When May Sarton began writing her Journal of a Solitude she was, at 58, a prolific and popular writer of poems and novels who felt she had been underappreciated by the critics. ‘I have created twenty-four “children” and every one has been strangled by lack of serious critical attention,’ she wrote. ‘I am way outside somewhere in the wilderness… I would be crazy if I didn’t believe that I deserve better.’ 

That year, however, Sarton was in luck. Carolyn Heilbrun, a professor of English and feminist scholar from Columbia University, agreed with her. Heilbrun had been impressed by one of Sarton’s recent publications, a memoir that recounted the tale of buying and renovating her house at Nelson in order to live ‘alone for good’ in peaceful and productive solitude. In Plant Dreaming Deep, Sarton portrayed this move as an adventure in autonomy. Released from the demands of other people, she was free to weave the deeper textures of finding herself and her artistic purpose into a glorification of the everyday. It won a legion of fans and had, Heilbrun wrote, ‘achieved something close to a new form for female writing: she transformed the genre even as she reported a new female experience.’

Heilbrun came to stay at Nelson, thrilling Sarton to her core, and then delivered what felt like a death sentence. Sarton wrote in her diary, ‘Carol…feels that what I have done best – and what she thinks altogether new in my work – is to talk about solitude. I cried bitterly last night, as if a prison door were closing.’ 

This was May Sarton’s dilemma: she craved solitude and hated it in equal measure. Carolyn Heilbrun could never have guessed. May’s reasons for living alone in the house at Nelson were not fully explained in her memoir which was, in fact, deceptive in many ways. Sarton’s biographer, Margot Peters states pithily that ‘her self-absorption, radical mood swings and violent temper made her impossible to live with.’  Solitude left May to mull over her relationships to others and forced her to feel the distressing emotions she would rather act out. Now, writing about the experience of solitude would oblige her to confront the parts of herself she preferred not to see. 

‘You keep the Hell out of your work,’ the poet, Louise Bogan wrote to May, a charge that annoyed her intensely, as all criticism did, but it was notable in her writing that her destructive impulses were entirely absent. ‘A person who cannot face the truth of her own behaviour cannot write honestly about it,’ Peters wrote damningly. ‘This violently conflicted woman avoided serious conflict in her writing.’

For Sarton, writing was the place where she made everything lovely again. It was the place where meaning and comfort took the form of transcendence or myth-making, both of which she felt were essential to the creation of literature. She wrote that: ‘we have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief, or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe or work can – if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough – be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive.’ Poetry in particular, Sarton claimed, was ‘a kind of dialogue between me and God’ and as such ‘must present resolution rather than conflict.’ These sentiments were noble and beautiful – and a handy cover for her reluctance to write honestly about the things she did, or acknowledge the damage she caused.

Yet at this point, May herself was beginning to wonder whether her inclination to paper over the cracks was unhelpful. Plant Dreaming Deep had created, in her opinion, ‘a false image’ of its author. The image, she wrote, was of ‘the wise old party who is “above it all”.’ Heilbrun, May claimed, had been disappointed when she visited ‘not to find this mythical person, but to find instead a far more vulnerable, involved and unfinished person than she had imagined.’ Ever one to deduce insult where none was intended, Sarton believed Heilbrun was implying that she should have given up her fraught personal life and devoted herself to art. If this next book must, as Heilbrun insisted, face up to the issue of solitude in her life, then Sarton decided to use it to show the extent of her sensitivity and suffering, as a justification for, and an explanation of, the Hell she created elsewhere. 

This was a cunning variation on an old theme, another myth-making exercise. But the myth was going to be harder to create this time around. Solitude forced Sarton into unusual honesty, and this honesty presented her with an unusual opportunity, if she had the courage to embrace it. 

It might offer her a chance to heal a life that, in her lucid moments, May knew was out of control.

