Encore

A Journal of the Eightieth Year

May Sarton

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781504017954
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The bestselling author and newly minted octogenarian "demonstrates that old age can be a vibrant and liberating experience... fearless and triumphant" ( Publishers Weekly ). On the second day of her 80th year, May Sarton began a new journal. She wrote it because she wanted "to go on a little while longer;" to discover "what is really happening to me." This triumphant sequel to Endgame —Sarton's journal of her 79th year—is filled with the comforting minutiae of daily life, from gardening to planning dinners and floral arrangements to answering fan mail. The wonderful thing about getting older, Sarton writes, is "the freedom to be absurd, the freedom to forget things... the freedom to be eccentric." Her other octogenarian pleasures include preparing for holidays and weddings, lunches with old friends and new admirers, the heady delight of critical recognition, and the rebirth of her lyric voice as she creates new poems. Yet Sarton knows that age can also bring pain and ill health, as well as a deepening awareness of the "perilousness of life on all sides, knowing that at any moment something frightful may happen."

Saturday, June 1

Just imagine! June already, but another of these rather dour, chilly, overcast mornings. We have had one after another, and it is depressing. There is no incentive to go out and pick flowers. But the azaleas have never done better.

This weekend I have no guests, no one to look after me. I decided I wanted two weekends before Susan comes when I would be a completely free agent. I see very well how it works both ways. The dear people who come to help me, Joan, Nadine, Eleanor Perkins, have helped stabilize my depressed moods. These last two weeks have been hard from the point of view of pain. The very fact that someone is coming makes me pull myself together, get up, get the tray ready, and then I have the luxury of going back to bed and having my breakfast brought to me. But on the other hand, this morning I was grateful not to have to hurry to get up, to have to get ready for anyone. It is now nearly half past eight and I am still in bed although I have had my breakfast and carried it up. The cat came in at a reasonable hour—I think it was at about eleven last night—so I had a fairly good night’s sleep for a change. Of course he goes wild when there is a full moon as there was two nights ago.

I think I am about a half an inch better. Dr. Khanjani is convincing when she insists that two months has not been long enough to undo the work of twenty years or more and get rid of all the accumulated poison. So I must just “bear and grin it” as my father said when he was in terrible pain with an attack of gallstones. I was called at two in the morning by his wonderful maid who lived in; I dashed over, and there he was in bed in excruciating pain. Even then—and I did admire him—he could joke, and said, “I must just bear and grin it!”

Fans are so kind and think of me so generously, but yesterday, late in the day, around five, after my rather grueling session with Dr. Khanjani, UPS delivered over twenty pounds of Bing cherries from a California fan who has been most generous before. But it is not kind to send such a weight to somebody as frail as I am—this ton of heavenly cherries sits right at the door and now I have to call five or ten people and tell them to come and take some because I am allowed only stewed fruit and no sugar; I have to forgo the pleasure of these magnificent cherries. This is a day when I have a lot to do, as I must get the mail and do some errands, and, hopefully, write a few notes.

Tuesday, June 4

We had a good rain all night. Of course I had watered in the afternoon, dragging the hoses around. Today I do not have to worry. I had planned to water all around the side of the fence. I can see from my window that the double yellow tree peony is out. It is a little bit later than the white and the wonderful pinkish orange and gray which is the most original and beautiful of them all, except the white, God-like one.

Although I had things to do upstairs, am not feeling well, and there is not much to pick now, yesterday I did go out for about a half hour of pure bliss. I find I have energy in the garden that I cannot summon for anything else. I tied up some of the daffodil leaves which had been sprawling and getting in the way of other plants trying to come through. I staked two white peonies that would have been beaten down by the rain last night if I had not done it. The peonies are not doing well. I think I must plant some new ones and certainly more iris. I have ordered an iris catalog and that will be fun, especially if I can get the intermediate-height irises which are much more useful in the perennial border than the tall ones. I not only did a little gardening, I made a bunch—not a total success, but it was great fun—with some of the strange allium that are covered with prickly points. They are lavender and greenish, not a solid mound like the giant ones that are magnificent this year. These smaller ones have very original designs, so to speak, and with a dark purple iris which has just come out, and some double purple perennial geraniums, made an interesting bunch which I loved making.

Pierrot came in earlier last night so I was able to get quite a long sleep. But the trouble is that I am anxious and badgered by having to get the manuscript off to Norton so soon.

Yesterday I made a stupid mistake. I had thought that my appointment with Dr. Khanjani was at ten-thirty. When I got there she was away and her car was away. But thank goodness she came and very kindly gave me a treatment. The only trouble is I missed the whole morning’s work and now I have to go again Thursday at ten-thirty. Tomorrow I have a permanent wave. It is a ridiculously busy life considering that I do nothing, nothing whatever.

