well. When I was young death

was a romantic dream, longed for at times of great emo­

tional stress as one longs for sleep. Who could fear

it? one asked at nineteen. We fear what we cannot

imagine. There is simply no way of imagining what has

not yet happened nor been described. We live toward it,

not knowing...except that intense love of life has to

be matched by greater detachment as one grows older.

Or is it that the things one is attached to change?

(House, p.53)

The journal, of course, tracks changes and can aid the imagination by pinning down the present. Sarton'8 "preparation" for death is a written exercise, a familiar means of leaving something concrete and enduring beyond the writer's life. But part of her concern with death was not with the end of her own life, but with the quality of change she perceived in her life as friends died: "the basic pattern 142

might take on meaning again....For years I have not

permitted myself to believe in anything but the impro­

bable immortality I might achieve with my work,

especially with poems....What I have been experiencing

lately is the sense that whatever I am to learn in the

next years is not going to come from friends, that I

am really more isolated than I could ever have imagined

being...and of course it is partly through my own choice.

(House, pp.190-91)

Solitude, isolation, aging and death are bound up together. What we witness in this particular journal is the process by which a fear or anxiety is recognized, weighed, contemplated and finally connected to other values. We see the idea rising from a natural context— a daily chore, a piece of news arriving with the mail, a memory sparked. The journal is not a volume of perfectly polished writing, but through a gradual weaving together of ideas as they grow out of experience and the process of writing itself, the journal is shaped toward a whole.

Indeed, if one can set a standard for judging the literary qualities of journal writing, consideration should be given to how much of this process is evident. If the journal seems to be erupting in excessive, didactic essays or, at the other extreme, finely turned aphorisms in place of gradual revelations of truths, one should 141

of a life changes radically when there is no one left, for instance, who remembers one as a child" (House, p.81). Age might also mean a depletion of stamina, of "how little time I have left and how few years" (House, p.185). But aside from these passing comments on death, Sarton is not gloomy or foreboding' about her own condition or about aging and death. She is able, ultimately, to tie these ideas together and connect them to that larger subject of the whole body of private writing— solitude.

I woke to a bright orange sunrise and a calm blue

sea, determined to talk about the real things that

are in my head these days. The first is death, not

death itself, but dying and the fear of dying alone.

Yet why? Everyone dies alone, however surrounded he

may be by loving family and friends. I knew this

for the first time when my mother was dying. 1 felt

deeply what courage it took and how little by little

she went farther away from us. In a way old age is

the same...and I suppose one might think of old age

itself as dying, for it too demands the giving up of

one attachment to life after another. Toward what end?

If one could think of it as a journey toward a real

destination other than a total blank, everything 143

probably be suspicious of the work as "journal" writing at all. A

daily record of experience is often inconsistent between entries with

the writer rehashing or repudiating earlier material. While Sarton may feel quite definitely one day that aging is partly a cutting off

from the past (because old friends are gone and seem to have taken

the past with them), she can sincerely explain some time later, "I do lead two lives, the past and the present, and sometimes the past is far more vivid than the present" (House, p.231). There is always room in a well executed journal for backing up, retracting, modifying or just ignoring what's been claimed before. If The House by the Sea can be summed up as a work, one would have to note its fluctuations between what it hopes to be and what it reads as being. As the

"happy" book Sarton hoped it would be at the beginning, the journal occasionally reaches moments of reflective peace, calm and balance.

The great subject of solitude is like an umbrella for everything else that finds its way into the writing and is, finally, a friendly but detached state.

It is not a matter of being a recluse...I shall

never be that; I enjoy and need my friends too much.

But it is a matter of detachment, of not being quite 144

so easily pulled out of my own orbit by violent attrac­

tions, of being able to enjoy without needing to pos­

sess.

(House, p.61)

The journal also becomes a special act of discipline as Sarton

uses it: "One does not 'find oneself1 by pursuing one's self, but on

the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through some

discipline or routine (even the routine of making beds) who one is

and wants to be" (House, p.180). The journal is that "something

else" for Sarton as much as her gardening or housekeeping chores are. It is a key to concentration because it demands a time frame

(life in the order of its happening, and simple chronology).