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May Sarton was born in 1912 in Belgium to parents whose focus was always elsewhere. George Sarton was a historian of science whose obsession with what was then niche research kept his family often on the brink of poverty. His wife, Mabel, was a talented artisan, designing furniture, making clothes, longing to devote herself to George, her own work and intense female friendships in that order. She suffered from poor health and struggled to care for May, who had a proclivity for violent tantrums and disobedience. The war turned them all into refugees, first in England where Mabel’s family remained (and proved reluctant to have them for any length of time) and then in America when George found congenial, if low-paid, academic work. From her earliest days, May was shipped around to relatives and friendly American families, and this affected her deeply. Wherever she went she would attach herself “like a limpet” to any caring figure, needy and yet prone to rage, as many deeply unsettled children are. Over time this anxious attachment settled into a grudge against her father and the financial hardship that she and her mother were made to endure.

May would draw the lines of her loyalty in black and white, becoming fiercely protective of her mother. But the situation was not so clear-cut, for Mabel played a complicated double game. She would complain about George to her child, sometimes excessively, but she didn’t always mean what she said. When May was a teenager, she told her that when George first found work in America and Mabel was living penniless with English relatives, he told her to ‘get rid of May’,  then a toddler, and come out to America to join him. This hurt May deeply, but it was not true. Mabel had, in fact, been the one to suggest leaving May behind. It was George who had told her that they could not ‘be completely happy without our sweet little May.’  At the age of 81, May Sarton was confronted with the actual letter from her father, but the old damage and cognitive dissonance were too much to overcome. ‘“He was acting, of course!”’, she declared, unable to believe the evidence, and too bewitched by her mother’s manipulations.

Mabel had plenty of complaints about George to relay to May, but when it came to her actions, her first and best loyalty was to her husband. She could – and did – manage without May for long periods of time, but she was never far from George if she could help it. What sense could this possibly have made to May? She was enmeshed in her parents’ complicated psychodramas, brought in as her mother’s knight errant and then left out in the cold, made to resent the man her mother steadfastly put first. It’s no surprise that May spent the rest of her life falling wildly in love without forming any proper attachments, seeking to bolster her low self-esteem with grandiose achievement.

School offered just such an arena of achievement for a quick-minded, pretty and energetic child. ‘May has been pure joy this year,’  declared one of her teachers’ reports from her first school in America. She was identified as having ‘a fine imagination and unusual power of expression’, and flourishing in the warmth of this admiration, May started to write both a journal and poetry, publishing her first poems aged 18. She became an emotionally potent and energetically intense young woman. One friend described her as: ‘A dragonfly – flashing, mercurial. A person who raged at life, a person alive to the nth power.’ 

The question was what to do with all that vitality. 

Initially, May tried to have a career on the stage, but when that failed to take hold and America sunk into the Great Depression, she persuaded her father to finance a string of trips to Paris. Her first break came in 1936, when she fell in with the literary set that included Julian Huxley, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf. In her memoirs she describes this time as a kind of creative vagabondage: ‘I did nothing wise or sensible. I simply lived in Paris. I wandered about, ardent and hungry, picking up whatever was accidentally brought to my attention, tasting it and then wandering on, casual and solitary.’ But a letter she wrote during that European trip to her new friend, the Russian critic, Kot, showed that whilst she might be dangerously casual, she was far from solitary: ‘On Friday night we all went dancing… I flirted with everyone – something I never do unless I am temporarily mad- Juliette said that I went around “lighting bonfires” and it is quite true- a sense of flowers falling on my head and that I must reach everyone’s heart- so I made quite a scene with Juliette […] My darling, I really have a daemon you know. And I realise that it is this… which is the one thing which might keep me from doing good work’. Peters writes that May’s ‘insistent energy was demonic.’ The old childhood urge to attach like a limpet found a predatory sexualised form in adulthood, as May sought the kind of emotional intimacy she craved, proving to herself and others, over and over again how irresistible she was. 