As for the journal, I have many doubts about it but we shall have to see how Eric Swenson at Norton and Tim Seldes, my agent, feel. When it is off my hands it will be much easier to do this journal and it will be much easier to live my life, because it was like a third leg all the time, having to work at that journal as well. A lot of letters that I want to answer are still waiting.

Nadine told me today that she had been reading At Seventy to her patient who died yesterday. The reading had meant a great deal, so that when she fell asleep, the patient would say, “Just let me hold the book.” This, I must admit, touched me deeply.

Wednesday, June 5

We are having cold, rainy, dismal weather although the rain was needed. I think the garden is happy although tossed around by a cruel northeast wind.

I remember now, because I have been correcting the journal, that last spring was much worse. Last May it rained almost every day and was very cold. So we have been lucky on the whole.

Yesterday, at about eleven in the morning, Eloise Armen, who has been managing and taking care of Eva LeGallienne’s life for the last twenty years or more, called me to say that LeGallienne had died in the night—a gentle death. She had called the dear night nurse because she thought she wanted to go to the bathroom but then decided she didn’t. I think from what Eloise said that back in her bed she simply drifted off and never woke up again. A beautifully gentle death for that great woman. She had been not quite “all there” for years. She was ninety-two, but for a long time still made the rounds of the bird feeders, still fed about nine raccoons every night with all kinds of goodies, and, the last time I was there, two skunks!

For six years of my life, from the time I joined the Civic Repertory Theatre as an apprentice when I was eighteen until my own little company failed in the middle of the depression, Eva LeGallienne was the most powerful influence in my life. She taught me an enormous amount and was the magnetic pivot of everything I thought and did. She was an extraordinary woman. In the years of the Civic Repertory when I was an apprentice, which meant that I did walk-ons and acted in student plays—later I was head of the Apprentice Group—I spent almost every evening from a little before eight until the curtain went up in LeGallienne’s dressing room. We talked about books and life in general. She was a marvelous friend. From the beginning she guessed, I think, that I was a writer rather than an actress, although I was made a member of the First Studio, a group selected from the Apprentice Group to go on with the company. I also saw her in Westport after the Civic Repertory failed and through all the years until very recently when she was not seeing people because she did not recognize them.

She was a great gardener and we loved to talk about that. I remember I gave her a Queen of Denmark pale pink rose that turned into a great enormous bush that climbed up half the house in Weston where she lived. Then she made a wild garden of a great part of her place, which has been willed to the town as a sanctuary. I wonder what will happen to the house itself and all the memories there: the marvelous library which she had amassed through all her roles? For instance, there are a great number of books on Queen Elizabeth, a great number of books on Ibsen, on Chekhov, and biographies of the actresses she most admired, Eleanora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt.

It was in many ways an extraordinarily fulfilled life. She had dreamed, when she was a child in Paris and spoke perfect French, of doing all the roles that she adored seeing Sarah Bernhardt perform. As a matter of fact she did play most of them, including Camille, which was a great success at the Civic, and L’Aiglon, which she did on Broadway and I think missed out because of its being a translation. It really cannot be translated into English. It is too melodramatic, too theatrical. Of course she looked wonderful as that glamorous young man. She even played Hamlet, as Sarah Bernhardt did. I wish I could have seen it. She did that at the Dennis Playhouse on the Cape. Of the roles that I think of her as greatest in, the first is Masha in The Three Sisters, a role where there are very few words but she is on stage most of the time, suffering, thinking, and being aware. To project thought was one of the ways by which Eva LeGallienne was able to communicate on stage. I have never seen an actress who did it so supremely well. In Ibsen’s The Master Builder she held a pause for almost a minute. This is unheard of in the theater. It was in the second act, I think, when the master builder has just treated a rival, a young architect, very badly. LeGallienne was silent for an extremely long time before she said, “That was a very ugly thing to do.”

I had the great good luck, the terror, and the fun of being her understudy for a week both in The Cherry Orchard as Varya and in Alice in Wonderland as the White Queen. Nothing could be more exciting than a role in which you get a laugh at the end of every sentence. The White Queen has extremely good lines, including the famous “Jam yesterday, and jam tomorrow, but never jam today!” It was a great event for me—that roar of laughter coming at me and also getting through the role of Varya in The Cherry Orchard with only one brief rehearsal. I had been the understudy but it never occurred to me that LeGallienne would ever be ill. So it came as a great surprise. I was in the country—a two-hour drive from New York—relearning the lines and trying to remember exactly what she did. So terror played its part. Alla Nazimova was playing Madame Ranevsky. At the end she said, “You did very well, dear, but you looked too happy.” I thought that was wonderful!