Finally, The House by the Sea is a story of aging. Sarton tells a friend that "what makes the spinster is fear of life" (House, p.273). This is clearly not the tale of a spinster, but of a creative intelligence moving more deeply into life as well as through it. Indeed, the work purposefully closes itself to make way for new work and, of course, new hopes.

I need to stop recounting days, one by one, and

to begin to think about and make notes for a new novel.

I am longing to live in an imaginary world again, with 145

people about whom I can know everything and tell the

whole truth. That is not possible in a journal inten­

ded for publication....Let me end here, on a plateau

of happiness, rejoicing in my world as it turns inward

once more toward creation.

(House, p.287)

The journal is not the "whole truth." It is a special kind of truth

about the private self and forms a literary experience much

different in quality than that of poetry or the novel, but Sarton

continues in her private writing what Jean Detre described as "edging her way to the larger truths by dealing with smaller insights born of

solitude."6 IV

The dust jacket of Recovering, published in September of 1980,

calls it "Sarton1s most important journal," and the statement is true

for several reasons. Plant Dreaming Deep as a memoir had created what Sarton believed to be a false image of her life and Journal of a

Solitude was created, in part, as a corrective to the earlier work.

The House by the Sea continues the great subject of solitude as a condition of life and as a focus of literary materials, while it chronicles a year of life engrossed with new beginnings, new adjustments and— as we learn by the end of that year— new appreciations of aging and death. Recovering is, quite literally, the tool Sarton used to mend a physically and emotionally shattered life — "recovering" as a means and an end.

While House by the Sea ended because Sarton felt the daily record kept her from going deeper into creative work (e.g. a novel),

Recovering begins with a recognition that the journal as a literary form may be Sarton's particular talent and her most valued activity as a writer. There is an urgency in the opening of this record

(dated December 28, 1978): "I had thought not to begin a new journal until I am seventy, four years from now, but perhaps the time has come to sort out, and see whether I can restore a sense of meaning and continuity to my life by this familiar means" (Recovering, p.9).

146 147

But it is much more than just a "familiar means"; Sarton's experience

with the form had already proven its value as a workable form for

publication. If poetry seemed to be the literary form of earlier

years (she had feared her creative powers as a poet had run dry after

sixty) and novels remained frustratingly unsuccessful, then the

journal appeared to be the form appropriate to her mature years.

What had begun as correction and continued as a kind of diversion

from other forms of writing resulted in an achievement Sarton might

not have recognized before her work on Recovering.

As the volume opens, we learn that Sarton's closest friend,

Judy, has died ("Now it [love] has become the past, a beneficent past"). The voice of this journal is somber, measured, already living deeply in the self.

...[T]he only way through pain, and I am thinking

of mental anguish of which I have had rather too

much this past year, is to go through it, to

absorb, probe, understand exactly what it is and

what it means. To close the door on pain is to

miss the chance for growth, isn't it? Nothing

that happens to us, even the most terrible shock,

is unusable and everything has somehow to be built

into the fabric of the personality, just as food 148

has to be built in. For me the moral dilemma

this past year has been how to make peace with

the unacceptable— where compromise is part of

wisdom and where, on the other hand, what my old

friend Pauline Prince calls "your thirst for the

absolute" seems the commanding necessity. In

human relations at least there cannot be an

absolute and to demand it is to be a wrecker as

I have sometimes been. So the word that has run

through these past months has been "accept, accept."

How unregrettable I feel when I rebel, as I do most

of the time, against accepting 1 The light these

December mornings has a rather special quality;

austere, cold as it is, it has amplitude, a

spacious austerity. I live with a wide semi­

circle of horizon over and beyond the bare

field. Snow would make it richer, but in my

mood at present, I rest on the cold gray sea.

(Recovering, p.13)

M.F. Hershman, reviewing Recovering, rightly noted that the achievement of this journal is its attention to the experience of pain: "For the book is about process— as different from progress 149

as journey is from itinerary— and the reader, separate, meets the

writer, separate, and hopes to know: what she thinks about, how she

lives it out, and what, in return, she herself gives to the

exchange."7

Routine writing— that is, daily recording of

experience— quickly organizes itself. Sarton, whose intentions in

publishing her private work had shifted through the years, now felt

that laying herself bare on paper "was the only valid medicine

against the flu, old age, depression" (Recovering, p.26). Day after

day, the journal charts a course of despair. One day she writes: "a

trajectory, the sense X had of myself and my own powers, has been

broken" (Recovering, p.27). Another day, the journal is both the

symptom and the cure: "I have been battling a loss of identity as a writer these past months. I feel like a clock that is running down.