The bohemian morals of the Paris literati set a bad precedent, as she was seduced on that formative trip by Julian Huxley, who claimed he had an open marriage (‘Must I be made miserable so you may be happy?’ his wife, Juliette asked him). May only ever tolerated his attention for its networking potential. In fact, she had her eye on that miserable wife, Juliette who, after all, seemed fair game. The emotional intensity, the adrenalised fraughtness of it all, was both intoxicating and addictive. ‘I am being used to the top of my energies and bent, till I am utterly exhausted as it is wonderful,’ she wrote to a friend. ‘I am seeing so much that my eyes burn all the time and my mind bursts like a rocket.’  She was writing and rewriting a novel, producing sheaths of poetry, declaring in letters to friends her intention to be solitary and disciplined, and proving completely incapable of either. And this was where the complication of manic living arose. Although a part of May was aware that her love of romantic chaos might one day stand in the way of ‘doing good work’, in the moment, it felt immensely creative. 

Back home in America, the experiences of Paris crystallised into a particular dynamic. She fell in love with one of her old school teachers, Edith Forbes Kennedy, and promptly bombarded her with flowers, gifts and above all, poems. Thirty in sixty days. Edith, kind but heterosexual, cracked under the strain, became physically exhausted and was forced to raise some explicit barriers. May was caught up in the melodrama, declaring herself to be in ‘a nightmare of panic… and remorse, though on serious thought, I do not believe I was instrumental in wearing her out.’ When May felt so energised by the drama, so marvellously productive, how could it be true that the beloved felt wrung out by it? 

A pattern established itself. May fell violently in love, mostly with heterosexual women, whose defences were subjected to the battering ram of her personality. She bullied them into loving her, but once engaged in the relationship, May’s emotional volatility and extreme sensitivity came to the fore. There were great arguments followed by desperately written apologies by May, more love bombing, more rows, more unbearable scenes, until the love affair was a tattered, worn out thing, blistered and shredded by the heat of May’s affections. All the while novels and poetry and then memoir, poured from her pen. But the creative success she longed for did not quite come. Critical response was mixed. Her readership did not reach the levels she desired. ‘I have to keep reminding myself,’ May wrote to Juliette, when they were still speaking to one another, ‘tortured by ambition as I am, that all that really matters is the intensity of the life lived.’ 

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In her book The Creative Feminine and her Discontents, Juliet Miller writes that ‘for a woman to get in touch with her creativity it is crucial that she confronts the daimon of destruction and aggression.’ Women, Miller argues, can struggle to own their inner violence and negativity for a number of reasons. They might be afraid of displaying characteristics that they have never presented publicly before, or showing loved ones an incongruent inner self. They might prefer to  turn anger inwards and wound the self, believing that ‘this matters less in the scheme of things than bearing the unknown results of expressing their anger or forcefulness towards another.’ Or, confronted by so much brutality and aggression towards them in their daily reality, they might possess instead ‘a strong desire for a peaceful internal world.’ 

Virginia Woolf embodied Miller’s arguments neatly, writing in A Room of One’s Own that anger might ruin a woman’s creative acts: ‘She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely.’ Miller argues that this inability to accept anger turned outwards in the creative act may well have contributed to Woolf’s depression and suicide. But Miller’s concern is not just with rage as a necessary component of mental and emotional hygiene. In Jung’s philosophy, the archetype of creativity is the ‘daimon’ or energetic upspring of life force that brings something new into being at the cost of something else being destroyed. Some critics argue that this notion is ironically based on theories developed by Jung’s female protegee, Sabina Spielrein, whose seminal paper “Destruction as the cause of coming into being” was presented to the Vienna Society in 1912 and never fully acknowledged by either Freud or Jung. 

Miller points out that in this paper, Spielrein ‘attempted to break out of the politics of the day by rupturing the idea of relating as a fixed given for women.’ A courageous idea at the time, it’s one that still troubles women artists. Among the many patients she sees, Miller writes that it is almost exclusively women who are afraid to call themselves creative artists. This would confer a dangerous identity, ‘where they fear to be seen as mad or as disobeying every expectation of gender and society […] where they relate first to themselves rather than primarily to others.’ She works in particular with singers, an artform that has ‘the power to carry emotional states of both destruction and healing, because of its ability to stir up and move the emotions.’ These women confess to her how odd it can feel to move an audience to tears simply with the power of their voices. Miller writes that the ‘concept of both moving into and filling out and affecting space is an alien one for women, and runs counter to both historical and cultural ideas that women are the ones who make and contain the space and not the ones to use it.’ 