Then LeGallienne—although she did not approve of my founding a company at my young age, knowing that I was not ready—supported me in every way that she could. The reason I founded the Apprentice Theatre when the Civic Repertory Theatre failed was not as arrogant as it might seem. I did it to try to keep a few of the apprentices together. It was the middle of the depression and they would have had little luck on Broadway. I decided to give rehearsal performances, had big black boxes built that could be moved around as scenery, and chose ten modern European plays which had not been seen over here. Those in French were translated by me. Eleanor Flexner and Kappo Phelan were directors. I had seen the danger at the Civic of the one woman who ran everything and was never herself directed. The New School for Social Research lent their tiny theater and we were announced as a course in modern European theater. Because we had no scenery and wore no makeup or costumes, the critics were impressed and we got some good notices. Brooks Atkinson, for one, was friendly.

Eva LeGallienne was most supportive. There are wonderful letters from her to me in the Berg Collection. I consider her as one of the greatest friends I have ever had and certainly one of the great influences. I wonder why she was never a muse. I did not write poems for Eva LeGallienne and I think that was because we were very much alike. So she told me more than once to explain to us both why we were never lovers!

The tragedy was that after LeGallienne was fifty, after the Civic Repertory Theatre closed, and she and Margaret Webster founded the National Repertory Theatre, she never got back what she had had as the founder and director of the Civic and as the very great actress that she had been there. Parts did not materialize and in the last years there were very few. So from the time she was fifty or sixty until she was in her eighties she was not used. To see this extraordinary talent wasted was cruel. But there she proved what a great woman she was for she was never idle; she gardened, she wrote books, she translated Ibsen and Chekhov, she saw her friends, and altogether had a rich life—including the friendship of many raccoons.

Thursday, June 6

After gloomy, rainy, cold weather for forty-eight hours, the sun is out. Although it was only forty-five this morning, it is going to be a beautiful day.

I have been thinking a great deal about Eva LeGallienne ever since I heard that she had died two days ago. What an extraordinary friendship ours was! Here I was, eighteen years old, an absolute innocent, just graduated from high school, and I found myself an apprentice there in that marvelous theater, watching rehearsals, able to see what a great director Eva LeGallienne was. Also she did all the lighting. She was Renaissance woman, spending a whole afternoon, sometimes longer, working with the great electrician we had at the Civic. Sometimes the lighting was extremely important. For instance, her Romeo and Juliet, for which she had designed semi-abstract sets, required very special lighting. This she was able to achieve.

But what was so amazing was her taking me in as a friend. I think it was for various reasons. One is, of course, that her father was the poet Richard LeGallienne who, when she was a child, married a novelist, and all the literati of nineteenth-century England at that time came to the house. So the fact that I was a poet made her feel at home with me more than the fact that we were both European in background. LeGallienne began her life in Paris, because when her mother, who was Danish, separated from Richard LeGallienne, she took Eva and her sister Hesper to Paris where Eva studied drama and where she perfected her French. Sometimes, as I grew to know her better over the years, we talked in French, especially over the telephone. I miss her voice.

She was and remained a nineteenth-century person, extremely conservative. The only battles we fought intellectually were over politics. She hated Roosevelt! Partly this was so because she disapproved of the WPA. She disapproved of art being mixed with charity, and this with some justice. She had hoped to get money from the WPA for her Civic Repertory, but she would have had to employ unemployed actors. She felt that art must be based, and choices must be based, only on talent, not on need. Of course what she did not realize was how many good actors were out of work.

She was nineteenth century in her morals, in her ideas. For instance, she was furiously against psychoanalysis. When I told her that I was getting some therapy about a very unhappy love affair I was engaged in, she came to my room in the middle of the night (I was staying over the weekend there in Weston), knelt down on the floor by my bed, and launched into a tirade against my doing this, saying it was cowardice. Of course many people did not know what was involved in a good therapist–patient relationship, and mine at the time with Volta Hall was very good.

LeGallienne had a marvelous sense of humor. We laughed a lot when we talked together. She was incredibly brave, taking an enormous amount of defeat as the years went on, after the Civic had to close. But she was so inventive about her life, and so filled with life, that she always found things she wanted passionately to do and did them even outside the theater.

Monday, June 10

This extraordinary weather goes on. I have not been able to talk into this machine much lately because I have been in so much pain—again with that feeling of desperation. I do not know what to do with myself. But yesterday and today things are a little better. Today I had a normal movement which is such a grace that I really have to thank God!