It is pure self-indulgence to spend this time and energy explaining

this, instead of getting to work!" (p.40). The reader is caught,

quite dramatically, on the threshold of a personal disaster that

Sarton senses but cannot, of course, foresee clearly. Sarton, as the character of her story, seems to be using her journal as a kind of countdown to— what? There is design to the entires: daily chores and daily troubles combine to assert, again and again, that the writer is doomed. In moments, the writing is repudiated: "I find the journal suspect because it is almost too easy. It is a low form of. creation." The form is given, the time frame set and, after 150

producing two published journals, Sarton's facility with private

writing honed to her readership is sharp. The journal is not the

challenge— it is not, one might speculate, felt to be the literary

challenge that other kinds of work could be for her. Yet it is the

vehicle of choice in this terribly difficult period. At times, the

chore of continuing a journal is resented as when "it is strange how

difficult it is to go backward in a journal to the immediate past. I

really don't want to talk about my journey." But she speculates,

'•Maybe this is the year for tearing hopes up like pieces of paper and

making a new start" (Recovering, p.46). In an odd way perhaps, the

journal may feel like a "low form of creation," an old form that adds

to the writer's fear of declining creativity, but Sarton'8

relationship to the form is much more sublte and complex than she

recognizes at the start of Recovering.

Sarton's despair seems to have reached a crisis in early spring of 1979 when a friend's immediate success with a new novel quite naturally rekindled (reenforced perhaps) Sarton's continual fears about her own career.

For the moment I have lost faith in my capacity

to write. I feel written out, and that there is

very little to show for forty years of hard work

and hope. I am not eager to get at a new work but terrified of the very idea. I feel boxed in my pri­

vate life and as a poet and novelist. Until last

November the phoenix rose again and again from the

ashes. Can it be that this time the phoenix died?

But I have to believe that I can malte a come back

eventually. It is too frightening to imagine even

for a second I am finished as a creator. I have

no illusions that it could make much difference,

except to me, one way or another, but I cannot

conceive of my life without creation. What would

become of me?

(Recovering, pp.95-96)

The "disaster" soon follows.

Friday, June 8th

Saw Dr. Dow yesterday and, as I have suspected

for some time, I shall be going into the York

hospital on the seventeenth for a biopsy, followed

at once, Dr. Dow believes, by a mastectomy of the

left breast. It is no surprise, and in some ways

a relief, for I know that the amount of suppressed 152

rage I have suffered since last fall had to find

some way out....I look on the operation as a kind

of exorcism. Something had to give, as they say.

(Recovering, pp.117-18)

Of course, it is not so simple as that. Sarton realizes soon after

the operation is over that the physical pain could not and did not

alleviate the emotional turmoil and that she had not emerged "like a

phoenix from the fire, reborn" (Recovering, p.119). The journey back

to a sense of self and well-being would start all over again.

But the journal continues. It is, as before, a medicine that

the writer (and reader, of course) knows cannot be ignored. The writing, in fact, begins to serve a purpose other than as simple cathartic exercise or as reinforcement for creativity. In these particular circumstances, the journal becomes a witness to the trans­ formation of despair into hope and renewal. The reader, carried along becomes a witness too. It is July.

These days I feel often on the brink of revela­

tion. Last night I lay awake from one to about

four, so full of life and intentions and ideas I

felt immense power flowing through me like an

electric current. It may be that overcoming does 153

literally bring new strength. But this morning

I am paying for the sleepless hours. 1 see, but

I haven't the strength to write it down.

(Recovering, p.124)

But she has written it down; the revelation was in the act of writing. Once again, what seems to be a mild denegration of the demands of a journal is actually evidence of a writer still involved in creativity. The written, literary experience is the revelation, not the cognitive experience bound up in the writer's head alone. By jotting down even this much of all that happened that night, Sarton reconfirms her role as writer.

Recovering is not simply a book of revelations nor is it entirely a success story. Sarton confronts the fact of her physical

"mutilation" as evidence "that the door has closed forever on passionate communion with another human being" (Recovering, p.138); at the same time, she "would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seeds every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss" (Recovering, p.140).