The culturally prescribed form of female relating involves women holding space for their loved ones and meeting their needs seamlessly and selflessly. But a different dynamic occurs between the creative woman and the world. The artist’s main relationship is with the watchful stranger, the audience or reader or viewer who is unknown and who may not be easily appeased. Rozsika Parker in her essay ‘Killing the Angel in the House’ grapples with Virginia Wolff’s idea of the obstructive angel who tries to ruin her creativity by insisting that she please her audience. Parker takes up the notion that aggression is required to stand firm against possible disapproval. ‘Whether we write, paint, garden or sew we never simply make a thing; rather we enter into a mixture of relationships with, for example, contemporary practices, with our own creative history, with materials, with colleagues and of course with imaginary audiences and internal figures.’ To be creative is to run the risk of outraging any or all of these interlocutors. It requires a certain aggressive strength to insist on the importance of one’s voice and the singular form of one’s art.

It’s clear that satisfying creativity requires the artist to safeguard authentic self expression. Aggression is necessary for breaking with past tropes and expectations, and to putting the artistic self first even when this entails rupture and disapproval. But I wonder whether speaking of rage and destruction also mistakes or mis-names the actions required of women? Sue Austin, therapist and author of Women’s Aggressive Fantasies argues that whilst rage needs to be welcomed, it also needs to be contained rather than immediately acted upon. This is, she says, ‘in order to prevent the ‘death of the “I” that wrestles with what it is to be me.’ It’s the delicate complexity and multiplicity of the self that needs to be honoured in both relationships and creativity. When aggressive impulses get out of hand, a scorched earth policy can destroy ambiguity, doubt, paradox, contradiction, all of which are essential to truthful and meaningful art.

What’s needed, then, is assertion, not aggression, self-protection not simply destruction, audacity not hostility. In other words, rage is only helpful to us when it has been emotionally processed. It’s the very act of channeling, harnessing, containing and processing powerful inner emotions that produces creativity of any kind. 

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Journal of a Solitude opens with startling honesty on Sarton’s part: ‘ For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision […] I live alone … for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use’. Continuing to strive for an honest assessment of her temper tantrums, she writes; ‘Those who know me well and love me have come to accept them as part of me; yet I know they are unacceptable. […] Sometimes I think the fits of rage are like a huge creative urge gone into reverse, something dammed up that spills over, not an accumulated frustration that must find a way out’. She wonders whether she is one of the people the French term soupe au lait, for their ability to boil over fast, in which case the tantrum is ‘a built-in safety valve against madness or illness.’ In conclusion, ‘The fierce tension in me, when it is properly channeled, creates the good tension for work. But when it is unbalanced I am destructive.’ 

Biographer Margot Peters views this explanation with some cynicism: ‘All her bad behaviour, May told herself, could be forgiven because she was a Poet.’ 

In this state of mind, however, Sarton quails at the prospect of solitude. On September 18th, she writes that ‘the value of solitude’ is its brutality: ‘there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within’ and so ‘one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.’ 

Margot Peters claims Sarton ‘was incapable of spending more than a few consecutive days in her own company’, and certainly not when the experience of it was so fraught. The journal records that September passes with Sarton seeing local friends, her cleaner, and even some German refugees she plucked off the road outside. They had come to Nelson to look at her house and maybe catch a glimpse of the novelist; they got a lot more than they bargained for. ‘Why did I tell them, nearly in tears, of my depression?’ Sarton wondered. ‘I had been writing all morning, was open from the inside out, unprepared for kindness and understanding.’ 