Yesterday Jean Alice called from the Carmelite monastery. How splendid to hear her voice. In talking with her again I realize how much in touch they are, those religious orders, with what is going on in the world, how deeply they pay attention.

The journal of the seventy-ninth year is almost ready to go and it will be a relief when it is out of my hands.

I was amused by a rather characteristic day of mine as I thought about it. What fun it is to have money to spend! I signed the contract with a Japanese company that is doing a translation of Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing and will pay me fifteen hundred dollars through my English agent who handles all that. So with fifteen hundred dollars on the way I sent Pat Keen, my English actress friend who is having a dry spell as far as work goes, two hundred pounds. I felt so happy to be able to do it. Happiness flooded in.

… as it flooded in when I put the hose on and watered the clematis which is just ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Sunday, May 5, 1991
• Monday, May 6
• Tuesday, May 7
• Thursday, May 9
• Friday, May 10
• Saturday, May 11
• Monday, May 13
• Tuesday, May 14
• Thursday, May 16
• Friday, May 17
• Sunday, May 19
• Thursday, May 23
• Saturday, May 25
• Memorial Day, May 27
• Wednesday, May 29
• Saturday, June 1
• Tuesday, June 4
• Wednesday, June 5
• Thursday, June 6
• Monday, June 10
• Thursday, June 13
• Friday, June 14
• Saturday, June 15
• Friday, June 21
• Thursday, June 27
• Friday, June 28
• Saturday, June 29
• Monday, July 1
• Tuesday, July 2
• Wednesday, July 3
• Thursday, the Fourth of July
• Sunday, July 14
• Tuesday, July 16
• Wednesday, July 17
• Monday, July 22
• Wednesday, July 31
• Friday, August 2
• Sunday, August 4
• Tuesday, August 6
• Thursday, August 8
• Friday, August 9
• Saturday, August 10
• Sunday, August 11
• Tuesday, August 13
• Thursday, August 15
• Saturday, August 17
• Tuesday, August 20
• Wednesday, August 21
• Tuesday, August 27
• Friday, August 30
• Labor Day, September 2
• Thursday, September 5
• Sunday, September 8
• Monday, September 9
• Tuesday, September 10
• Thursday, September 12
• Friday, September 13
• Sunday, September 15
• Thursday, September 19
• Saturday, September 21
• Thursday, September 26
• Tuesday, October 1
• Thursday, October 3
• Friday, October 4
• Sunday, October 6
• Tuesday, October 8
• Thursday, October 10
• Saturday, October 12
• Sunday, October 13
• Tuesday, October 15
• Sunday, October 20
• Thursday, October 24
• Tuesday, October 29
• Wednesday, October 30
• Tuesday, November 5
• Wednesday, November 6
• Tuesday, November 12
• Thursday, November 14
• Friday, November 15
• Monday, November 18
• Tuesday, November 19
• Sunday, November 24
• Wednesday, November 27
• Thanksgiving Day
• Wednesday, December 4
• Monday, December 9
• Sunday, December 15
• Thursday, December 19
• Saturday, December 21
• Christmas Day, Wednesday
• Tuesday, the last day of 1991
• Friday, January 3
• Saturday January 4
• Tuesday, January 7
• Monday, January 13
• Tuesday, January 14
• Wednesday, January 15
• Sunday, January 19
• Friday, January 24
• Monday, January 27
• Friday, January 31
• Saturday, February 8
• Wednesday, February 12
• Saturday, February 15
• Monday, February 17
• Friday, February 21
• Tuesday, February 25
• Friday, February 28
• Monday, March 2
• Wednesday, March 4
• Saturday, March 28
• Sunday, March 29
• Monday, March 30
• Tuesday, March 31
• Thursday, April 2
• Monday, April 6
• Wednesday, April 8
• Friday, April 10
• Monday, April 13
• Wednesday, April 15
• Saturday, April 18
• Easter Day, April 19
• Patriot’s Day, April 20
• Friday, April 24
• Monday, April 27
• Tuesday, April 28
• Friday, May 1
• Saturday, May 2
• Sunday, May 3
• Wednesday, May 6
• Friday, May 8
• Saturday, May 9
• Monday, May 11
• Wednesday, May 13
• Friday, May 15
• Saturday, May 16
• Saturday, May 23
• Tuesday, May 26
• Wednesday, May 27
• Thursday, May 28
• Saturday, May 30
• Monday, June 1
• Tuesday, June 2
• Friday, June 5
• Saturday, June 6
• Tuesday, June 9
• Thursday, June 11
• Monday, June 15
• Tuesday, June 16
• Tuesday, June 23
• Wednesday, June 24
• A Biography of May Sarton
• Copyright Page