I discovered May Sarton (1912-1995) on the shelves of the local women’s bookstore. You know I covet “sets” and, even though her books were not properly so, there was consistency in their Norton editions: the tidy little pocketbook novels with a splash of colour in a design at the bottom of their white covers, the trade paperback journals with her name more prominent than the title, in (mostly) matching font.

Together they filled nearly an entire shelf in the bookstore’s second room (the “small room” one could say), where most of the non-fiction resided, including the poetry. There was an occasional outlier hardcover, too—a biography, a collection of poetry, or a novella: that spelled timely, important…expensive. But there was more than one paperback copy of Journal of a Solitude, so that’s where I began.

Last year, I plucked her reflections At Eighty-Two from my own collection in an evening when I’d misplaced the book I’d planned to read, and I enjoyed it so much that I’d resolved to reread her deliberately this year; when Rebecca (Bookish Beck) mentioned she was reading The Single Hound for July 16th to mark Sarton’s passing, I thought I would reread the first of Sarton’s non-fiction but, then, I couldn’t resist Rebecca’s selected novel (which she’s posted about today as well).

The Single Hound was just the kind of read I was craving, and it felt so very Sartony. Even though—atypically—I actually prefer her non-fiction to her fiction, this debut novel contains a glimmer of everything that I recall drawing me into her work years ago.

It opens with a simple passage about nature; almost immediately, there’s a cat (Pascal); an unabashed love of literature and letters (readers and writers); an almost fairy-tale like focus on small pleasures (teatime); a reverence for silence and solitude; and profound connections between people, forged through a shared recognition of kinship.

More specifically, we meet three women—the Little Owls— who have aged while sharing a home in Belgium. One of the women is a poet and a young man in England, feeling lonely one evening, discovers her work (published under a male pseudonym long ago) and senses such a strong connection to the author, that he travels to meet him (errrr, her).

Here’s Doro: “In the blue room upstairs there were cupboards full of notebooks written and rewritten, the barriers of imagination without which she sometimes thought she would not know where to find succor. And she found herself turning to them more and more, and away from the world of war….”

Annette “…put on her woolen bed socks and sighed with pleasure at slipping into bed. With all the energy and violence of her actions of the day she now was still. She fell into sleep like a stone into deep water, untroubled, unresisting, with the pleasant always recurring image of the forests of the Ardennes where she had been a child coming and floating behind her eyelids just before she slipped off to sleep.”

Claire, “…the beauty—pigeon-white curly hair, brilliant blue eyes, now always ringed in shadow, delicate hands with a wedding ring on. She is all charm. People say of her, ‘She must have been a great flirt.’ She loves bonbons, but is not allowed them any more; and silks that rustle, and bows, and flowers on her dresses, but she cannot afford them.”

And Mark: “But what made Al pack up for Spain while he shut himself in an old house to write a long poem in Spenserian stanzas? What made one thing possible and another not?”

And Doro and Mark, writer and reader (soon, writer): “They sat and looked out into the garden. When one finally arrives at the end of a long journey there is nothing to say. There is everything to say and everything can wait. Doro felt an overwhelming sense of peace and gratitude, that at last and in her lifetime her poems had reached the person for whom they were written.”

For me, there is a sense that everything is slightly “too much” in Sarton’s fiction and poetry. Her intensity saturating every image until it’s a little overexposed.

Consider Doro’s “barriers of imagination” and succor: such elevated expression. Annette “unresisting” and “recurring” and “coming and floating”: more poetry than prose. Claire’s nearly comical contrast of “silks that rustle” and eyes “ringed with sorrow”. And Mark, who can’t simply write verses—only Spenserian stanzas.

As a reader, this preoccupies me a little. It consigns me to the position of witness when she tells me a story or displays a scene, so I’m never quite feeling as engaged as her characters feel.

And, yet, I forgive all of this, and even feel myself straining a little to make a space for her generosity. To try to see things in these bold hues myself, as she’s described them.

Because I also think this very quality is what keeps her observations so sharp and clear in her non-fiction, elsewhere. This is the other side of that coin, that shines so brightly and so naturally.

I’m reminded of George Saunders saying, in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain:

“I like what I like, and you like what you like, and art is the place where liking what we like, over and over, is not only allowed but is the essential skill. How emphatically can you like what you like? How long are you willing to work on something, to ensure that every bit of it gets infused with some trace of your radical preference?”

Sarton infuses every bit of her fiction with her “radical preference”, she is “emphatically” herself on every page.