But things change. By October 11th, Sarton is complaining mildly about having ‘filled this weekend with friends, so that I would not go down into depression, not knowing that I should have turned the corner and be writing poems.’ Suddenly the fact of being a writer and living alone ‘means something’. ‘I have time to think. That is the great, the greatest luxury. I have time to be.’ Despite knowing the creative benefits that might come from quietude, Sarton falls victim to her extrovert nature, and by November, she is complaining to the journal that the constant interruption of social demands has unsettled her. ‘Poetry has gone. No lines jump into my mind, the taut thread gone slack.’ When the conditions are right, which is to say, when Sarton is in creative flow, people seem oppressive and demanding. After any time of being with them, ‘I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over any encounter and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.’ This is more than solitude as creative salvation. It is solitude as essential emotional processing, solitude as a way of saving Sarton from herself and her vexing demons of rage and insecurity.

 The demons inevitably return, though. Across the time of writing the journal, May was in a love affair with a younger college educator referred to simply as X (named Monica for the purposes of Peter’s biography), and as usual the course of that affair was tumultuous. Readers aren’t informed that Sarton’s initial depression and self-reproach in the journal was actually caused by a rift between them, but a reconciliation takes place and the relationship picks up its destructive course. The journal entry of January 12th describes ‘a frightful attack of temper, of nerves, of resentment against X, followed by the usual boomerang of acute anxiety.’ May attempts to normalise this as the kind of stress ‘any intimate relationship suffers’, though her description of it sounds extreme to the point of dissociation: ‘At such times the whole being, physical and psychic, is literally unstrung, in an uproar, and we have to wait for the uproar to die down to know what has happened.’ 

On January 27th, after a weekend away with Monica (did it go very badly or very well? Sarton does not say), she is experiencing ‘a panic of solitude.’ ‘I am bored with my life here at present. There is not enough nourishment in it.’ February 9th is a particularly contradictory entry in which Sarton is attempting to make solitude a virtue while hating it: ‘The way in which one handles this absolute aloneness is the way in which one grows up, is the psychic journey of everyman’, she writes. But then she ends up concluding: ‘I learn by being in relation to […] Close off response and what is left ? Being…enduring…waiting.’ 

What are we to make of Sarton’s slaloming description of solitude? How do we understand its effect on her life? Over the course of the year it’s possible to see that the discomfort of solitude comes from boredom, loneliness or regret over an argument, whilst its pleasures stem from creativity and some measure of serenity regained. But Sarton is incapable of altering her behaviour or her life in order to avoid one and enjoy the other. It’s equally difficult to ascertain the extent of honesty that solitude provokes in her. She shows us the reality of her temperament without pretending to greater coherence than she possesses, and for a woman as insecure as she was, it took courage to display such weaknesses. But solitude’s ability to give her space in which to regain her balance and peace of mind is often used by Sarton as a natural conduit towards self-forgiveness and ‘transcendence’, in other words, coming up with spurious justification for her furious outbursts. On May 6th, after a visit from her old lover, Judy Matlock, whose increasing dementia irritated her immensely, Sarton had this to say about arguments:

For weeks and months I have allowed myself to be persuaded into a frustrated pseudopeace to spare the other. But if there is deep love involved, there is deep responsibility toward it. We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be. The fear of pain and of causing pain is, no doubt, a sin.’

When May’s reproaches towards Judy included the fact that she was only going to receive a fifth of Judy’s savings in her will, rather than all as she had once thought, the claim that not bringing these issues up is a ‘sin’ seems questionable. Margot Peters points out that what hurt May was feeling that she was not important to Judy any more, and Sarton was notably generous to friends who pleased her. But Sarton’s expectations of others were always perilously high, her empathy often lacking. 

The idea that personal growth is something essential that she will fight for arises several times in the Journal and appears to be the existential counterpart to the transcendence she desired in her poetry. She would not forgive others for ‘not tolerating “the destructiveness implied in growth”,’ but the growth she demanded was essentially on their side, not on her own. There is one glaring dishonesty in the Journal that shows the extent of Sarton’s failure to address her own poor behaviour. Over its course, she was falling in love with her therapist, Marynia Farnham, who was heterosexual, vulnerable with mental deterioration and professionally out of bounds. Eventually, May persuaded her into bed, but the relationship never took off and would eventually end in accusations of slander and lawyers and an even worse car crash than usual. Carolyn Heilbrun did not think it necessary to include, and so it was left out. 