Whatever failures she was experiencing that year as a lover (a relationship was ending) and as a woman stricken by cancer, her writing continued to connect her to something beyond and outside herself— her readers certainly, but more importantly to the larger . 154

conception of literary identity. It might be true to say that

Sarton1s desire to "give herself away" in work was a kind of

intentional self-effacement to counter physical deterioration. There

was still anger to deal with and fear, but the focus of the journal

was on gut-level pain, so that various issues were foced out in the

open that remained shadowy in the earlier works. Sarton's

homosexuality seemed to be a more urgent issue and memories of her mother sharpened. In the process, Sarton was licking old wounds, but not so as to rehash old suffering. Instead, the journal became an attempt to resolve the past, or at least clear away patches of old grief.

Friday, August 3rd

My mother's birthday. And for the first time since

her death twenty-nine years ago (is that possible?)

I have opened the folders of letters and read some of

her letters to me. I have dreaded doing this for

years but instead of grief, they have brought me deep

joy, a reaffirmation of our relationship, which was

so rare in its freedom....

(Recovering, p.146) Saturday, August 4th

One thing happened yesterday that seems a miracle, a

release at last from a long bondage, for I have been

perhaps too aware for too long that, in spite of all

I was able to do for Mother in the last months, I

failed in one way that I cannot forget, that has

haunted me all these years. One day she asked me to

sit with her a while, and I said "I can't" and rushed

out of the room in tears....Failure cannot be erased.

It is built into a life and helps us grow. Failure

cannot be erased, but it can be understood. I think

today that Mother understood, and that has made all

the difference.

(Recovering, p.151)

The journal is also the means of breaking through to Sarton1

"preferred" literary form— the novel.

The journal has proved beneficial in one way,

that here I am able to think and speak about

women honestly. It is hard to do. I sometimes

sit here and think for an hour before I can

bring myself to say certain difficult things,

difficult because they are not things most people

want to hear. But the big block between me and a 156

new novel has been the pressure to do that in

fiction. If I can do it here, maybe the door

will open again into the novelist's way of creating.

(Recovering, p.159)

’I

But the novel is irrelevant. The "novelist's way of creating" is probably irrelevant too. The reader's immediate sharing of Sarton's experience is here in the journal. Sarton continues to underestimate what the journal is actually doing as a literary work. The journal, as a storehouse of experience recorded with as much proximity to the moment of its happening as is likely to be possible, literally

"realizes" (in the sense of "make real") the experience. The novel may or may not be written, but the journal has captured Sarton's concerns all along.

Acceptance— of self, of the past, of the future— is the final movement of Recovering. Sarton is by no means simply tying together loose ends and begins again to "center" her life as autumn approaches. Her discoveries are provocative, and rather than shutting doors on issues they reorganize Sarton's (and the reader's) perception of her condition. One of the deepest understandings she comes to is a new truth about her relationship with the un-named former lover. 157

To see a person for himself or herself, not

for one's feelings about them, requires wisdom,

and I must assume that it is part of the ascen­

sion of true love beyond the initial passion and

need....How does one achieve perfect detachment?

Partly perhaps by accepting the essence of a

being for what it is, not wishing to change it,

accepting.

(Recovering, p.163)

Sarton's mood is somber but the reader recognizes that detachment is a quality she is trying to develop not only towards her former lover but to herself as well. It is a crucial step towards the restoration of well-being.

Until now I had felt in a childish way that life

was always somewhere ahead preparing surprises, that

something amazing was about to happen, and it often

did. Now I am coming to understand that my life is

over or nearly. The timelessness at the end approaches.

It has been a rich life, filled to the brim with work

and love, and I am really quite ready to let it go.

(Recovering, p.180) 158

A restored sense of well-being is a kind of conclusion. But the writer has to begin to draw away from even the experience of writing

(that is, of producing the daily journal) to finish the business of detachment.

The examination of pain does not come from

self-pity, nor does being willing to experience

it for the sake of personal truth mean one is

masochistic. For one cannot probe pain or come

to terms with what it has to teach without detach­

ment. It is the sentimentalists who cannot bear

to look at their pain, who wallow in it, and it

is the cowards who simply shut it out by refusing

to experience it.

(Recovering, p.209)

There is a kind of peace at the close, but not in the usual sense of

"happy ever after." Sarton's last entry begins:

In some ways I am reluctant to come to the end

of this journal. There seems always something

I want to think about, talk with myself about.

I shall miss the daily coming to grips with

whatever has been going on. This morning I 159

woke to another radiant day and the large

perimeter of blue ocean now all the leaves

are gone, and watched the sun come up through

a wide deep orange band. I lay there trying

to find the way through a spell of cold rage

into some way of handling it through enlarging

its perimeter from the intensely personal into

the universal.

(Recovering, p.245)

Sarton's final achievement is not a resolution of the rage, despair, confusion, and darkness of the many days, weeks and months of journal-keeping. The great art of the journal as a literary experience is exactly what Sarton concluded— enlarging the perimeter of the intensely personal into the universal. The universal value of such reading is a recognition that one not only experiences life in such ways as these volumes record, but that one survives, "recovered" and renewed. Conclusion

In the private moment of writing— writing sheltered by the context of journal or diary— the writer almost breaks free of assumptions about literary convention, problems of craft, and responsibilities towards audience. Still, the writer intent upon purposeful communication, even that directed solely to the writer herself, must settle certain questions regarding the ultimate purpose for writing, much less for publishing the journal or diary. When that private material made public, critical attention may be attracted by several things. For an Anne Lindbergh, sharing the most excruciating and intimate portions of her written life, publication assured instantaneous attention simply because of who she was. It mattered little, in a sense, how artful her writing was since she had a ready-made audience for the Lindbergh story. But partly because

Lindbergh chose to release dated material and preserve her diaries nearly intact as originally written rather than reshape her story as memoir, readers become particularly aware of the form of that writing along with its content. When May Sarton, poet and novelist, chose to publish memoirs and journals— particularly journals created for publication— she recognized a possibility in those forms for

160 161

making of the private moment a public forum. As a result, both

writers have created a continuity of private material. This

evolution of material is, in fact, the evolution of "story telling"

and shares some of the same assumptions of form, craft and audience

with other forms of creative literature. As particularly noted in

the work of Anne Lindbergh, character development, audience

manipulation, diction, dramatic structure (that is, "fictional"

problems of craft) are not merely coincidental in the private writing

but, indeed, characterize the nature of her diaries. These

manipulations of character, however, are not the same ploys used by

those traditional autobiographers (Henry Adams, for example) William

L. Howarth ("Some Principles of Autobiography") labels "orators,"

writers whose primary business in writing their own lives is to

instruct. Lindbergh, even in her own character-making, is not "a

pastoral figure, closely attentive to his listening flock, speaking

aloud for the benefit of others."! Again, because the context of

the journal/diary assumes no audience beyond its own writer's eyes,

the creation and manipulation of character in this form is less

"artifice" than exercise, experiment, or play perhaps. It is

important, too, to note the distinction between Lindbergh's work and

that of other autobiographical writers of whatever form, whose lives and materials are inextricably bound up in "history making." Francis

Russell Hart ("History Talking to Itself: Public Personality in

Recent Memoirs") sees in the publication of private writing a 162

necessity .for transformation of the writer's character: "Going public

or being a public person requires choosing a collective identity to

which one can 'belong,' and then trying to cope with the sense of

self-alienation which that 'belonging' engenders."2 But

Lindbergh's diaries, published so many years after the fact and in

such a moderately edited state, represent just the opposite case.

Lindbergh's work demonstrates a refusal on the part of the private

individual to adopt a "public" face either as a result of or for the

benefit of publication.

May Sarton's journals, on the other hand, are less story than

they are "study." For a writer already established with a reading

public for both poetry and fiction, the daily record of her private

life provided another form through which to continue and expand upon

a body of ideas as they grew out of immediate daily experience. Her

great theme of solitude became not only a literary device, but a

"living" device as well. In Sarton, we have the best example of

writing serving as a quite literal extension of daily living rather

than merely a representation or consequence of it. In one way,

Sarton's journals would seem especially fitting as examples of what

Northrop Frye has explained as the "rhetoric of non-literary prose";

that is, writing which ultimately primarily appeals "to contemplation based predominantly on visual metaphors."3 The details of Sarton's daily experience had to be enlarged (given metaphorical proportion), 163

pondered and shaped around the theme of solitude and thereby given

meaning. But to characterize the published diary/journal as a

clear-cut form with assumed values and functions as a publishable

genre is difficult beyond generalities or beyond conclusions drawn

from examinations of separate works such as these.