Journal of a Solitude therefore raises any number of questions about Sarton’s personal and professional relationship to the notions of performance and audience. The point of solitude is to remove both, so that the demands of external witnesses might be silenced and the inner voices more clearly heard. But writing about solitude for publication leaves an imaginary audience still in its seats. 

Sarton is at times concerned in her diary about the extent of her personal revelation. Commenting on November 17th that ‘One must believe that private dilemmas are, if deeply examined, universal, and so, if expressed, have a human value beyond the private’, she quickly goes on to say that having recently seen American publishers and her agent, ‘all that happens to a work of art when it becomes public fills me with woe and anxiety.’  This remark points not just to her fear of bad reviews, but to her growing popularity which she longed to safeguard.  By January 5th she was writing that if one considered oneself a ‘serious writer’, ‘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, and come out with personal truth.’ The reason the artist must be ‘willing to go naked,’ Sarton decides, is in order to help and instruct all fellow beings: ‘if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy,’ the result is, ‘the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist’. In her best moments, Sarton knew what she needed to do for her mental health and for her creativity. The problem, as always, was doing it. 

The Journal points towards the complexity of our self-appraisements, and to the multiplicity of performers and audiences inside an artist’s head. Margot Peters quotes May’s former lover, Monica, who came to the conclusion that May ‘was two people: the writer, sensitive, intuitive, wise; and the chaotic child, irrational, angry, demanding.’ This insight finds full expression in the Journal’s confessions, where the tempers and rages, the depression and hungers of the child are transformed by the wise artist into meaningful experiences which can ‘be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive’. Undeniably, this is a large part of the Journal’s appeal. Sarton presents her human failings candidly, and finds ways not just to forgive them, but to gild them with universal significance. There is undoubtedly much comfort to be had in this. 

May Sarton’s courage was rewarded critically and in terms of her popularity. Journal of a Solitude is considered by many to be her breakthrough book, even though it was her 27th publication. This was swiftly followed by a novel, As We Are Now, which also maintained Sarton’s new, darker perspective, recounting an old woman’s testimony from a much-hated nursing home. It was published to consistent heartfelt acclaim. But there the run of critically praiseworthy works ended. Sarton fell out with Carolyn Heilbrun after she spoke of  ‘a certain laxity of style, a tendency to seize on the first metaphor to hand, rather than search out the one, perfect phrase’ in the introduction to a reissue of one of her novels. Sarton invited Heilbrun to dinner, and a scene ensued in which May attacked Heilbrun’s short hair (‘Everybody thinks you’re a lesbian’) and her Jewish ancestry. Heilbrun got up and left. May never really regretted the ones that got away, and after all, she was a success now.

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In 1979, four days of interviews were turned into a short documentary film about May Sarton, and its transcript was published under the title May Sarton; A Self-Portrait. Speaking six years after Journal of a Solitude, it is fascinating to see what remains of its influence on its creator. Sarton speaks of having become ‘enamoured of solitude. That’s my last, great love.’ She went on to qualify her statement, adding that ‘it’s hard to handle, to not get unbalanced and not let depression get hold of you. Everything becomes more intense, you see, which is partly why it’s so marvellous. There’s nothing to break the intensity.’ 

So solitude had turned into the relationship Sarton always wanted, one in which she could live under her own unfaltering, attentive, forgiving gaze and in the act of creativity she loved. Some things, though, hadn’t changed. ‘I still lack critical attention,’ Sarton complains, citing ‘the very depressing and discouraging lack of recognition’ for her work and also the failure of critics to give her credit for ‘being intelligent as well as sensitive.’ But if Journal of a Solitude did not bring the recognition she craved, it did consolidate her creative process and show her what she needed to do to survive her own volatility: ‘The form in my life is to keep my center strong and not dispersed. That’s what it’s all about.’ And yet… with Sarton, is anything ever so simple or wholly believable? ‘We have to make myths of our lives or we wouldn’t be able to sustain them,’ she states, adding with reference to her dark side, ‘I think this is partly how one handles the monster.’