What becomes marketable material can be easily guessed: event,

character, expose (particularly when the journal's writer is a

celebrity— or better yet, a dead celebrity lately rediscovered).

Imagine, for example, what the general reading public would make of a

Joan Crawford diary now that we've heard all about Mommie Dearest.

But simple inclusion does not mean such material merits study as

literary art. When does the diary/journal warrant critical

attention? When, despite events and characters, the private writing

reveals craft at its core, it attracts attention and works on a level

apart from story alone. When, despite problems of craft, the private

life reveals a certain subtlety of thought, an attention to mind and

idea as much as to record or event, private writing passes beyond

interest in personality alone. May Sarton's great theme of solitude

forms the basis of an entire philosophy of life and art that grows as much from the act of writing (that is, the journal as journal itself) as it does through the actual events of Sarton's days. With both examples in this study, literary art is produced apart from personal history. 164

Private writing must be selective in its material but should also speak with a certain candor. Anne Lindbergh, stifled for years by a fear of publicity, could use her diary as a depository for thoughts she could not risk letting go beyond the confines of her diaries' pages. For Lindbergh, the act of writing became nearly as important as the material itself. What Paul de Man has suggested of the general nature of autobiographers ("Autobiography as

De-facement"), is certainly true in Lindbergh's case: "We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium?"^ Lindbergh's writing forced an identity crisis for the woman who could never really decide how much of an artist she was and, in any case, what that role meant in relation to all her other responsibilities as wife and mother. But however sheltered such writing appears to be for the writer, the reader of the published text of the journal/diary reads an odd document, neither private nor public. William L. Howarth reminds us that "When a writer does not fully understand his purpose, he can only portray himself as a serial image; his reader has to provide the missing continuity."5 The published diary/journal is likely to demand such effort, especially when one is reading across several volumes of a 165

single writer's work. The demands of the journal/diary's chronology impose some degree of continuity upon the writer's material, but the reader may still be faced, as in Lindbergh's case, with a self-portrait (or self-portraits) drawn as much by history as by the material of the journal/diary alone.

Publication creates a special context that should always raise critical questions about the edited or censored state of the material, as well as questions about the writer's perceived purposes for publishing, if the writer herself is in control of publication.

When those intentions cannot be discerned from the text itself or through an editor's annotations, the reader must be very careful to consider the form exactly as Ginsberg suggested— as a form in flux.

As a type of autobiographer, the journal/diarist is, as Barnett J.

Mandel has suggested, "...that consciousness which thinks about itself— its present, past, and future."6 it is neither the form of absolute freedom and truth for every writer, nor the lesser art of the novelist or poet's craft, as Mandel discerns.

By splitting literature into fiction and non-fiction—

an illusion passing itself off as self-evident reality—

we have created fiction at the heart of literary activity,

relegating autobiography and other forms of writing to

merely "something else." But there is nothing inherent

in the forms themselves requiring such a r a n k i n g . 7 166

The writer of published private writing may view that publication as

a kind of compromise— if not a compromise of privacy (as with

Lindbergh), then as an artistic compromise when the writer has already established herself in other genres (the partial dilemma for

Sarton).

Readers go to journals and diaries partly out of simple curiosity about other people's lives or because of a more subtly unconscious identification with another individual's stuggle to make sense of life. Mandel suggests that such writing "is one of the strategies human beings have developed to make life matter."**

One might add that reading such writing is the same thing. Howarth notes the general appeal of autobiography as its "inclusive thematic base, since its writers constantly grapple with issues— love, memory, death— that appeal to a broad reading public."9 But an even greater attraction to the form as literary art comes, I would suggest, from the general celebration of life that the daily record preserves by design. Each new journal entry must attest to at least one thing: the writer survives another day. Martha Rank Lifson describes autobiographers as creators, "makers of the world and of themselves." Such writers "create coherent stories, delineated portraits of others, descriptions of cities and ponds, analyses of feelings, and all of these stand despite disclaimers, doubts, even the questioning of one's faulty memory."10 The great value of \

167

studying published private writing as literary art is ultimately,

perhaps, as an anonymous reviewer summed up the experience of reading

May Sarton1s journals:

It would be nice to think that years of experience

bring some wisdom in dealing with problems of love,

work and money. Miss Sarton offers no comfort on

this score, but there is something wonderfully en­

couraging about the spectacle of passions that en­

dure as long as one has a mind and heart and will.H

For the reader and scholar of private writing, the recognition of

artistic achievement in that form doubles the value of spectacle and

teaches us what depths of perception and revelation we are capable of

every day if we would pay attention to our lives as the Lindberghs

and Sartons do. NOTES: Chapter 1

1Irving Howe, rev. of Native Realm: A Search for Self- Definition, by Czeslaw Milosz, NYTBR, 1 Feb, 1981, p.3.

^Donald Hall, rev. of Some Americans: A Personal Record, by Charles Tomlinson, NYTBR, 1 March, 1981, p.4.

3paul Zweig, rev. of A Romantic Education, by Patricia Hampl, NYTBR, 26 April, 1981.

^Barett J. Mandel, "Full of Life Now" in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1980), p.51.

^Francis Russell Hart, "History Talking to Itself: Public Personality in Recent Memoir," New Literary History, 11 (1979), p.195. *

^Louise Bogan, Journey Around My Room, ed. Ruth Limmer (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p.91.

7Anne Olivier Bell, introd. to The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. II (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980), p.vni.

8j. Lyndon Shanley, The Making of Walden (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1957), p.5.

^Shanley, p.6.

l%alph Waldo Emerson, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909), p.v.

H-Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman, George P. Clark, Alfred R. Ferguson and Merell R. Davis (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1960), p.xiii.

168 169

12cilraan et al., p.xiii.

13Martha Rank Lifson, "The Myth of the Fall: A Description of Autobiography," Genre, 12 (1979), p.56.

l^Lifson, p.61.

15 William L. Howarth, "Some Principles of Autobiography," in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1980), p.100.

1^ Ira Progoff, At a Journal Workshop (New York: Dialogue House, 1975) and The Practise of Process Meditation (New York: Dialogue House, 1980).

l^Process Meditation, p.19.

l^Anthony Sampson, rev. of The Blackbench Diaries of Richard Crossman, by Richard Crossman, NYTBR, 16 June, 1981, p.4.

l^Allen Ginsberg, "The Journal as Genre," Special Session, MLA Convention, Houston, 28 Dec., 1980.

20Lifson, p.67. NOTES: Chapter 2

Ijean Stafford, rev. of Bring Me a Unicorn by Anne Morrow Lidbergh, Book World, 20 Feb, 1972, p.13.

^Seldon Rodman, rev. of War Within and Without by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, National Review, 17 Oct, 1980, p.1274.

3A11 references to primary texts by Lindbergh appear within the body of the chapter abbreviated as follows: Unicorn (Vol I), Gold (Vol II), Rooms (Vol III), Flower (Vol IV), War (Vol V). Only subsequent secondary sources are cited as end notes following.

^William L. Howarth, "Some Principles of Autobiography," in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1980), p.86.

3John Chamberlain, rev. of Bring Me a Unicorn by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, National Review, 12 May, 1972, p.528.

^Stephen Spender, "Confessions and Autobiography," in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1980), p.116.

?Anne Fremantle, rev. of Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, America, 17 March, 1973, p.247.

^Margot Hentoff, rev. of Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, NY Rev of Books, 3 April, 1973, p.14.

9Alfred Kazin, rev. of Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, NYTBR, 4 March, 1973, p.l.

l^Anne Fremantle, rev. of Locked Rooms and Open Doors, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, America, 20 April, 1974, p.247.

^-Patricia S. Coyne, rev. of Locked Rooms and Open Doors, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, National Review, 21 June, 1974, p.712.

12coyne, p.712.

170 NOTES: Chapter 3

l-Letter recieved from May Sarton, 8 Feb, 1981.

^All references to primary texts by Sarton appear within the body of the chapter abbreviated as follows: Phoenix, Plant Dreaming, Journal, House, Recovering. Only subsequent secondary sources are cited as end notes following.

%ev. of Journal of a Solitude, by May Sarton, Publisher1s Weekly, 19 Feb, 1973, p.77.

^Phyllis Meras, rev. of Journal of a Solitude, by May Sarton, NYTBR, 13 May, 1973, p. 14.

^Robert F. Sayre, "Autobiography and America," in Autobiography; Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1980), p.148.

6 Jean Detre, rev. of The House by the Sea by May Sarton, MS, January, 1980, p.34.

?M. F. Hershman, rev. of Recovering, by May Sarton, Ms., Dec, 1980, p.42.

171 NOTES: Conclusion

iWilliam L. Howarth, "Some Principles of Autobiography," in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1980), p.95.

2Francis Russell Hart, "History Talking to Itself: Public Personality in Recent Memoirs," New Literary History, 11 (1979), p.209.

^Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1957), p.327.

^Paul de Mann, "Autobiography as De-facement," Modern Language Notes, 94 (1979), p.120.

^Howarth, p.110.

^Barnett J. Mandel, "Full of Life Now," in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1980), p.49.

7Mandel, p.55.

%andel, p.64.

9Mandel, p.87.

lOMartha Rank Lifson, "The Myth of the Fall: A Description of Autobiography," Genre, 12 (1979), p.57.

llRev. of Recovering, by May Sarton, NYTBR, 21 Dec, 1980, p. 12.

172 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bell, Anne Olivier, introd. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol II. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980.

Bogan, Louise. Journey Around My Room. Ed. by Ruth Liramer. New York: Penguin Books, 1981.

Chamberlain, John. Rev. of Bring Me a_ Unicorn by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. America, 17 March, 1973, 528.

Cornelisen, Ann. Rev. of Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier by Joanna L. Stratton. NYTBR, 8 March, 1981, 7.

Coyne, Patricia S. Rev. of Locked Rooms and Open Doors by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. National Rev, 21 June, 1974, 712. de Man, Paul. "Autobiography as Defacement." Modern Language Notes 94: 919-930, 1979

Detre, Jean. Rev. of The House by the Sea by May Sarton. Ms., January, 1980, 34.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Edward Waldo Etaerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. Boston: Houghton Miflin Company, 1909.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. William H. Gilman, George P. Clark, Alfred R. Ferguson and Merrell R. Davis. Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1960.

Emerson, Ken. Rev. of Flora Tristan1s London Journal, 1840. Trans, by Dennis Palmer and Giselle Pincetl. NYTBR, 15 Feb, 1981, 13.

Fremantle, Anne. Rev. of Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. America, 17 March, 1973, 247.

Fremantle, Anne. Rev. of Locked Rooms and Open Doors by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. America, 20 April, 1974, 311.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1957.

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Ginsbergb, Allen. "The Journal as Genre." Special Session, MLA Convention Houston, 28 Dec, 1980.

Hall, Donald. Rev. of Some Americans: A Personal Record by Charles Tomlinson. NYTBR, 1 March, 1981, 4.

Hart, Francis Russell. "History Talking to Itself: Public Personality in Recent Memoirs." New Literary History 11: 193-210, 1979.

Hentoff, Margot. Rev. of Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. NY Rev Books, 3 April, 1973, 14.

Hershman, M.F. Rev. of Recovering by May Sarton. Ms., Dec, 1980, 42.

Howarth, William L. "Some Principles of Autobiography." In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1980.

Howe, Irving. Rev. of Native Realism: A Search for Self-Definition by Czeslaw Milosz. NYTBR, 1 Feb, 1981, 3. „

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Lindbergh, Anne Morrow. War Within and Without (1939-1944). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. 175

Mandel, Barret J. "Full of Life Now." In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1980.

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Zweig, Paul. Rev. of A Romantic Education by Patricia Hampl. NYTBR 26 April, 1981, 5. SECONDARY SOURCES

The following references have contributed to my understanding of the current state of journal/diary writing as a literary form and and, in particular, the works of Anne Morrow Lindbergh and May Sarton.

"Anne Lindbergh." 60 Minutes. Produced by Joseph Wershba. Correspondent: Mike Wallace. CBS, 20 April, 1980.

Baker, A.T. Rev. of Locked Rooms and Open Doors by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Time 11 March, 1974, 101.

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Lindbergh, Charles A. Autobiography of Values. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

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